Lessons from the Adirondacks

My senior year in high school my Human Geography class went on a field trip to our own town, Brookfield, CT--a trip that seems superfluous seeing as Brookfield is a teeny tiny town that everyone in my class had lived in for 10+ years. At the outset, it seemed like there wasn't much to learn, but after visiting our Historical Society, several cemeteries, community garden, arts center, and meager business district, I found that there was so much more to my lifelong hometown than I ever could have thought. And although the scale was considerably different, I felt that same sense of awe after coming back from this Adirondack field trip. Seeing all of the diverse aspects of Adirondack life, like the quaint towns followed up stretches of undeveloped wilderness, the vast array of beautiful plants and wildlife, the working farmstead, the museum's account of human life in the Adirondacks, and the people that flock to these places still, helped to solidify what we've been learning in class since August.

We've studied the park from a historical, scientific, and literary lens, and soon enough we'll cover the cultural angle as well. Each of these distinct vantage points offers insight into what is so unique about the region, what made it into what it is today, and where the park falls in all sorts of broader conversations about property rights, wilderness conservation, and the human-landscape relationship. The more that we learn about the park from each of these viewpoints, the closer we get to honing in on what the Adirondacks represent on both a local and global scale and what our successes and failures in those 6 million acres can teach us about where humans fit in to these natural systems.

After seeing the Adirondack artwork, sustainable goat farm, wildlife refuge, and even the more hoity-toity castle-living side of things, I think it would be fair to add a fourth item to the trichotomy of the park: wilderness, playground, home, but also educational experience. There is so much to learn from the Adirondacks, not just in the quiet self-reflection the stonily silent presence of the mountains moves me to make, but in the sense that the Adirondacks themselves represent a blending of wilderness and human activity that is hard to come by these days. As The Atlas refers to it, the park is a sort of "Adirondack experiment" (Jenkins, x) wherein studying the interactions between culture and geology, history and science, economy and regulating bodies, and, perhaps most importantly, the wilderness itself and the now inextricable human presence, can teach us about the natural landscape that we so often take for granted and how we, as humans, can sustainably and justly fit into that vision.