I just had an experience much like the experiences of those Adirondack locals who were left out of the equation while the discussions about the rules and regulations of the ADK Park at its beginnings were taking place. I live in a very rural place. There are horse farms and corn fields and essentially nothing else until the nearest town, which takes about 7 minutes to get to and STILL has about 5 antique stores for every restaurant. (I think there are 3 restaurants). I have no cell service in my house, and you have to walk about a mile and a half to the top of the road to be able to get anything remotely close to the amount of signal you'd need to make a phone call. I've lived in this place for 19 years (my entire life), as many of the Adirondack locals probably did as well. And, therefore, I've gone my whole life without ever having more than one bar of cell service in my house. This can be an inconvenience, but more than anything, it has created a community between my family, the families around us, and the entirety of the private boarding school campus on which I live. This includes my good friend Meg (who's in Janelle's section of this class with me!), who attended Millbrook for 4 years, and also had to deal with the inconvenience that comes from the lack of cell phone service.
This past week, Meg posted a blog post about the necessity of the installation of a cell phone tower near Millbrook's campus. She referred to the opinion of the students, herself included, regarding the isolation that comes from not being able to use your cell phone to call your friends back home, or you family. She then referred to the side opposed to the cell tower: the weekenders coming up from NYC, and looking for a relaxing, rural escape. I read the post and thought, "Wait, I don't fit into either of those groups." Yes, I was once a Millbrook student, but I am also a local resident of the area, and definitely not a weekender with a primary home in New York City. Both of these groups are outsiders (on a very extended vacation, for the boarding students), and although I'm sure this was just an oversight on Meg's part, it was still a disheartening feeling to be left out. I felt protective of my landscape and wanted to have my opinion against the cell tower heard and respected. I find this analogous to the conflict between inside and outside control of the Adirondack Park that we have talked about so much, and this feeling of not being included in my own area's decisions has made me understand why internal control, to some extent, is so important. For the residents of the park to abide by the rules and regulations religiously, they must also agree that said terms are appropriate and useful. They should be able to have their opinions about the land they reside in heard. This conflict, however, is not resolved because of the unbelievable amount of outsider control that led to the ultimate creation of the park. This instance (and it is a BIG instance) shows why outsider control, and a possibly less emotional connection with the land, can lead to more practical decisions. Without the outsider control preserving the land for business and industry purposes, the Adirondack Park would probably not exist, at least not to the extent that it does today. Essentially, we need a way for outsider control to contribute their unemotional opinion while still allowing the often less powerful insiders to be heard and respected.
PSA: Meg knows I fully respect her opinion and she approved this blog post being written!
This is such an important conflict to note, especially since it is one that has come up again and again in our readings for this class. While most of the Schneider and Terrie chapters have discussed how locals were often left out of big decisions regarding their home, I found it interesting that Colvin explicitly refers to the ADK locals as "indispensable to the completeness of the park" in his First Annual Report (p.115). I believe that Colvin actually was an ADK resident himself (although not since birth) so it makes sense that he would be more attuned to the needs of fellow ADK-ers. Of the one paragraph in the entire report that Colvin mentions the soon-to-be park residents, however, he doesn't seem to actually address or include the locals in any substantiative way. Instead, Colvin makes assumptions like "they would keep provisions" and "voluntarily protect the game and timberland from unlawful destruction" (p. 115). While this might be true, these are certainly statements that at least some of the residents did not intend to sign up for when they first moved to the park. From what we've read of the early ADK settlers, it seems like most people moved to the area out of financial necessity and were more concerned with breaking into an industry than they were with protecting the wild landscape. In this one paragraph Colvin exalts the residents to wilderness semi-vigilantes without providing any real evidence that that is what those residents wanted in the first place.
ReplyDelete