as reviewed by Tim Holmes
Most view the Adirondack Park as New York’s natural resource, with its land protected mainly for the benefit of New Yorkers. Others see the Adirondack Park and recognize its national value as a collection of landscapes and habitats unique to the United States. Then there are those who perceive a greater value beyond the U.S. borders and few are better qualified to communicate that value than Bill Weber and Amy Vedder.
As scientists who have worked in or closely studied numerous protected areas of international interest, they are able to see the value, the promise and the limitations of the Adirondack Park. As the concluding essay in The Great Experiment in Conservation, Voices from the Adirondack Park, its 14 pages address one of the compilation’s most important topics. What is the global significance of the Adirondack Park, if any, and does it – or could it – serve as a model for conservation around the world?
Concisely written, with titles and subtitles to organize their arguments, Weber and Vedder provide numerous comparisons that take the reader around the world, with stops in South America, Africa, China, Yellowstone and back again to the Adirondacks. Based on their considerable experience, the Adirondack Park is undoubtedly an international model for conservation, but not for the reasons one might expect. They perceive so many idiosyncrasies in “its origins, evolution, current form and finances” that you would be out of your mind to base a new preserve on the Adirondack model. However, as they are able to explain so well, with fewer new preserves being created than in the past, the new struggle in conservation is for maintaining and restoring biodiversity within existing preserves, and in that respect, the Adirondack Park is “an indispensable model for twenty-first-century conservation.”
Weber and Vedder reveal the Adirondack model as one of continuous restoration:
“Enter the Adirondacks: not as model of planned protection, nor even of planned recovery or management, but one that stands as an inspirational example of people recognizing mistakes, correcting behavior, and creating the conditions for wildlife recovery. This experience is especially relevant to those areas where wildlife depletion has not been accompanied by significant habitat loss and where human behaviors can be changed. Such areas would include a long list of African parks in post-conflict zones; forest reserves where minimal direct logging impacts nevertheless led to commercial over-hunting; and marine reserves affected by comparable over-fishing.”
What is most refreshing about this concluding essay is its optimism tempered by realism. It is an optimism based on a number of personal success stories in wildlife conservation, achieved under some of the most difficult social and political conditions. Knowing better than most that “a growing percentage of the world’s parks contain human communities” and that “conflict is inherent in conservation,” the authors have concluded “that conflicts never go away; they just change with time and require constant learning and adaptation.” That sentiment alone provides a good reason to read the entire set of 34 essays.
Weber and Vedder have dedicated their careers to finding common ground over habitats, wildlife and local economies. They observe that the Adirondack Park has evolved from a model of “what not to do,” to a model of recovery and restoration, and that it now has the potential to offer a new set of lessons to the world. Their main concern is that the Adirondack experience is not well publicized and therefore not widely known. “A model is only valuable to the extent it is visible.” Perhaps by making the lessons of the Adirondack Park more visible to the world, they can be better understood at home.
* Pp. 502-516 in The Great Experiment in Conservation, Voices from the Adirondack Park, edited by William Porter, Jon Erickson and Ross Whaley. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009.
