After 35 years leading three environmental groups in Adirondack conservation advocacy, Peter Bauer is stepping down as the Executive Director of Protect the Adirondacks at the end of 2024.
by Peter Bauer
By the end of 2024 I will have worked in Adirondack Park environmental conservation for 35 years. A long tradition of Adirondack conservation and advocacy by many others preceded my time and I hope that this work continues for many others in the years to come.
This past summer I was transfixed by the Summer Olympic Games in Paris and it occurred to me that Adirondack Park conservation is like a relay race where the baton is passed from person to person, organization to organization, generation to generation, decade after decade. For a period of time, I was lucky enough to carry the baton of conservation. Adirondack conservation includes dozens of leaders and groups all working for the Park and Forest Preserve, sometimes together, sometimes independently, sometimes successful, sometimes spinning their wheels, but always aiming forward. In the various positions that I have held, for the various organizations that I worked for, I tried to shape and effect good deeds and environmental gains for the Adirondack Park.
As I look back at the wins and losses that I contributed to since 1989, I know that I worked hard and honestly to protect the wild places, forests, waters and rural communities of the Adirondack Park. This work was important, valuable, and thoroughly enjoyable. I was lucky to be given the chance to do good work and I tried my best to honor that opportunity.
The end of this year tops just over 12 years that I have worked as the Executive Director of Protect the Adirondacks, the organization that formed through a merger of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, where I was the Executive Director for 14 years, and the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks. In between these positions I worked for five years as the Executive Director at the FUND for Lake George, which has since merged with the Lake George Association. These were three wonderful organizations, with great Boards and members, who were highly successful. During my time working for these groups, I was often a “professional meeting-goer” as I drove all around the Adirondacks and beyond to various meetings, and in the last three decades I went from the youngest person in the room to one of the oldest.
Peter Bauer providing budget testimony to a joint committee of the New York State Legislature.
I moved to the Adirondacks in the mid-1980s after having visited the area, mainly the High Peaks, when I was in college. I moved to Saranac Lake initially, but also lived in Lake Placid and Keene. It was thrilling in those years to hike and paddle and camp and cross-country ski in new places around the Adirondacks. Driving on roads in far flung areas of the Adirondacks that I had never driven over before was exhilarating. In the mid-1990s, I moved to Blue Mountain Lake, where my wife Cathleen Collins grew up, and this is where we live today, though for a period we lived in Lake George.
In a stint at Adirondack Life magazine in the late 1980s, where I was fortunate to work under the writer Christopher Shaw, and work with other writers like Bill Mckibben, I wrote a piece on the future of the Adirondacks, interviewing George Davis in the process. George and his wife Anita helped me make a map for the article of the top lands in private ownership that were targeted by the environmental community for protection in the Forest Preserve or by conservation easement. My position at Adirondack Life was the start of a great education about the history, geography, character, and culture of the Adirondacks.
At the Canoe-In for a Motorless Weller Pond protest in 2018.
In 1989, Governor Mario Cuomo formed the Commission on the Adirondacks in the Twenty-First Century, headed by one-time Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner and former state legislator Peter A. A. Berle as its Chair. Berle led the legislative floor fight to pass the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) Act in the early 1970s, and he named George Davis as the Commission’s Executive Director. Davis would go on to win a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award for his Adirondack Park planning and advocacy work. I was a late addition to the Commission’s staff in the summer of 1989, and in the end, I was its last employee in late 1990.
The Commission brought together everything about the Adirondacks – the history, major issues and challenges, politics, controversies, successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, and the passions and irrationality of this place. We grappled with competing ideas, policies, and visions for the future, probing the data and its importance for the Forest Preserve and ways to strengthen regional landscape planning. Under George Davis, the most fearless of fearless leaders, the scope of the Commission’s work was broad and ambitious and in those two years I learned the power of myths and the importance of reality in public policy for the Adirondack Park.
In my work I’ve often encountered the notion that the Adirondacks is somehow a land apart from the rest of the country, a place that’s unique with its own social, cultural, and economic rhythms, a place somehow behind the times. The great open spaces of the Adirondacks can seem dramatically different and overwhelming to visitors, especially when encountering roads lined with seemingly endless walls of forests after a long drive from a city or suburban landscape.
But in many ways, I found the Adirondacks to be ahead of the rest of the country. The disinformation and misinformation around the Berle Commission report in 1990 and after, the statements at public hearings, usually to great applause, about a United Nations takeover of the Park and black helicopters ferrying-in blue helmeted soldiers from an international army to drive out local people from their homes, was omnipresent in wake of the Commission report in the early 1990s. This was a rebirth from the fertile seedbank of the anti-APA advocacy in the late 1970s-1980s. In this fact-free zone of passions, where there was little public accountability and no gatekeeper for the truth in local media, the Adirondack Park was actually ahead of its time, presaging a new truth-free and fact-free era of American public life that we’re all currently living through. In this unfortunate respect, the rest of the county had to catch up to the Adirondacks.
My experiences with the Berle Commission brought me into meetings with environmental staffers at the Cuomo Administration. I watched them say one thing to Commission leaders in private and another thing to the media. I watched them play different Commissioners against one another. At the same time, local government leaders came through the office, and they too said different things in private than in public. I watched some Commission members disavow hard data as simply somebody’s random opinion. The staff or spouses of State Assembly members or Senators came through the office to deliver messages. But the biggest thing I saw was how hard it was to turn the wheels of government to create the opportune conditions for serious public policy to happen.
Peter Bauer and Cathleen Collins on Wright Peak in 2000.
