About Megan Plete Postol

Megan Plete Postol is a freelance journalist and outdoor writer based in the Southern Adirondack area.

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  1. Boreas says

    This is a great effort! After all, this is but one reason why the APA was created – to minimize sprawl and its effects on local and greater ecosystems. Ultimately, findings should be considered and used GLOBALLY whenever possible and not just in the Adirondack Park!

  2. JB says

    As much as we want to avoid addressing it, sprawl is the defining environmental issue of the current American era. If the original pioneers of the conservation movement were alive today, they would undoubtedly point to sprawl, not industrial logging, as the greatest existential threat to wild landscapes (and thus to the sustainability of the society itself). The painful truth is that we cannot hide behind the inadequacy of old solutions for modern problems. Article XIV catered to the needs and problems of its time, while the APA Act sought to resolve more modern threats through masterful land-use planning. But land-use regulations will always be reactionary instead of prescriptive if we attempt to ignore the larger countercurrents. The Adirondack ideals of steady-state rurality and the thriving hamlet are failing because they are at odds with the prevailing socio-political and economic forces. We cannot subsidize communities and expect them not to grow, restrict property and expect it not to appreciate, overtax landowners and expect them not to exceed usufruct, commercialize recreation and expect no overuse, engender distributive justice and expect to justify conservation. True land-use planning is an elusive necessity only possible with the alignment of economic, political and conservation interests. And that is a diminishing rarity in a modern republic clinging to old ideas for an older time, a time when liberty was synonymous with appropriation of natural resources, and when natural resources exceeded human ones.

  3. louis curth says

    Truth Prevails!

    —“findings should be considered and used GLOBALLY whenever possible and not just in the Adirondack Park!” Boreas

    “The painful truth is that we cannot hide behind the inadequacy of old solutions for modern problems.” JB

    —“clinging to old ideas for an older time, a time when liberty was synonymous with appropriation of natural resources, and when natural resources exceeded human ones.” JB

    I would only add this wildlife management definition from my long ago time at Paul Smith’s; “the carrying capacity of a biological species ………. refers to the maximum number of individuals (of that species) that the environment can carry and sustain.”

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