The people and the park - Great Northern Forest Ecoregion - includes related information

Sierra, March-April, 1994 by Bill McKibben

Collins comes from a long line of Adirondackers--his grandfather was the caretaker at Sagamore, the Vanderhilts' sumptuous summer camp in Raquette Lake. Collins--"Mr. C"-- teaches fifth grade at Long Lake's school, 15 miles down the road from Newcomb. This year's class has eight young scholars, and today they are diagramming sentences about last week's field trip to Albany, which though only three hours' drive away might as well be in a different world from Hamilton County, the last county in the East without an automatic teller machine.

"I always take them by the governor's mansion," says Collins, "and then we walk into a residential area. It's not too attractive to them--the houses side by side, the brick front yards. The kids are somewhat appalled that people live like that." But, he says, "If I told you the number of times I'd heard school kids say 'I wish we had a mall nearby,' you wouldn't believe it."

Solving that dichotomy of desire is a crucial part of solving this crisis. To some extent, the prosperity of Adirondackers is in our own hands--and in our own heads. Learning to take our wealth from the natural glory around us--recalibrating desire so that we're satisfied by the sugar maple and not the shopping mall--is part of the answer. It won't put food on the table, and food on the table is a necessity. But a lot of the rest of what we want is not necessary, and pursuing it means wrecking what we have. The moose and the mall are mutually exclusive. Here there is at least the possibility that the glory of open spaces and loon call and neighbors knit tight by living on the margins of modernity might be enough to make up for missing luxuries.

There are places where the message is clearly getting through. At the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, kids arrive constantly. "When I first got here, they might come once a year and just race through the place," says Daisy Kelly, the museum's education coordinator. "Now we have them back so much that they can actually do some learning." The most common question when confronted with an artifact, she says, is "'Is that real?' And if it is, they're thrilled." Some of the kids, in fact, now lead workshops, demonstrating skills like rustic toymaking.

Wandering around the museum, though, the present moment starts to seem mundane. The exhibits, which draw 100,000 visitors each summer, celebrate a romantic Adirondack past-- river drivers and hermits and great camp owners with plush private railroad cars, porches full of rustic furniture, and hand-carved guideboats. Beautiful as the dioramas and reproductions are, they also feel exotic, as if from a foreign country. I try to imagine what from the lives of present-day Adirondackers might someday be enshrined here.

John Collins, in his Long Lake classroom, may have the best clue. "These kids have a sense of limits that other generations didn't have. It's a first-grade lesson--you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't have the park and chop it up and sell it too."