At the Commission, I had a front row seat to the debates that I would hear echoed though Adirondack conservation for years to come. I was awed by environmental stalwart Harold Jerry, who had led the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, which recommended the formation of the APA and a regional land use plan for the Adirondacks. Harold Jerry often squared off with Bob Flacke, another former Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and local government official from Lake George. They argued about land acquisition, strengthening or weakening the APA Act, and community development. At the Commission I marveled at the leadership of Berle, the graceful diplomacy and wisdom of Ross Whaley, then President of SUNY-ESF, and the canny work of Craig Gilborn, the Director of the Adirondack Museum. Flacke would go on to write a minority report to undermine the Commission’s final report and then he campaigned against the APA for a decade with various timber-industry-backed groups. Though adversaries in the years after the Commission report, when I later lived in Lake George in the early 2000s, Flacke and I teamed up on various efforts and became allies and friends.
The Commission’s work spotlighted the need for open space protection and made sweeping recommendations to improve the management of the Adirondack Park and community development. The Commission’s final report included over 250 recommendations and though this plan failed to be implemented in its full form, over half of the recommendations were eventually adopted in part or in full over the years. The Commission’s boldest act was the publication of a map of high priority lands that merited long-term protection to maintain the great open space landscape of the Adirondack Park in perpetuity. In my role, I helped design and get that map printed. For me, that map, that vision, always set out the highest goal for Adirondack policymakers and communities.
In the few short years I had lived in the Adirondacks before working on the Berle Commission, I had sensed a deep love for the wildness of the area among many Park residents. The opposition to the Commission report in the early 1990s seemed to be using local voices for the benefit of the large timber companies and landowners who were opposed to further land use restrictions. A Commission meeting in North Creek in the spring of 1990 led to local residents in the area banding together to organize a group that wanted stronger protections in order to the protect the Adirondacks. In the wake of that meeting, the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks (RCPA) formed in 1990.
In my first years living in Saranac Lake and Keene, I hiked, paddled and cross-country skied all the time on the Forest Preserve. At Adirondack Life, I had various Adirondack Park maps on the wall of my office and at the Berle Commission we pored over all sorts of maps. But it wasn’t until I was at the RCPA and living in Blue Mountain Lake, that I grew to understand the incredible good fortune of the public Forest Preserve in the Adirondack Park, its immenseness and grandeur, and I saw up close what public wild spaces mean for a society, and for the last three decades the Forest Preserve has been the principal focus of my work.
The RCPA was as grassroots an effort as there ever was. The organizers were David Moro, Joe Mahay, Evelyn Greene, Art Perryman, Richard Stewart, Peter O’Shea, and Erwin Miller, among many others. Another one of the key organizers was the incomparable John Collins, who was not only steadfast in his environmental views, but always seemed to know the right position to take and was quietly persuasive. Johnny, a schoolteacher in Long Lake, served for a long time as an APA Board member from Hamilton County, then APA Chairman, and he later became my father-in-law, and was someone I grew to deeply admire and love.
With New York’s Senior Senator, Chuck Schumer, while lobbying in Washington in 1999.
I started attending RCPA meetings in the summer of 1990 with Wendy O’Neil, where we helped raise money and did some grant-writing to get the group going. 1990 saw large protests against the Commission report and various acts of civil disobedience. Many of the opponents claimed to speak for all Adirondack Park residents. The RCPA went gangbusters in its first years, garnering attention as a credible local voice for conservation, while working with a constellation of other groups pushing for various legislative versions of the Commission report. Dan Ling and then John Parker were hired as the first staff. RCPA published a periodic pro-conservation newspaper Adirondack Voices, which I initially put together, and later John and Constance Quenell helped to publish it, and it was widely distributed around the Park.
By the time I was hired in the summer of 1994, much of the early enthusiasm had waned, and our goal was to build a viable organization. For the next 14 years, the RCPA played a key role in Adirondack Park advocacy. Our initial work focused on complementing the larger Adirondack Park advocacy organizations with a sustained undeniable local voice calling for stronger environmental protections. In these years, the role of the RCPA grew and we took the lead on some issues and set the agenda for Adirondack conservation.
The Board was bolstered with new leaders like Peter Hornbeck, Phil Hamel, Dean Cook, and Nancy Bernstein. Hornbeck, Hamel, and Joe Mahay all chaired the group at different times. The RCPA focused on major private land development issues before the APA as well as Park-related budgetary and legislative matters in Albany. In a series of meetings, I paraded local residents who spoke out earnestly for Park protection through the office of State Senator Ron Stafford from Plattsburgh, the legendary and all powerful Senator, who controlled all things legislative for the Adirondacks, and with whom I established a working relationship.
A few months into my work at the RCPA in 1994, George Pataki was elected Governor. He would go on to serve for 12 years. I had no idea at the time how much Pataki would change the Adirondack Park landscape for better and worse. After Nelson Rockefeller, who set up the APA, passed the APA’s Land Use and Development Plan, and signed the first Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan, Pataki has had the greatest influence over the shape and management of the Adirondack Park of any New York Governor.
In his first years, Pataki struggled to set his agenda. He was the first Republican Governor in twenty years in New York and expectations were high for him to make major changes. Among the various groups beating up on the APA at that time, like the Blue Line Council and Fairness Coalition, hopes were high that Pataki would abolish the APA. Pataki did not kill off the APA, but he gutted the APA Board in 1995 by getting rid of long-time Adirondack Park environmental titans Peter Paine, Elizabeth Thorndike, Anne LaBastille, and John Collins. Pataki also fired Bob Glennon, the APA’s Executive Director. New Board members were largely local government officials and North Country political leaders or ideological pro-development allies. The APA has never recovered.
