ADIRONDACK GREEN
The Struggle to Save America’s Greatest Park
New York’s Adirondack Park is bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, Grand Canyon, and Great Smokies National Parks combined. Most of it is privately owned. It also might be the world’s best protected wilderness, even though 85 million people live within a day’s drive and 130,000 people live inside park boundaries. How did that happen?
In this site, the people who fought a 50-year campaign to protect the wild Adirondacks while also preserving the park’s small towns tell their stories. In their own words, environmentalists, public officials, and property rights activists explain why they shed blood, sweat and tears to protect the places they love.
A Wild Idea is the first complete account of a twenty-year citizens’ campaign that either saved a vast wilderness or ruined a local economy, depending on who’s talking.
The Adirondack Park Agency (APA) has been praised worldwide as a triumph of sustainable planning. But the APA law still infuriates local landowners who insist that private property is private, and the battle to pass the law pushed communities to the brink of violence.
A Wild Idea is based on in-depth interviews with more than five dozen insiders who are central to the story. It’s a rich, exciting narrative about state power and how it was imposed on rural residents, and it’s full of surprising and shocking revelations.
