Understanding the Lack of Sympathy

In Phil Terrie's talk a few weeks ago, he often mentioned that although the environmental group he is affiliated with, Protect the Adirondacks, focuses mainly on the preservation of the park through an environmentalist's lens, they sympathize with Adirondack locals and their suffering economies. I wanted to believe that this was true, but with every case that was either mentioned in the talk or in class it seemed as though the financial problems of the local areas and people were being overlooked. I was agreeing with what Bob Glennon, the past executive director of the APA, argues against in this week's Schneider reading: the idea that the APA is "not here to stop [development in the Adirondacks]," (Schneider, 309) but to mitigate it. I feel strongly that the Adirondacks should be protected as an inhabited wilderness space, and therefore that development should not overpower nature, but I have been struggling to balance this wish with the wishes of the clearly struggling Adirondack towns. After hearing Terrie's talk, I began to think a lot about whether a sort of formula for empathy could be formed and used to determine whether the economic needs of the ADKs were greater than the environmental ones in a given situation.  Obviously this couldn't be a perfect formula, but it could shed a light on the times when environmental groups like Protect the Adirondacks are completely lacking the sympathy they might claim to have.

The reading for Monday, however, made me understand this lack of sympathy more clearly. First of all, Schneider presented Aldo Leopold's idea of "the land ethic" (308) that asks for sympathy for the land in essentially the same way we see it between humans. This provides a conflict of sympathies. If we accept the fact that the locals and the economy both deserve sympathy in the same way, how can we say that one deserves it more than the other? In trying to answer this question we fall into another never ending loop of paradoxes, but it is definitely important to think about if we are ever going to find some sort of balance between the inhabitants and the inhabited. Schneider also concreted another idea that we had mentioned in class regarding the negative economic impacts that development can have. He says that the literature on this concept says that "the effect on the tax burden of all the new roads and schools and all that jazz is actually negative after a very short time" (309). This furthered my understanding of Terrie's strict environmental lens as any increase in sympathy would probably cause the uprooting of many struggling Adirondack families to avoid the heavier taxes. It is difficult to see this at first, for me and probably those living in these towns in need of economic support, because any sort of development seems as though it would bring more tourists, and therefore more money. This is not always the case.