Peter Bauer at the office of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks in 2003.
A series of events happened in the Adirondacks that shaped Pataki’s approach to Adirondack politics. Straight off in 1995, with a new APA Board freshly installed, the Essex County Board of Supervisors moved to sell their county landfill. The APA reversed a longstanding policy against the importation of solid waste from outside the Park and then stated it had no role in reviewing the project. The would-be private landfill owners planned to import 150,000 tons of garbage a year and slowly fill up the 150-acre landfill site. They were calling it a “Fresh Kills Landfill North” in a nod to the infamous New York City mountainous landfill in Staten Island. RCPA worked with other groups and local residents to oppose this effort. The big break came with a weekend of New York Times stories (see here and here) featuring the RCPA that reported on the APA’s sudden policy reversal, which spurred Pataki to reign in the agency. His administration soon negotiated a settlement with the county that blocked privatization.
The summer of 1995 also saw the great Blowdown where a derecho blasted across the Adirondacks and microbursts levelled trees by the millions. Sacred places like Canada Island on Lake Lila or long stretches of the Oswegatchie River saw towering white pines and hemlocks flattened. Pataki’s DEC convened a working group as there was a big push to go into the Forest Preserve for salvage logging, something that had been done after the 1950 Blowdown. In the end, Team Pataki wisely resisted these calls.
Then at the beginning of 1997, Mary Lou Whitney threatened a major development of exclusive “Great Camps” spread across 15,000 acres around Little Tupper Lake, the northern part of what was then the 51,000-acre Whitney Park private estate in the central Adirondacks. Pataki’s top staff intervened and the Governor worked out a state purchase. Team Pataki was generally surprised at the glowing media coverage about its Little Tupper Lake deal.
When I worked at Adirondack Life, I first paddled on Low’s Lake, which had recently been purchased by the State. Much of the lake was still private land, but the Forest Preserve had a foothold that was expanded over the years. It’s hard for me to think of the Adirondack Park without Low’s Lake being protected in the Forest Preserve and timeless. My two kids grew up camping and they have always known favorite spots like Little Tupper Lake and Round Lake as public lands.
In the wake of the Little Tupper Lake purchase, I went to New York City with a group of Adirondack environmental leaders and other statewide groups to meet with Pataki. We laid out the enormous opportunities for land protection in the Adirondacks at that time as major timber companies and papermill owners that had owned hundreds of thousands of acres were all changing their industrial practices. One by one they sold off their lands, much of it to conservation, but some to developers, and sold or closed mills from Minnesota to Maine. Most of the papermills that ringed the Adirondack Park closed. To say that Pataki “got it” at this historic moment is an understatement. He seized the challenge.
Pataki embarked on an aggressive land protection campaign for the rest of his time in office. After buying Little Tupper Lake, Pataki went on to finalize the 129,000-acre “Champion” land deal that protected five rivers, including a long stretch of the South Branch of the Grass River, and a 100,000- acre easement. Then he completed the 100,000-acre DomTar deal followed by the 300,000-acre deal with International Paper Company. RCPA spent a great deal of time in this period researching and promoting the benefits of land protection for Adirondack communities and swatting back deliberate misinformation. Pataki went on to purchase Round Lake, Clear Pond, Henderson Lake, Massawepie Mire, Madawaska Pond, and Lyon Mountain, among other natural jewels, and over 700,000 acres of easements on forestlands. The last major timber company to sell its lands was Finch, Pruyn and Company, which sold its 145,000-acre holding to The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in 2006, that would later be protected by the State under Governors David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo.
This map shows lands in brown where the State of New York owns a conservation easement. These lands are tightly regulated with limited development and provide public recreational opportunities.
Buying land helped Pataki set up a political dynamic that enlivened supporters and minimized opposition in the Adirondacks. While local government leaders were uncomfortable with his land protection deals, and periodically griped, they were thrilled by how he had gutted the APA. While environmental groups were displeased with how useless and pro-development the APA had become, and we publicly griped, we supported the many Pataki land deals to expand the Forest Preserve and buy conservation easements. Pataki was at once pro-development and pro-land protection. Natural jewels were protected, but Pataki opened the gates of the Park wide for vacation homes anywhere and everywhere.
The Pataki land deals changed the face of the Adirondack Park. These historic land purchases were facilitated and assisted by land protection groups like The Nature Conservancy Adirondack Chapter and Land Trust and the Open Space Institute. Mike Carr ran the TNC’s Adirondack Chapter for two decades and more than anybody else in these years literally moved mountains from private ownership to public protection to help preserve the great open spaces of the Adirondack Park for the long run.
The RCPA Board was chock full of Wilderness enthusiasts. We organized the Canoe-In For Wilderness at Little Tupper Lake in the summer of 1998, an event with paddlers in over 250 canoes and kayaks of activists calling for a Wilderness classification for the newly acquired lake. The day was festive, and the event helped seal the deal. We worked with local businesses like Blue Mountain Outfitters and with John Nemjo at Mountainman Outdoor Supply Company. Six months later, as the APA acted to classify this area as Wilderness, DEC Commissioner John Cahill and Jim Frenette, a Board member from Tupper Lake, led the charge. Frenette said the Whitney Wilderness classification was a gift to his grandchildren and everybody else’s grandchildren too. These years saw the biggest expansion of Wilderness in the history of the Forest Preserve with the creation of the William C. Whitney Wilderness, Round Lake Wilderness, and Madawaska Primitive Area. It also saw massive expansions of the Five Ponds Wilderness and Pepperbox Wilderness Areas. The RCPA had a hand in all of those actions.
