Monday during the 8 O’clock Hour, I’ll report in-depth about the Adirondack Park Agency’s decision to allow 220 hunting camps to remain on the former Champion timber lands.<\/p>\n
Those traditional hunting clubs have lived in the shadow of eviction since 1999 when this easement deal — one of the first big ones that reshaped land-use patterns across the Adirondacks — was negotiated by New York state and Champion.<\/p>\n
Sportsmen were, understandably, livid.<\/p>\n
These camps — mostly blue collar affairs, some dating back to WW2 — were part of the cultural landscape of our region, and they also provided ready access to a remote part of the Park.<\/p>\n
The knock against the APA was echoed far and wide:<\/p>\n
A big, unresponsive bureaucracy tosses locals on their ears; the effort to squeeze out the Park’s people takes another ugly step forward, with greenies and state officials working in cahoots.<\/p>\n
But events this week suggest a very different narrative.<\/p>\n
Yes, the state blundered when it created the Champion deal.\u00a0 Everyone involved learned a big, painful lesson on that project.<\/p>\n
Based on the anger they sparked, green groups and state officials finally grasped the fact that these clubs were an important part of the landscape, and not a down-at-the-heels blight that needed to be removed.<\/p>\n
In the decade since, as more conservation easements have been created, the vast majority of hunting clubs have been allowed to remain.<\/p>\n
(The exception are those cabins that sit on actual forest preserve land, as opposed to private easement land.)<\/p>\n
The state also circled back, at long last, and decided to revoke the decision to evict the Champion clubs.\u00a0 The APA voted 8-to-1 on Friday to allow 220 cabins to remain.<\/p>\n
Was it a clumsy process?\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 Was it evidence that the APA, DEC and green groups sometimes have a tin ear when it comes to community needs and values?\u00a0 Certainly.<\/p>\n
But this week’s outcome suggests that critics wildly overshoot the mark when they paint the portrait of a greedy, uncaring APA leviathan, a closed-door cabal of enviro-zealots and black hat bureaucrats.<\/p>\n
The Park is, in the end, a human institution, every bit as flawed as it is ambitious.<\/p>\n
The near-unanimous vote to save the hunting camps suggests that this is not only a worthy experiment in enviromental regulation, but also an interesting experiment in how we might democratize and humanize conservation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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