Easy Wilderness

         We’ve explored the idea before that the history of the Adirondacks might have been vastly different, had the region provided more farmable land, and it’s no new concept that fertile land will be utilized as the precious resource that it is. So I wonder, then, why the Adirondacks is celebrated as such an enormous feat, to be a park so wild and so well-protected, as far as state or national parks go. Yes, settlers moved into and out of the Adirondacks over the centuries, but due to the nature of the environment and the characteristic geology of the park, most industries didn’t stay for long, and neither did a lot of people.

The Adirondacks are a rising geological dome, with valleys at higher elevation than other mountain ranges, making it much less passable for travelers. The soil isn’t fertile except for a few areas around the edges of the park. Mines were rich, but very localized and sometimes hard to find. The weather is rather unforgiving. Industries that were more likely to see success in the Adirondacks, such as logging and trapping, are lonesome and dangerous occupations. Isn’t it obvious, then that the Adirondacks were fairly easy to revert back to wilderness?

With the tone of some of the Adirondack material we read, it’s easy to believe in the ‘human accomplishment’ of creating the Adirondack park and preserving its wild, as if finally we have learned to protect a bit of this Earth and live alongside it because the Earth is so delicate and fragile. We are doing nature a disservice in forgetting its power. The Adirondack Park is not to be seen as an environmentalist achievement, as it is sometimes viewed. The accomplishment of the Adirondacks is rather the ability of nature in this specific region to remain so intensely and indisputably wild insofar as to stave off repeated attempts of humans to settle and industrialize the area.

I like calling the Adirondacks ‘easy wild,’ in the sense that we couldn’t settle it, so we made it wild again. Unfortunately, this made it seem like an environmentalist miracle, when in reality, the Earth had quite literally refused to let humans take over. However, I feel that this is perspective not often encountered and sometimes it’s frustrating to get the sense that humanity has begun to believe that it ‘made the wilderness happen’ as if we own what wilderness the Adirondacks have become again. The Adirondacks are easily kept wild and we are not as challenged with keeping it this way as we think we are, because we don’t lose much by leaving the Adirondacks alone. By contrast, the plains of the Midwest are not so easily wild; where every inch of land has been appropriated in neat squares and vast agricultural plots blanket miles upon miles. Every plot has been constructed for human use. Take this land and try to revert it back to it’s natural state, where crops don’t grow in tidy rows, and then I might be impressed. But the Adirondacks are easy wild; it will always be wild not matter how humanity tries to make it otherwise. Every piece of the Adirondacks is wild, down to the very core: the rocks, the weather, the animals, and the people who have dared to stick around so long. In the end, it is the wild itself that shaped the history of the park, and that’s what sets the Adirondacks apart.

Works Cited

Schneider, Paul. The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness. New York: H. Holt, 1998. Print.

Terrie, Philip G. Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks. Blue Mountain Lake, NY: Adirondack Museum, 1997. Print.

Jenkins, Jerry, and Andy Keal. The Adirondack Atlas: A Geographic Portrait of the Adirondack Park. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2004. Print.