A scene from the Canoe-In For Wilderness at Little Tupper Lake in 1998.
The RCPA also developed a Forest Preserve Watch program. In the late 1990s, we dealt with local governments building wide snowmobile trails with DEC approval, where the APA was forced to undertake enforcement actions, and DEC’s massive tree cutting and road widening along the Bear Pond Road in the Watson’s East Triangle, where the APA again was forced to undertake an enforcement action. The RCPA sued over the APA’s lax enforcement over the Bear Pond Road, and we negotiated a settlement that codified new policies to improve Forest Preserve management.
The most frequent calls we received was about damage to the Forest Preserve from All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs). In the late 1990s, ATV use was out of control in many parts of the Forest Preserve. The RCPA set out to investigate it, and we were stunned by what we found. Todd Thomas, John Davis, and Bill Kitchen all helped immensely with field work and picture taking to document ATV damage to Forest Preserve areas where they were allowed and to areas where they trespassed. The DEC had illegally opened scores of roads in the Forest Preserve to ATVs. Riders were not only tearing up these roads, but widely trespassing onto hiking trails, riding around barrier gates, or tearing the gates out. Miles of roads and trails had been turned into long wide rutted muddy troughs.
In 2003, RCPA published Rutted and Ruined: ATV Damage on the Adirondack Forest Preserve. The report used the power of pictures, long a core part of Adirondack Park advocacy. The report catalogued four years of field work that documented widespread natural resource damage caused by ATVs and provided a legal analysis that showed that the DEC had failed to follow the law and illegally opened scores of Forest Preserve roads. Rutted and Ruined reached Pataki’s desk.
The cover of Rutted and Ruined, published in 2003. This report led to a prohibition of ATV use on the Forest Preserve.
The report was followed by legal action against the DEC and APA, which was settled as these agencies agreed to close all of the roads in the Forest Preserve that had been illegally opened. Tom Ulasewicz, Bob Glennon, and Dale Jeffers all helped with the legal analysis. The road closures were followed by a DEC statement that ATV use would not be allowed on the Forest Preserve except for use by disabled individuals through a permit program. The DEC drafted a new Commissioners Policy to ban ATVs on the Forest Preserve and held public hearings that were roiled by angry men, and some women, facing limits on the use of their machines, but DEC never finalized this policy. In these years I learned about the powerful emotional connections between men and women and their machines. While DEC stated that ATVs would no longer be allowed on the Forest Preserve, an official ban proved to be a bridge too far. The RCPA’s work effectively banned ATVs from the Forest Preserve, a fact that still continues today.
Fieldwork was decisive on the ATV issue. We clearly proved a negative impact and widespread problem. Getting out into the field, especially to places in the Forest Preserve, became one of the focuses of my work as there was nothing like seeing the issues up close to understand their complexities. No other environmental advocate got out into the Forest Preserve as widely and consistently as I did. This extensive field work helped immensely in how we approached Forest Preserve management issues. The other benefit from this extensive time in the field is that the concept of preserving lands for future generations became very real as I visited wild and beautiful areas that had been protected 30 or 40 or 100 years ago, where I saw how gifts from the past benefitted all of us here today.
In the late 1990s, the RCPA intervened in a civil rights lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) against the DEC-APA for their failure to provide adequate access for disabled individuals to the Forest Preserve. The plaintiffs were seeking widespread use of ATVs, which they called “wheelchairs in the woods.” A coalition of environmental groups intervened to protect Wilderness Areas from new motorized uses and to help plan for meaningful expanded universal access on all State lands. A 2001 settlement created a workable program for special ATV access in certain Wild Forest areas for disabled individuals through a permit program and for new planning to provide accessible recreational facilities across New York. In the last 25 years, the DEC has constructed hundreds of facilities to improve disabled access.
Though perhaps the RCPA’s greatest impact was on the Forest Preserve, our initial focus was on private land development. In the mid-1990s, private land development was a major focus, with vacation homes fueled by a growing economy and in reaction to the Commission report. RCPA published Growth in the Adirondacks: Development Trends in the Adirondack Park 1990-1999, which for the first time charted annual building trends in the Adirondack Park, seeing an average of 850 new houses annually, and that the APA only reviewed about 33% of new development, with 66% handled by local governments. That report ended constant chatter from local officials that nothing could happen in the Adirondacks without an APA permit.
Work on private land development is always an emotionally charged issue because of everything that is involved in owning land or a house. In our advocacy to limit development we were faced with angry responses from people that we were killing their dreams, whether it was their year-round home or their vacation home. American life creates a tremendous emotional connection between people and their homes. One’s home is their castle, where they’re kings or queens, where their family is safe, and nobody should tell anybody what they can or can’t do there. The vacation home is where the kids and grandkids come to visit. The raw emotion around land and housing development rivalled that around men and women and their machines, and always made these issues fraught and tense.
2024 marked the 27th sampling season for Adirondack Lake Assessment Program (ALAP), a water quality monitoring program that was started in 1999 in a collaboration between the RCPA and the Adirondack Aquatic Institute (AAI) at Paul Smith’s College. I started this program with Michael Martin, who ran AAI that time. ALAP started with a dozen lakes initially. AAI evolved into the Adirondack Watershed Institute at Paul Smith’s College, which is one of the premier scientific research organizations in the Adi-rondacks. In 2024, 80 lakes and ponds participated, involving hundreds of volunteers and dozens of lake associations. The long-term data from ALAP has provided vital information on water quality for scores of lakes and documented extensive road salt pollution and impacts from climate change. The road salt pollution data underwrote the final report findings of the Adi-rondack Road Salt Reduction Task Force. Nancy Bernstein helped manage ALAP for PROTECT for a time and Sean Conin, Mike DeAngelo, Dan Kelting, Corey Laxson, Elizabeth Yerger, and Brendan Wiltse, among others, all worked on the program for PSC-AWI.
