Park Perspectives: Feelings of oppression

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait

By TOM WOODMAN

Last winter I spent much of an afternoon with a local official in her home in the southern Adirondacks. She was a captivating host, sharing her thoughts, her music, and tales of her family, which had lived in the Adirondacks for generations. Toward the end of our day, when talk turned to the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency and protection of the Park, her tone became bitter.

Over many decades, from long before there was an Adirondack Park, powerful people outside the Adirondacks had looked down on residents, she felt. They were happy to use the locals as guides, caretakers, and waiters but dictated to them how they could live.

It’s common enough to hear Adirondackers complain about the influence of those from outside the Park. But I was startled by the strength of her feelings and how they were grounded in generations of history.
I was reminded of this recently when I read a letter from Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward (see Letters Jan./Feb. 2010). Its language recalls the resentment that I heard last winter over what sounds like class conflict.

In the letter she calls for a constitutional amendment to permit a land trade that would expand a mine near Willsboro into what is currently Forest Preserve. She is frustrated by opposition to the amendment from the advocacy group Protect the Adirondacks. Speaking of Adirondack residents, she writes:

“Our opinions don’t matter! When people first began discovering the Adirondacks, we carried their packs, cut their trees, built their homes, dug their ditches, labored in their mills, taught their children, healed their sick, and welcomed them like family. Most have become our friends and our neighbors, but those who came with their own agenda have stood Judge and Jury on what is acceptable for growth in our communities…”

Such feelings of oppression aren’t always on the surface, but they still pop up when an argument calls for them. They seem to rise from (and appeal to) an undercurrent that flows deep and long among some residents. Fewer now than in past years, maybe. But enough, still, to be both meaningful and unfortunate.

You can find this leitmotif running through Contested Terrain, Philip Terrie’s excellent book on Adirondack history.
He traces a feeling of resentment toward outsiders back to life in the Adirondacks even before the state created the Park in 1892. The lumber industry and later the mines that created jobs were largely owned by outsiders who provided the capital and earned the profits.

And with the growing popularity of outdoor recreation in the late nineteenth century, Adirondack residents found new sources of income but also new slights. As Terrie writes: “While romantic writers extolled [Adirondack] guides as possessors of a natural wisdom and virtue, they often condescended to them for their illiteracy and rough ways.”

History helps explain where this culture of resentment was born. But it doesn’t justify hanging onto the attitude long past the time when we should have outgrown it.

From nineteenth-century debates through the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency in 1971 and to this day, some have exploited these old feelings of resentment toward outsiders to muster opposition to preserving the wildness and natural beauty of the region. Whether or not that was fair in the 1890s, in the twenty-first century casting disagreements as a resident-versus-outsider morality play is worse than simplistic.

Modern land protections rein in powerful outside interests at least as much as local residents. Consider the land developers, speculators, and wealthy second-home owners who chafe at limits on their ability to carve up the land or build as extravagantly and intrusively as they’d like. In an era when the region confronts such borderless threats as climate change, invasive species, and interstate pollution, parochialism is dangerously wrong. If we’re going to meet these challenges, we need to discuss issues on their merits, disagree when we must on facts and principles, and stop nursing outdated grudges.

Writing about the heated disputes arising from the creation of the Park Agency, Terrie notes that some eloquent proponents of wilderness protection had deep roots within the Park and some strident opponents did not.

He writes: “Far from being the subject of a simple tale of class conflict, the Adirondack Park was becoming a focal point in a debate of national significance: To what extent does a society have an interest in what happens to private property? And what power does it have to demonstrate and protect that interest?”

These were and still are big questions. We have all we can do to get the answers right without building needless obstacles in our way.