As APA turns 50, 'A Wild Idea' chronicles how it came to be

RAY BROOK |The Adirondack Park Agency turns 50 this year, a birthday that will not be celebrated by everyone, but one that even to its most fervent supporters in 1971 would have seemed to be a summit that was all but unscalable. The band of people who gave birth to the agency included a diminutive tycoon with the ear of The New York Times' editorial writer; a Cornell grad student too inexperienced to know that what he wanted couldn't be had; an adventuresome ranger who had to keep his opinions on the sanctity of the forest to himself because they clashed with the status quo; and a swashbuckling governor whose pinnacle of power just happened to coincide with the rise of environmentalism. The APA couldn't happen in today's politically charged atmosphere, and it barely happened then, said journalist Brad Edmondson, author of "A Wild Idea: How the Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks," the first comprehensive telling of how the APA came about. Nothing like it had been tried before. It was an exercise not just in policy-wonk paper pushing, but in physically getting out into the field and mapping virtually every square foot of the Adirondack Park in a way that was not terribly unlike what surveyor Verplanck Colvin had done a century before. Edmondson's narrative began nearly 20 years ago when he and Sierra Club member Ted Hullar began conducting oral histories with those early players in the process, some of whom are now gone. It was a project, but not a book project — but then it began to get interesting. "I thought, this is going to be pretty dull, it's about land use planning," Edmondson said. "But the human stories behind the land planning were quite dramatic." Clarence Petty, the ranger whose vision for the park transcended bureaucratic thinking at the time, was a born storyteller, and he'd had 30 years to hone those stories to perfection. "By the time I'd spent 10 hours with Clarence, I was hooked," Edmondson said. Ultimately, those interviews would include 60 people and 1,500 pages of transcripts that formed the backbone of the book. The story, rife with fascinating detail, is told not just from the perspective of the founders, but of the Adirondackers who were vehemently opposed to any attempt to tell them what they could and couldn't do with their own property. Even if it was not in the best interest of the park, it was a legitimate point of view, Edmondson said, and one worthy of respect. Inhabitants of the park who accused the founders of Ivy League arrogance were not far off base. Scant input from their point of view was sought, and in Albany, a great majority of lawmakers could vote for legislation enabling the agency without worrying what their voters would think back home. When Gov. Nelson Rockefeller appointed a Temporary Study Commission that would be a seminal milepost in the park's future in 1968, there was already simmering suspicion of the process because Rockefeller and his brother had toyed with the deeply unpopular idea of turning the Adirondacks into a National Park. But the relentless drove of men like Yale grad Harold Hochschild, president of the American Metal Company and founder of the Adirondack Experience, Rhodes Scholar Peter Paine, a partner in an international law firm with prescient views on conservation, and Harold Jerry, a planner with a Harvard Law School pedigree and, more importantly, the governor's confidence, the study commission forged ahead under the pressure of ridiculous deadlines. Much of the legwork fell on George Davis, a Cornell grad student who chased after 60-year-old Petty on exhausting forays into the woods, and prowled the park by car, canoe, and air, making note of every relevant feature from wetlands to attractive views. These features were painstakingly incorporated into map overlays that would ultimately dictate where development could and couldn't go. "He was too young and inexperienced to realize that what he was doing was impossible," Edmondson said. "A Wild Idea" chronicles the tension that naturally developed between private and public interests, but through it all, "civil discourse never broke down," Edmondson said. By the 1990s that would change, as APA opponents became more hardened, a bit of a preview of today's political acrimony. Ultimately, Edmondson said, public anger "rises and falls to the degree that people feel they are being listened to." But, while seldom loved, the APA fulfilled its primary goal of preventing mega-developments of tens of thousands of homes that had been proposed a half-century ago. "By and large the APA has succeeded," Edmondson said. "But people will always have to fight for it. To live up to its ambitious mission, it's going to take a lot of resources and a lot of public involvement, and those are not guaranteed."

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As APA turns 50, 'A Wild Idea' chronicles how it came to be

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