Peter Bauer and Michael Martin, co-founders of the Adirondack Lake Assessment Program (ALAP), which completed its 27th monitoring season in 2024.
The RCPA also had success in Albany as we helped to pass legislation on jet ski control, acid rain mitigation, and bolstering the Environmental Protection Fund in its first years. We worked for years on the Northern Forest Alliance, a massive 40-group, 4-state coalition that focused on land protection and rural community development. We reviewed and field checked dozens of Unit Management Plans for Forest Preserve management, worked on Article 14 amendments, and helped to write the first invasive species management plan for the Adirondack Park. For a decade RCPA also managed an FSC Sustainable Forestry Certification program that at its height had over 12,000 acres enrolled. Ross Morgan and Dan Gilmore were terrific foresters. Kate Gardner, Deb Zack, and Robin Robertson all helped immensely to make the RCPA an effective and viable organization in these years.
Pataki’s commitment to protect open space in the Adirondacks irked a number of local government officials. Senator Ron Stafford, a Pataki ally, arranged a meeting with local officials where they pushed for more snowmobile trails and tourist trains to take away the sting of Pataki’s land buys. At that point, local officials could have asked the Governor for the moon, but their ask was for more snowmobile trails and tourist trains. This also followed some early missteps at the DEC in Pataki’s first years where they gave local governments the authority to widen snowmobile trails and town highway crews butchered a half dozen trails, which after an outcry saw those trails closed.
After working through the 1995 Blowdown, some initial land protection successes, and disabled access, Pataki’s staff then formed the “Snowmobile Focus Group” in 2001, which would bring together state agency officials, green groups, and local government leaders to try and draft a comprehensive snowmobile trail system for the state. For years at these meetings, I expressed concerns that these extra-wide trails could not be built and comply with the Forever Wild clause. DEC officials felt otherwise. At every iteration of the early plan, and at the public hearings on the official draft plan, we protested in an effort to uphold Forever Wild.
In the end, the Pataki Administration released its statewide snowmobile trail plan, heavily focused on the Adirondacks, in its last months in office in 2006 without much fanfare. Pataki’s staff acknowledged that the plan had problems, but threw up their hands as career staff at DEC, local government officials, and snowmobile groups demanded the final plan. After 12 years running the state, Team Pataki was on its way out, but as they checked out some key staff acknowledged that their plan would likely create a constitutional showdown at some point in the future.
As the RCPA notched a series of successes, my personal visibility grew, especially as the issues on which we worked involved men and women and their machines or some developer’s dream. The RCPA’s success in getting ATVs banned from the Forest Preserve and the failure of the state to adopt a fullblown snowmobile plan for years, for which we were blamed, made me a target. That I was the only Adirondack Park advocate selected for Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer’s environmental transition team in the fall of 2006, shined the spotlight brighter, and also amplified RCPA’s platform.
In these years, I was very visible driving all around the Park and I made sure to attend every public meeting and hearing. If I stopped for gas or coffee or to get a gallon of milk, that could take half an hour as somebody had a bone to pick about something and I was always talked through somebody’s complaint, making the legal or conservation case. Because I lived in a small community in Hamilton County, I was more accessible than most of the other Adirondack advocates, who mostly lived in Albany or outside the Park. Unlike most of these advocates my kids went to local schools and I dealt with the realities of Park life. This textured experience in all facets of Adirondack living gave me a deep understanding of Adirondack life that the other advocates in Albany never fully gained.
But the spotlight had its downsides. One time I attended the “Forever Wild” community theatre performance in the Adirondack Lake Center for the Arts in Blue Mountain Lake. Forever Wild spoofed all things Adirondack and beyond through a few dozen comedy skits. At one performance, my youngest, then around a year old, was squirmy and I went and stood in the back of the theater to hold him. The Forever Wild players then performed a skit mocking me. Mark Frost, the publisher of The Chronicle in Glens Falls, was at Forever Wild and later wrote a gleeful piece in his newspaper about how pleasurable it was to watch me with my squirmy baby as I watched myself get mocked. Later on, in Frost’s April Fools satiric edition of The Chronicle, he wrote an alarmist front page piece that I had conspired with NASA to spy on all Adirondack residents. There was lots of stuff like that.
In these years, the RCPA emerged as a strong grassroots advocacy non-profit that had a big impact on issues across the Adirondacks. We contributed to a number of successes that helped to shape the Adirondack Park as we know it today.
In 2007, I stepped down from the RCPA and took a job as the Executive Director at the FUND for Lake George, which has since gone on to merge with the Lake George Association. The FUND job let me work every day with Chris Navitsky, the legendary Lake George Waterkeeper, where we put together the Do-It-Yourself Water Quality publication and its “Low Impact Development” manual. The big focus was on a massive stormwater mitigation project along West Brook in Lake George Village where new wetlands and stormwater control devices were built in an area of a dilapidated Wild West themed amusement park called the Gaslight Village. In the end, after nearly $10 million was raised, the new wetlands and stormwater controls were built along with the new Charles Wood Park.
Peter Bauer in 2012 with Lake George area local government officials calling for mandatory boat controls to protect the lake from harmful aquatic invasive species.
