Nature Conservancy Buys Large Area of Adirondack Land (original) (raw)

Conservancy Buys Slice of Adirondacks

Sept. 18, 2008

A 14,600-acre piece of the Adirondacks long prized by environmentalists for its forests and wetlands, including a pond where Ralph Waldo Emerson led a “philosophers’ camp,” was purchased on Thursday by a preservation group for $16 million, the group said.

The property, which had been owned by a Vermont family for 56 years, will not immediately be open to the public because of leases for recreational hunting and fishing that will last several more years. But the group, the Nature Conservancy, said the purchase meant that the land would be protected and ultimately added to the Adirondack Forest Preserve in Adirondack Park.

“This is one for the history books,” said Michael T. Carr, executive director of the Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy. “We’re redrawing the conservation map of the Adirondacks.”

The property, southwest of Lake Placid and on the boundary of the High Peaks Wilderness Area, was until Thursday among more than 2.6 million acres of unprotected privately owned land in the six-million-acre Adirondack Park.

Roughly the size of Vermont, the park includes 103 towns and villages and has an estimated year-round population of 131,000 residents, said Keith McKeever, a spokesman for the Adirondack Park Agency.

The land bought on Thursday includes Follensby Pond, the site of a famous 1858 gathering known as the Philosophers’ Camp, where Emerson and other Boston-area intellectuals spent a month fishing, hunting, painting and writing. Among those joining Emerson were the painter William James Stillman, the poet James Russell Lowell and the scientist Louis Agassiz.

The gathering took place at a time when Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others were redefining attitudes toward nature.

“It was an early moment in the development of the idea that there was something sublime about nature,” said Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. “Nature was starting to play a less utilitarian function and a more aesthetic and intellectual one.”

Mr. McKibben, who recently edited a large anthology of environmental essays, “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau,” said the early work of people like Thoreau was one of the reasons why the State of New York began protecting the Adirondacks 100 years ago.

He called the Adirondacks one of the world’s greatest examples of ecological restoration, because, unlike Yellowstone National Park, there are many communities existing alongside wilderness. In many ways, Follensby Pond is in much better ecological shape now than it was when Emerson and others camped there, Mr. McKibben said.

“It’s so heartening to me that that momentum continues in New York State,” he said, “even while some of the rest of the country is back to chanting, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ New York has done it right for a very long time.”

The driving force behind the purchase was the property’s ecology, its pristine hydrological systems and high-quality forest lands adjacent to wilderness, Mr. Carr said.

“But we cannot deny the romance and the mystique of Emerson and his colleagues, Stillman, Agassiz, at the Philosophers’ Camp,” he said.

Through an agreement between the sellers, the McCormick family of Manchester, Vt., the recreational leases associated with much of the property, common among large privately owned forestlands, will continue for several years. Revenue from the leases will go toward paying property taxes and other “caring costs,” said Connie Prickett, a spokeswoman for the conservancy.

The state had expressed a desire to buy the land in the past, but it was stymied by a lack of preservation money. The Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy had to borrow the $16 million from its larger parent organization. The bulk of the loan will be paid back when the property is finally sold, most likely to the state.

The commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, Pete Grannis, declined to comment, apart from a statement issued through the Nature Conservancy: “We applaud the McCormicks and the Nature Conservancy for taking measures to protect this special place.”

The seller, John S. McCormick, also gave a statement through the group: “It is a beautiful piece of property, and the solitude it offers is absolute. We’ve had so many wonderful experiences there.”

The purchase was welcome news to John F. Sheehan, spokesman for the Adirondack Council, an environmental advocacy organization based in the park. Mr. Sheehan said the property had been well tended not only by the McCormick family, but also by generations of families that have been leasing portions of the property for recreational use.

Mr. Sheehan said that the council favored having the state take over the property in the future, but that “it doesn’t have to happen tomorrow, because the property has been extremely well cared for.”

Mr. Carr said the chapter’s investments had led to the protection of 571,000 acres in the region. At the moment, it is trying to get the state to buy 70,000 of a 161,000-acre property it purchased last year. An additional 90,500 acres are being offered for sale to timber investors, which would allow logging under strict sustainable forestry standards. The conservancy has said that the sale is necessary to help pay for land preservation.

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