On the Idea of an Adirondack Mountains National Park (2021) | Hacker News Reader

On the Idea of an Adirondack Mountains National Park (2021)

adirondackalmanack.com

58 pointsrntn26 comments

I think New York has done something unique and positive with the Adirondack Park, but I could see how this strategy would make sense in the mid 60s.

At that time, New York was projecting 30-35M residents by 2000. They were planning for industry expansion in big centers like Buffalo, Utica, Syracuse, etc. They didn’t see the post-Vietnam nadir and the policy changes driving migration of industry to the South and eventually Mexico and China coming.

Making the Central Adirondacks a Federal problem would ease the ability to keep the timber, paper, iron mining and downstream steel industries vital on the periphery. Those industries were the backbone of the Lake Champlain corridor including canals, railroads, etc. (ie lots of jobs) With the hydroelectric potential of the St Lawrence and easy to exploit hydroelectricity in Quebec, there was a lot of potential for development.

Reality wasn’t in alignment with that vision, and ultimately what happened was probably for the better. The Adirondacks are depopulating and becoming a worse place to live, but the natural resources are protected.

If I was prez, there'd be a lot more national parks. There'd also be "greenways" connecting them.

I'd also make national parks out of sensitive marine areas, where no fishing or motorized boats would be allowed.

There are some grand efforts in this direction..

https://y2y.net/

Personally, I would love to see a corridor like this from the Great Smoky Mountain National Park through the Nantahala National Forest and right down the Savannah River basin with all its dams, to - and including - the Georgia and South Carolina barrier islands, from Charleston to the Florida border..

Curious, are there benefits of greenway connections compared to allocating the same amount of green space elsewhere?

Here is a good summary of the largest efforts to make corridors worldwide :

https://www.planetcustodian.com/important-wildlife-corridors...

Here is a good (but old) recap of the (lack of) research into their efficacy :

https://www.biologydiscussion.com/articles/benefits-of-conse...

Allowing safe, uninterrupted movement of species. All ecosystems would be (almost) entirely connected to their neighbors, human settlement has upset this and its causing fragmented struggling ecosystems

The development in most of the areas in the eastern US is probably too far gone (and pipe dream projects like I dreamed up a few comments above are surely impossible), but I wonder some kind of special purpose multi-state consortium couldn't be arranged (and bolstered by relevant federal programs) to take something like my pipe dream 'southeastern mountains to the sea' and make a Georgia - Carolinas regional authority to fund things like buying out and cleaning up defunct industries in the region(s) and returning the land to a wilderness trust managed along the lines of the Adirondack Park Authority with the long term goal of creating natural corridors..

I don't believe this would be true. The Appalachian Trail is basically that. We could be doing more there.

Corridors are a staple tool in ecology and environmental management.

They made the system much more resilient to local extinctions of key species and have a lot of extra benefits, like dealing with the excess of grazing by a big herbivore population that grows too much and is migrant by nature, or removing pressure in territorial animals.

Two places and a corridor act as one big place. Can host also new species that need to roam and never couldn't live in two isolated islands with the same total area.

Just being pedantic, but the president actually doesn't have the power to create national parks - only Congress can. The president can create national monuments, though, which are pretty similar for all intents and purposes.

Just to be pedantic: in The West Wing, season 1, episode 8, this is a key plot point. According to this episode, the Antiquities Act does give the president this power.

Since this is a really silly but rewarding conclusion to the episode, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this.

[0] https://westwing.fandom.com/wiki/Enemies

The Antiquities Act of 1906 does not give the President power to declare National Parks; only National Monuments [1]. This is a mistake in that episode, and the link you cite also mentions this (see the "Trivia" section).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiquities_Act

Then vice president Teddy Roosevelt was on a hiking trip in the Adirondacks when he received word that president McKinley had been assassinated. It's crazy how back then the VP could be so hard to track down. In fact, I believe the night FDR passed away VP Truman had ditched his secret service agents to head to the bar.

https://www.adirondack.net/history/midnight-ride/

More generally, the idea that people really should be on the communications grid has been normalized in a lot of circles. I see a fair number of people, including here, rather uncomfortable about the fact that someone may not always be able to reach you or that you may not be able to call for help.