Since the 1970s, the FUND had built one of the country’s best long-term water quality monitoring programs in partnership with the RPI Darrin Fresh Water Institute in Bolton Landing. This data had found largely stable water quality parameters for Lake George with the notable exception of road salt pollution, which increased annually. This partnership has reached a wholly different level with the Jefferson Project. In my years at the FUND, I helped lead the effort to try and eliminate the Asian clam infestation, a massive effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. We worked to improve Eurasian watermilfoil hand harvesting in partnership with the Lake George Park Commission. We pushed for stream buffer and septic regulations, which eventually bore fruit. I helped to catalyze the ultimately successful effort for a mandatory boat control program to defend Lake George against new infestations of aquatic invasive species.
In 2012, I signed on as the Executive Director with Protect the Adirondacks, which had formed through a merger of the RCPA and the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks in 2009. It was a homecoming of sorts as I was back with Evelyn Greene, Peter O’Shea, Nancy Bernstein, and Peter Hornbeck, who had all been involved in the RCPA, and continued their activism, but was also new as I started working with Chuck Clusen, the Board Chair, who had extensive experiences with national environmental organization, and Dave Quinn, our long-time Treasurer, and people like Charlie Morrison, Michael Wilson, Ken Strike, Dale Jeffers, Bob Glennon, John Caffry, Barbara Rottier, Jim Dawson, Roger Gray, Chris Walsh, Lorraine Duvall, Andy Coney, Phil Terrie, and Sid Harring, among others.
I hit the ground running at PROTECT in the fall of 2012. Two weeks in, the Cuomo Administration announced that it would buy 69,000 acres for the Forest Preserve from TNC, which would complete the Finch, Pruyn and Company land purchase. Governor Paterson had purchased a 90,000-acre conservation easement over the Finch lands in 2010. The biggest project in the history of the APA – the 5,800-acre Adirondack Club & Resort in Tupper Lake – was being litigated. And, perhaps biggest of all, the looming constitutional showdown about Forever Wild had finally arrived as the DEC-APA started cutting thousands of trees and grading with heavy machinery a new 12-mile-long, extra-wide “Class II Community Connector Snowmobile Trail” through the Moose River Plains Wild Forest.
In early 2013, the Legislature passed the “NYCO Amendment” to amend the Forever Wild clause to allow NYCO Minerals, Inc., a mining company, to acquire 200 acres in the Jay Mountain Wilderness. This amendment split the Adirondack green groups. PROTECT opposed it, but it narrowly passed in a statewide vote in November even as another Article 14 amendment to settle a land dispute on Raquette Lake passed by a large margin. In the years after the vote, I obtained records through Freedom of Information requests that detailed the close working relationship between the Cuomo DEC and NYCO where the DEC staff acted as de facto lobbyists for the mining company throughout the legislative campaign. At NYCO’s insistence, DEC even intervened with the New York State Board of Elections to change the official ballot language to favor passage of the amendment. I worked with Sue Craig at The New York Times, who has since gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize for her work on Donald Trump’s taxes, to publish an expose’ at the Times about the DEC’s collusion. Andrew Cuomo’s Administration, of course, did nothing about this matter.
When he served as Governor, Andrew Cuomo was a major booster of snowmobiling and worked to gut the “forever wild” constitutional protections for the Forest Preserve in an unsuccessful effort to build hundreds of miles of wide snowmobile trails.
My time at PROTECT largely coincided with Andrew Cuomo’s time as Governor. From top to bottom, Team Cuomo was the worst administration for the Adirondacks in modern times. Motorsports was something dear to the Governor, who made expanding snowmobiling in the Forest Preserve a top priority. Cuomo eagerly participated in an annual snowmobile ride with snowmobile lobbying groups where he thrilled in driving a snowmobile at high speed.
In the fall of 2012, I started fieldwork on the new Seventh Lake Mountain Trail, the State’s first “Class II trail,” where I documented and photographed extensive tree cutting and excessive trail grading. I photographed the crew at work and excavators carving out a wide trail. State policy limited Class II trails to widths of 9 feet in straight areas and 12 feet on hills and curves. I measured and photographed scores of locations where the trails were 20 feet in width or greater. I counted thousands of tree stumps, though grading of the trail to flatten and smooth it had destroyed many stumps. We calculated that for each mile of Class II trail constructed an acre of forest was cleared. The Seventh Lake Mountain Trail was the DEC’s showcase Class II Community Connector Snowmobile trail, the first 12 miles of what was planned to be a network of hundreds of miles of new motorized trails in the Forest Preserve. Team Cuomo was planning the largest expansion of motor vehicle use in the history of the Forest Preserve.
Fieldwork on Class II snowmobile trails.
I reported my findings to the PROTECT Board and Conservation Advocacy Committee and we submitted our concerns about State policy and Forever Wild violations to the DEC and APA, who brushed them aside. By 2012, we had been raising these concerns for 15 years, but the DEC was determined to expand motor vehicle use in the Forest Preserve. In early 2013, Glens Falls environmental attorney and PROTECT Board member John Caffry, volunteered to take on an Article 14 challenge pro bono and enlisted Claudia Braymer, an environmental attorney in his office, to join with him. The initial constitutional challenge was filed in early 2013. None of us involved anticipated that this case would take 10 years to complete.
