In the wake of Thanksgiving, I want to dedicate this blog
post to why I’m thankful for the Adirondacks. As a New Yorker, as an admirer of
nature, and as a proponent of the democratic system, I feel blessed to have
something like the Adirondack Park so close to home. Everyone says how the
Adirondacks are a small-scale experiment that sets an example for how to manage
the entire country, and to have that experiment in our backyard is something
special.
I’m thankful that a park so susceptible to exploitation (for
recreation, vacation, timber) has been preserved as much as it has. And that
preservation is a testament to the passions of the people that fight for the
park and the democratic system that has been created to sort out competing
interests. It’s also a testament to the integrity of the Park’s initial constitution,
however fickle it may seem today with the constant legal challenges. The
founders of the Park constitution made it a point to keep land forever wild and
it’s certainly rare to see that promise upheld today.
As a way of saying thanks for this course, I added a picture
of the snowglobe I got from the Adirondack Museum. Though it may look like just
a trinket to some, each snowglobe in my collection carries some meaning in
the form of either how I got it or the memories that it brings back. This
Adirondack one has its own story, and will definitely remind me of our trip to
the Adirondacks, everything I’ve learned in the course, and the friendships I’ve
made along the way. So thanks for being a part of that story.
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