This past June we learned that a Texas real estate developer has plans to purchase the 36,000-acre Whitney Park property, an important crown jewel parcel in the middle of the Adirondack Park Forest Preserve. This came as a surprise in the community of Adirondack activists, because this vast wild forest area has been a first priority purchase on the NYS Open Space Plan for decades. We had assumed that the State had been working behind the scenes to acquire the lands, but, surprisingly, they had taken no action.
New York’s Adirondack Park is a world-renowned treasure, visited by over 12 million people annually. It has received this attention because it has some of the strongest land protections of any park in the world. In 1894 the people of New York enacted a new State constitution, which, in part, created the Adirondack Park, “to be forever kept as wild forest lands.” This was the Gilded Age, when fortunes were made on railroad construction, lumbering vast swaths of forest, mineral extraction for the steel industries. Yet even in that context, the people of New York had the vision to set aside an immense acreage of northern New York to be permanently protected as wild forest, not to be exploited for timber or mineral wealth.
The 36,000 acre Whitney lands are a tremendously unique habitat with 22 lakes and ponds, and over 100 miles of undeveloped shoreline. It is the middle of a historic 19th century canoe route. These lands are the lynchpin that would connect other State lands added to the Forest Preserve between the early 1900s and the 1990s, connecting a 600,000-acre contiguous wildland area, the largest east of the Mississippi.
For the integrity of the Adirondack Forest Preserve, this remaining undeveloped crown jewel parcel must not be lost to a Texas developer who wants to lock it up with a hotel, mansion-like ‘camps’, exclusive golf courses, and private ski hills.
Connected, contiguous wildland corridors are critical for wildlife biodiversity as the climate warms. An astounding recent study by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reported a cumulative population loss of nearly 3 billion birds in Canada and the U.S. since 1970. Equally troubling, Adirondack forests are becoming increasingly susceptible to tree blights as the climate warms, with blights already impacting stands of beech, ash, and hemlock.
The last thing our fragile Adirondacks needs now are more roads in exclusive estates, and manicured golf courses covered in pesticides and herbicides killing off our dwindling insect and bird populations. These lands must be kept as wild forest lands for all the people of New York.
Every year the State Legislature enacts the Environmental Protection Fund (EPF) to undertake critical environmental, conservation and water protection projects around the State. One category of funding is for open space protection. These lands are exactly what that fund was created for.
In the 1990’s the Sierra Club “Save Whitney Park” campaign helped encourage Governor George Pataki to work directly with Mary Lou Whitney to purchase a 15,000-acre portion of the Whitney Estate for addition to the Forest Preserve. Let’s hope Governor Hochul’s administration will have the vision of the members of the 1894 New York Constitutional convention and recognize the importance moving quickly and aggressively to protect these unique lands as Adirondack Forest Preserve. This is not a once in a lifetime opportunity, it is a once in forever opportunity. If these lands are developed, they are gone forever.
Send a message to Governor Hochul today!
