As an advocate for the “forever wild” Forest Preserve, Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve periodically reviews the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation’s work plans to ensure that activities such as trail maintenance on the public’s Forest Preserve are undertaken in compliance with Article XIV of the state constitution, the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan, and DEC regulations. [Read more…] about National Wilderness Act Violations & Why They Matter in NYS
Wilderness Act of 1964
Thoreau, Wilderness, and Our Community of Life
The Ken Burns documentary film Henry David Thoreau is airing on PBS. This renewed focus on Thoreau’s life provides an opportunity to present an excerpt of Ed Zahniser’s speech “Wilderness and Our Community of Life,” delivered at Vassar College on March 31, 2004.
Novelist Andrew Lytle writes that prophets do not come from the city promising riches and wearing store-bought clothes. No, prophets have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats… and telling of a different sort of treasure. Wendell Berry writes that “if change is to come, it will come from the margins… It was the desert, not the temple, that give us the prophets.” And in Hebrew scripture, as in New Testament Greek, the words we translate as desert and wilderness are the same word.
This prophetic role of wilderness experience – how wilderness can call us back to right relationships, to right living, to social justice – this prophetic role of wilderness also figures in the history of the Wilderness Act of 1964. For this we step back to the Transcendentalist reformers Margaret Sarah Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. [Read more…] about Thoreau, Wilderness, and Our Community of Life
Dave Gibson Pens First Biography of Conservationist Paul Schaefer
A staunch advocate for the Adirondack Park, activist and writer Paul Schaefer deeply influenced conservation policy in New York State. His work and writing inspired countless conservationists, with his tireless efforts paving the way for the protection of “forever wild” forests in the Wilderness Act of 1964. Until his death in 1996, Schaefer continued to strive to instill the same care for the Adirondacks in the next generation.
Among that next generation is David Gibson, who is the current managing partner of Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve and the former executive director of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, groups founded and led respectively by Schaefer. Gibson has written the first biography of Schaefer, A Force for Nature: Paul Schaefer’s Adirondack Coalitions (Syracuse university Press, 2025). [Read more…] about Dave Gibson Pens First Biography of Conservationist Paul Schaefer