(Of course, if you talk about government VIPs, satellite/staff mostly does provide an always on-call ability. And for others, there are increasingly reasonable satellite options available as well.)

Even in the eastern US, there are many remote areas where there is no communication coverage except for satellite.

While I think a lot of people should be a lot more comfortable being out of communication range (and proper planning, packing emergency gear, spares, etc can greatly help), in recreational areas that are not so remote, the spread of low band 5G (basically extra 4G+ coverage) really makes the ability to work remotely (even more) valuable..

> the spread of low band 5G

Also StarLink. A couple of years ago I really wouldn't have been able to work from my dad's place in Downeast Maine. Now I could if not always reliably.

Until recently, visiting a family member's beach house meant I didn't have cell service (at least for my carrier). They seem to have added a new tower to the island, or maybe adjusted their beam spread and now I can get a signal there.

But I still tell work that I'll be out of touch. Because if I'm on vacation - I'm on vacation.

Nuclear tipped ICBMs put an end to that. It's even questionable how much should a president drink alcohol while in office. A drunk president ordering a preemptive nuclear strike likely would be ignored by the military but a drunk president when an attack is incoming would be a very bad situation.

https://mountainlake.org/a-wild-idea-full-documentary/

The video seems to be no longer available online. The discussion about the way the Adirondack park system was created is well worth watching if the above program airs on your local PBS station..

Below is an older 2 hour PBS documentary on the Adirondacks:

https://www.pbs.org/video/wned-tv-documentaries-adirondacks/

Interestingly, a couple of the large state parks in the Northeast (Adirondack and Baxter) have arguably held the line on development more than national parks have in general. Not that there's a lot in the way of national parkland in the Northeast--although efforts are still underway in Maine in addition to the existing Acadia.

As someone who spends a lot of time in the mountains of western North Carolina, to the southeast of the Great Smokies National Park, I found this discussion on the possibility of creation of an Adirondack national park here really enlightening.

I am very impressed with the achievements of the Adirondack Park Agency..

In WNC, there are many national forests, which serve a lot of recreational activities, but also other uses :

"National forests, on the other hand, emphasize not only resource preservation, but other kinds of use as well. Under this concept of "multiple use," national forests are managed to provide Americans with a wide variety of services and commodities, including lumber, cattle grazing, mineral products and recreation with and without vehicles. The national forests are managed by forest rangers with the US Forest Service (USFS) under the Department of Agriculture."

https://www.nps.gov/grsm/planyourvisit/np-versus-nf.htm

The land that is truly wilderness, as the Adirondack Park Agency has achieved, even though the pressure of NYC is much more than the pressure of Atlanta, Charlotte, Knoxville, etc, is more than in the Great Smokies National Park.

The Adirondacks are great but I’m also a fan of the wilderness areas is Pisgah. Linville Gorge is even old growth, I believe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linville_Gorge_Wilderness

"The forbidding nature of the terrain made resource extraction unprofitable, which is the primary reason why the gorge is one of the few remaining examples of old growth forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains range. No industrial logging ever took place within the gorge, and its virgin forests span 10,000 acres (40 km2).[5]"

https://news.yahoo.com/final-nantahala-pisgah-forest-plan-10...

"One addition in the plan is the special designation of an 11,500-acre Big Ivy/Craggy Mountains Forest Scenic Area in Buncombe County, which Will Harlan, organizer with Friends of Big Ivy and I Heart Pisgah, said leaves just one step before it becomes the state's first national scenic area: a congressional designation.

It is one of five Forest Scenic Areas included in the plan, alongside Looking Glass Rock, John Rock in the Pisgah and Whitewater Falls and Glen Falls in the Nantahala."

I spend quite a bit of time in the Nantahala and Pisgah forests along the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge.

Pisgah is, in my opinion, far and away the best XC mountain biking in the southeast.

Some pretty good fly fishing for brookies in the streams above 3000 feet in both forests..

Great link, thanks. I grew up just outside the park, but live across the country now and watched this for a little nostalgia — and I learned a lot.

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