The DEC officially opened the 12-mile-long Seventh Lake Mountain Trail in 2013, but continued to work on the trail in 2014. DEC also started cutting trees to build the 18-mile-long Newcomb to Minerva Trail through the Vanderwhacker Mountain Wild Forest Area in 2015 and 2016. DEC planned to build over 36 miles of new Class II trails in its first phase. PROTECT sought injunctions and restraining orders to stop trail building, but were unsuccessful until 2016 when our field work documented that over 30,000 trees had been cut down or were marked for imminent cutting. Forest Ecologist Steve Signell and I worked out a field protocol for counting standing trees in uncut sections of various trails and for counting and photographing stumps. To document the extent of tree cutting, we had to photograph and take GPS measurements for each stump that was one inch in diameter or greater. In many places we counted tree rings on stumps of trees less than 3 inches in diameter and found them to be 50 years old or older. For this case, I photographed and recorded data on over 10,000 stumps and Signell counted thousands of standing trees marked for cutting. I also provided dozens of pictures showing that Class II trails were regularly constructed to widths of 20 feet or more.
Scenes of Class II snowmobile trail construction in the Moose River Plains Wild Forest.
Claudia Braymer used the tree counts to win injunctions to stop tree cutting and trail work in 2016. The Newcomb to Minerva Trail was partially cut out at that time. A trial was held in 2017, which was managed by John Caffry, who led the legal team. Historian Phil Terrie testified about the 19th century use of the word “timber” to mean all the trees of the forest, not just large diameter merchantable trees. Signell testified about the extent of tree cutting and the ecological changes to the forest from building wide trails through an intact forest. He and I testified about the tree counts and trail width photographs. Other experts testified about ecological impacts to the forest from cutting Class II trails as well as about the significant differences between Class II trails and hiking trails. The trial judge ruled against PROTECT at the end of 2017, but Caffry organized a successful appeal to the Appellate Division, Third Department, in 2019, and Caffry successfully defended this decision at the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which issued a historic decision in 2021. The case was formally ended in 2023.
This landmark case followed only two other major cases in the last 130 years, which combined set out the case law for Article 14. This case effectively caps snowmobile trail mileage in the Forest Preserve and has spurred important Forest Preserve management reform efforts, such as revision of the DEC’s Forest Preserve tree cutting policy and creation of a new DEC Commissioner’s Policy (CP-78) for planning and undertaking construction or maintenance work on the Forest Preserve. DEC-APA are also currently working on new Forest Preserve trail design standards. These reforms were hard won and participation in this defense of Forever Wild was a highlight of my time.
The purchase of the TNC-Finch lands, done in stages 2013 to 2018, was something that had been in the works since Pataki, and was the sole major achievement for Andrew Cuomo in the Adirondacks, though he largely botched the classification of these lands and severely weakened Forest Preserve management and policy in the process. Floatplane rights on remote ponds and road management contracts were given to local governments. Under Cuomo, the DEC purchased the Finch lands, and sent them to the APA for classification, in stages.
Speaking at a public meeting in Schroon Lake on the classification of the TNC-Finch lands in 2017.
During the APA’s classification review of these lands, our chief goal was to see DEC-APA manage the major waterbodies at the core of these new Forest Preserve lands as motorless lakes. Despite the abundance of water throughout the Adirondacks, there is not an extensive list of motorless areas for the public to paddle. In the Finch-TNC deal, the Essex Chain of Lakes and Boreas Ponds created great opportunities for new motorless waters. In the end, the classifications for the Essex Chain and Boreas Ponds were compromises, the best we were going to do with Team Cuomo running things at the DEC and APA. We helped to win motorless waters for the Essex Chain and Boreas Ponds, and saw new Wilderness lands created, but these gains were coupled with dozens of miles of newly designated motor vehicle roads, such as the 6-mile-long Gulf Brook Road that leads to Boreas Pond, and a series of “State Administrative” roads lacing through the Essex Chain Lakes tract, as well as a historic weakening of the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan and the Wild, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act.
In these years, at various meetings I often heard complaints that in the Adirondacks when lands were purchased for the Forest Preserve we were “manufacturing” Wilderness out of industrial lands that had been intensively managed for decades. I would push back that manufacturing Wilderness was one of the best things a society could do in the 21st century as more and more lands are developed and our collective footprint grows incessantly year after year. Lands purchased for the Forest Preserve are seldom undisturbed primeval wild lands. The Forest Preserve restarts the clock, draws a line in time, where for the future, hopefully for all time, these lands will see only the most minimal of human interference as natural ecologic processes will get to play out unfettered. That’s the promise and the dream of the Forest Preserve.
At this time, PROTECT put together the best Independent Public Oversight Program in the Adirondacks that watched, reviewed, and intervened on all major public and private land management decisions. We reviewed dozens of projects and proposals each year and submitted dozens of comment letters. The major issue where we had an impact was stopping the storage of hundreds of dirty oil tanker rail cars on little used Adirondack rail lines and continued ATV trespass on the Forest Preserve, and we tried to stop clearcutting on conservation easement lands, and opposed new major hotels in Lake George and Saranac Lake and large private land subdivisions and developments.
Walking rail lines in 2018 to investigate illegal storage of dirty out-of-service oil tanker rail cars in the Adirondacks.
In Albany, we helped to pass the Invasive Species Transport legislation and pushed for State spending to improve trail construction and maintenance and Forest Preserve management. We pushed for funding and testified at budget hearings to support critical Adirondack Park institutions and programs, like the Visitor Interpretive Centers and the Adirondack Diversity Initiative, among others. We questioned quixotic state spending projects like building the new Frontier Town Campground. We helped to craft legislation to reform the APA Act to utilize conservation design principles for largescale subdivisions and reviewed and worked on proposed constitutional amendments for the Forest Preserve. We advocated for the State to study the reintroduction of extirpated species and wildlife protection legislation. We stood up against State efforts to change the law that requires State payment of local taxes on the Forest Preserve.
