Editorial: The Clarence A. Petty Heritage Fund
MAY/JUNE 2010
Clarence Petty was known to readers of the Adirondack Explorer through hundreds of “Questions for Clarence,” posed by our editor Phil Brown and enlivening every issue from 2004 to a few months before Clarence’s death in November 2009. When this legendary woodsman and conservationist passed away at the age of 104, the Explorer lost a good friend and the Adirondack Park lost one of its greatest champions.
To commemorate his life’s work and to help keep it going, we are setting up the Clarence A. Petty Heritage Fund with an initial goal of $250,000. Our intent is to use this fund to help ensure that the Adirondack Park will be as wild and beautiful a hundred years from now as it is today.
Clarence Petty was born only thirteen years after the state legislature created the Adirondack Park in 1892. During his long life, he played a major role in shaping the region as we know it today—reforesting cut-and-burned-over areas in the 1930s as a camp supervisor with the Civilian Conservation Corps; fighting fires and stocking fish from the air as an early bush pilot; and following every Adirondack trail and waterway during years of field studies that led to the protection of a million acres of Forest Preserve as Wilderness (no motors allowed) and the preservation of 1,200 miles of rivers and streams in their natural, free-flowing state.
“I’m only a temporary custodian of the land,” he told CBS Sunday Morning on the eve of the Park’s one hundredth anniversary. “But there are thousands of others who are going to own it in the future, and I have an obligation to those people who come after me.”
For this conservation ethic to prevail, he knew that more young people must be engaged—and that’s where the Adirondack Explorer can help. Our average reader is fifty-five years old, yet the contents of this newsmagazine, especially the wildlife coverage and outdoor adventures, are also ideally suited to a younger audience.
To effectively reach young people, the Explorer needs to venture further into the world of online communication. The generations that will write the next chapters in the story of the Adirondack Park get their information and share their thoughts through the Internet. To continue Clarence’s work we must develop a dynamic online presence that brings the Park to life and builds strong new communities dedicated to protecting it. The Clarence A. Petty Heritage Fund will give us the means to do this.
After retiring from state service in 1974, Clarence devoted much of the next three decades to writing letters and speaking out on the need to protect wild nature. The Explorer has pursued this same educational purpose through its articles, commentaries, and debates. Still, much more needs to be done in the way of “enterprise reporting” that illuminates problems, identifies workable solutions, influences public opinion, and shapes government policy. The hang-up is that in-depth coverage of this kind is labor-intensive and costly, requiring weeks and often months of research, writing, editing, and illustrating.
The Clarence A. Petty Heritage Fund will make possible this investigative work. It will enable us to make a persuasive case for actions that benefit the Park, such as curbing careless upland development that defiles our wild landscapes, utilizing renewable, non-polluting energy in a way that will make the Adirondacks a model for environmental sanity, regulating on-site septic systems before the renowned water quality of our lakes and streams is further diminished, and converting the old Adirondack railroad line into a world-class bikeway connecting Lake Placid, Saranac Lake, and Tupper Lake—and eventually running all the way to Old Forge.
Help us honor a great Adirondacker by supporting the fund that will keep alive his memory and perpetuate his important work.
Dick Beamish, Chairman