Timothy Barnett, first director of The Nature Conservancy, Adirondack Chapter, has died

The “Energizer Bunny of conservation” worked to protect the park for 46 years

By James M. Odato

Timothy Barnett, who found ways to win over private landowners to protect hundreds of thousands of acres of the most coveted conservation lands in the Adirondack Park — helping to build a state forest preserve and a defense system against climate change — died today, his family informed colleagues.

He was 82 and worked for The Nature Conservancy for 46 years before his retirement in 2018, more than two decades after a traumatic neck injury left him paralyzed.

The first executive director of the Conservancy’s Adirondack chapter, appointed in 1972, who later managed a merger with the Adirondack Land Trust, Barnett put together deals that kept timberlands as working properties while also preserving and opening vast tracts within the six million-acre Adirondack Park for recreation, wildlife and a biodiverse species. 

Called a “legacy guy, a mentor to everybody” by Willie Janeway, executive director the Adirondack Council, the friendly Barnett won over local leaders, land barons and environmentalists alike, said a host of peers and colleagues who credited Barnett with giving New Yorkers Great Camp Santanoni and Lake Lila. He preserved Brandon Park, Bay Pond, Valcour Island and Whitney Park and their numerous mountains, temperate deciduous woodlands, bat habitats, canoe carries, countless lakes, ponds and streams.

He embossed the blueprint for the Conservancy’s approach of achieving land protection through non-confrontational, collaborative means, perhaps involving a climb, a paddle or a bar tab, using a well-timed joke and and firm persistence. He was admired by coworkers, many of whom he convinced to join the nonprofit.

“He attracted good people,” said Mike Carr, a former Conservancy executive director now heading the allied Adirondack Land Trust.

One time Conservancy Chairman Peter Paine Jr., a friend and former neighbor when Barnett lived on Lake Champlain in Westport, admired his style. He recalled the 1978 transaction between the Conservancy and his father, Peter Paine Sr., that put 1,000 acres, including 3 miles of lakeshore, into a conservation easement. Barnett, with a twinkle in his eye, kidded the senior Paine, a powerful paper industry leader, that he was motivated by tax advantages, not altruism. All three men laughed.

The families knew each other, Paine said. Barnett grew up in Westport. His father, Life magazine editor and writer Lincoln Barnett, had become attracted to the region as a youth attending nearby Camp Dudley.

Paine credits Barnett with having a hand in the more than 500,000 Adirondack acres protected through Conservancy involvement, the great majority of which is in state control.

“He changed the map of the Adirondacks,” said Peg Olsen, the chapter’s executive director, who described the man who urged her to join the Conservancy as “the Energizer Bunny of conservation.”

“Of course, he would tell you that he had little to do with it and that his real talent was hiring good people smarter than he,” said Olsen, who confirmed his death.

For a glimpse of his sense of self, one can read Barnett’s LinkedIn page. He listed his education credentials: Paul Smith’s College, honorary PhD, 2006; University of Colorado, bachelor’s, English literature, 1965; Middlebury College, beer, skiing, 1958-1960.

A gifted athlete and marathoner, he skied and hiked mountains and trails throughout the Adirondacks until a 1997 horseback accident altered his mobility. He broke a neck vertebra while on a mission for the World Bank to set up a national park in Kyrgyzstan.

After surgery, rehabilitation and a move from the Adirondacks to Saratoga Springs, he returned to work as the Conservancy’s vice president of special programs.

For decades, he wheeled along the long ramp attached to the front porch of the chapter’s green two-story headquarters in Keene Valley. It is named the Barnett Center for Conservation, where he phoned his network of contacts and discussed new transactions.

A personal aide would drive him to weekly in-person sessions with his team and for meetings and conferences in the Adirondacks.

“One of his greatest strengths and one of his biggest gifts was his ability to join people, to bring them together,” said Carr, one of several people who Barnett recruited with an I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer insistence. “He managed to see the good in almost everyone and develop relationships with landowners, government officials, donors, key staff.”

One such recruit, Melissa Eisinger, who worked for the Adirondack Chapter from 1990 to 2011 and became acting director during Barnett’s recovery, called her former boss an exceptional leader of the fledgling chapter of the national nonprofit started in 1951. 

“At the point where he came into the nature conservancy, the conservancy was protecting little things that protected a species,” she said. “His idea was this is the Adirondacks, and this is it, we need to protect vast swaths of land, not to keep people out, but to protect it, we are going to suffer unless we have big tracts of land to protect us … It turns out he was prescient.”

Carol Ash, former Conservancy regional director, said Barnett was instrumental in the deal that protected Whitney’s Adirondack property, knowing how to approach Marylou Whitney. “He was never down and out,” Ash said. “If there was an issue that had the rest of us saying we’ll never get this done, Tim was always eh, eh, eh, eh, eh there’s always another way, particularly with the Whitney estate because he already had a good relationship with Marylou.”

His survivors include his wife Claire, leader of a nonprofit focused on eliminating toxics in schools. They met during Barnett’s New York City years selling TV ads for WPIX. They have two sons, Ian and Edward.

A celebration of Timothy Lincoln Barnett’s life will be held at a later date. His family requests that donations in his memory be made to The Adirondack Land Trust, P.O. Box 130, Keene, NY, 12942, or to “The Adirondack Chapter” of the Nature Conservancy, P.O. Box 65, Keene Valley, NY, 12943.