The 2018 election changed things in Albany, as it ended over 100 years of Republican control of the State Senate, ended divided government, and catalyzed a series of far-reaching pieces of legislation including the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). The CLCPA ushered in New York’s Climate Action Plan under which state agencies are supposed to bring climate change and greenhouse gas emission limits into their regulatory work. So far, neither DEC nor APA have stepped up on complying with the CLCPA, but this far-reaching law provides a major yardstick to measure the State’s progress.
Protect the Adirondacks was struggling when I started in 2012. The growing pains of the merger and Great Recession had stalled its progress. I worked to rebuild the core of the group, stabilize and grow its financial support, and expand its programmatic scope. In these years, I am indebted to Ellen Collins for all of her help with office work (and for being the best mother-in-law imaginable). Since 2012, PROTECT has run up a bunch of successes and helped to reform and improve the overall management of the Adirondack Park and Forest Preserve. PROTECT grew in these years, and as I step back, Protect the Adirondacks is now a group led by Claudia Braymer and Chris Amato, two highly skilled environmental attorneys.
Whereas Governor Pataki had been pro-development and pro-land protection, Cuomo and Hochul were just pro-development. Andrew Cuomo lined up his agencies and budgets around the slogan that “The Adirondack Park is Open for Business” and that pretty much said it all. Governor Cuomo welcomed any and all development with scant land protection successes. Governor Cuomo protected the least land in New York State and the Adirondacks of all Governors who completed at least one full term since the Great Depression of the 1930s. For her part, Governor Kathy Hochul has yet to articulate an agenda for the Adirondack Park, for the Forest Preserve or our rural communities, beyond massive financial support for the Olympic Regional Development Authority.
Lobbying in Albany with Claudia Braymer, who takes over at the Executive Director of Protect the Adirondacks in 2025, and Assemblymember Matt Simpson, who represents the southern Adirondacks.
A big part of my work at PROTECT was trying to set the public record straight by bringing sound factual information to the pressing issues of the day or the ongoing debate over the future of the Adirondacks. We did our homework and brought factual and accurate legal and policy analysis to the public. We organized a report The Adirondack Park and Rural America: Economic and Population Trends, 1970 to 2010. This report brought hard data and a national rural context to questions around economic and population trends in the Adirondacks, where the APA’s regional zoning and the Forest Preserve had long been blamed for all the Park’s problems. When we looked at the data, we found that Adirondack communities were stronger than many other rural areas, and that there was nothing unique in the Adirondacks because everything that is happening here is the same thing happening all across Rural America.
During these years we also published The Myth of Quiet, Motor-free Waters in the Adirondack Park that looked at the publicly accessible motorless waters opportunities in the Adirondack Park and 20% in 2023: An Assessment of the New York State 30 by 30 Act, which catalogued where the State of New York stands in its effort to protect 30% of the state’s lands and inland waters by 2030 as required under the “30 by 30 Act” legislation.
During my PROTECT years I also wrote regularly for The Adirondack Almanack, first with its punchy and visionary founder John Warren, and then with Melissa Hart, who edited the site after it was purchased by the Adirondack Explorer. I wrote over 200 articles for the Almanack that addressed all the major issues confronting the Adirondack Park over the last dozen years.
On the summit of Cascade Mountain, examining the impacts of high public use of the Forest Preserve.
Through it all, I’m incredibly grateful to the members of the RCPA, FUND for Lake George, and Protect the Adirondacks, the terrific Boards and co-workers at these groups, the many generous donors and foundations, volunteers, and partners in the Legislature, state agencies, and allied non-profits. I was always asked why there are so many different groups in the Adirondacks, and folks complained that they could not keep them all straight or tell them apart in the alphabet soup of acronyms. My response was that there were never enough groups, that we always need more, because there is so much work to do to protect the Forest Preserve and Adirondack Park. The job of protecting the Adirondacks involves many people, wearing many hats, bringing to bear a wide spectrum of voices and talents and ideas. Sometimes this chaotic orchestra hits all the right notes, at other times the music is a discordant static buzz, yet it comes together more than not, and the Park wins from these collective efforts.
Conservation work is also heartbreaking work. We often deal with loss. Lands that would have been great additions to the Forest Preserve are developed. State agencies that should be public servants and honest brokers violate their own statutes and the State constitution. Invasive species inexorably infest new lands and lakes in the Adirondacks. Climate change has made it so it’s just as likely to rain as it is to snow in the winter and is driving ecological change everywhere. Random political decisions in Albany drive bad policies for private land development and Forest Preserve management. That we could sometimes stop bad things from happening didn’t always mean that we could always make good things happen.
Over the next two decades the final shape of the Adirondack Park will concretize as land will either be protected or developed. The Adirondack Park has been in flux for decades, but it’s final shape is coming into view. The list of problems and challenges facing the Adirondack Park would quadruple the length of this article, but as much as there have been conservation successes in the Adirondack Park, there have been losses and missed opportunities.
As I change roles in my work at Protect the Adirondacks, my home continues to be in Blue Mountain Lake, smack in the middle of the Adirondacks in northern Hamilton County, where I live with my wife, where my kids come home to visit, and where I’m involved with my community. My future role in Adirondack Park conservation remains a work in progress, but I plan to stay active as a proud citizen activist, and plan to revisit many of the special places in the Forest Preserve, and to hopefully finally get to some other places that I have yet to get to while I still can. I will always believe that I was incredibly lucky to have done this work for as long as I have and I know I that worked like hell to honor this opportunity and the platform it accorded me. All of my work has been accomplished as part of the Adirondack Park’s conservation tradition, while standing on the shoulders, and honoring their work, of all who gave their time, talents, and passion for the last 175 years to create and build and manage and care for and protect the forever wild Forest Preserve and the Adirondack Park.
