WHY IS ‘GREEN’ NY GOV. HOCHUL REBUILDING A LOGGING ROAD THROUGH THE ADIRONDACK’S MOST-TREASURED WILDERNESS?
Adirondack high peak wilderness, 2014. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
THE FREE LANCE NEEDS YOUR DONATIONS TO SURVIVE. DONATE HERE.
New York's first female Governor Kathy Hochul portrays herself as an environmentally-friendly, "green" leader driven to do everything she can to mitigate global warming.
"Under Governor Hochul’s leadership, New York is implementing the nation’s most aggressive plan to combat climate change," her official website boasts.
Yet, under her leadership, the state environmental agency responsible for protecting the largest tract of wilderness east of the Mississippi is rebuilding a logging road through its most sensitive, prized area. And it started work on the project within weeks of Hochul becoming governor in Aug. 2021, according to a lawsuit filed by an environmental advocacy group last month.
The road is being built through the New York State Forest Preserve in the Adirondack High Peaks. The state agency ostensibly responsible for protecting the land, Governor Hochul's Department of Environmental Conservation, is building it. Hochul's DEC is building the road in spite of the State Constitution's clear command that the Forest Preserve be kept "Forever Wild" and publicly-vetted management plans that prohibit roads, the lawsuit alleges.
"Roads are prohibited in a wilderness area," said the lead attorney on this case, Christopher Amato, Conservation Director and Counsel for the group that filed the lawsuit, Protect the Adirondacks! "This case places protection of Wilderness areas in the Adirondack Park front and center."
MacIntyre East Tract wilderness, High Peak Wilderness Complex, Adirondack mountains, New York, 2022. Photo Credit: court records.
New York's highest court found in May 2021 that DEC violated the Forever Wild Clause by building extra-wide snowmobile trails on Forest Preserve land without obtaining approval from the People by holding a constitutional referendum. Protect the Adirondacks! was the plaintiff in that lawsuit too. The same constitutional rules that banned the snowmobile trails ban roads.
New York's Forest Preserve is a unique American treasure. It is the first instance in world history of constitutional conservationism. It is also the first instance of giving wilderness special legal protection. The Victorian Age miracle was created by state legislation in 1885. Because corrupt politicians in Albany failed to protect it (subsequently passing other laws allowing logging on the preserve), the People amended the State Constitution to take it out of their hands in 1894.
What is today Article XIV, Section 1 of New York’s Constitution is commonly called the "Forever Wild Clause." The Forever Wild Clause commands: "The lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands." The Clause currently protects a total of 2.6 million acres of wilderness in the Adirondacks, and 286,000 acres in the Catskills. It includes all of New York's highest mountains: 46 peaks above 4000 feet in the Adirondacks and 35 peaks above 3,500 feet in the Catskills.
In the struggle to combat global warming, the preserve is a potent weapon: it's a titanic heat and water collector. In the Catskills, it nourishes and protects the reservoirs that provide nearly 90% percent of New York City’s drinking water. Of all the jewels of nature protected by the preserve, the high peaks of the Adirondacks are the most treasured. Poets and writers have rhapsodized about them for more than a century.
“Turning my head accidentally, a most grand prospect, even in this enchanted region of grand prospects, broke upon me. There surged the Keene Mountains, rolling gigantic billows in softest, sweetest azure upon the valley, like those of an ocean that might whelm the world,” poet Alfred Billings Street gushed in his 1869 Adirondack classic, The Indian Pass.
I know the land intimately. I've been going there since I was a boy. I spent several summers at the Camp Read Boy Scout reservation in Brant Lake. The only other places as wild as the Adirondacks on the East Coast are the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Appalachian Trail in Maine. As wild as those places are, they're not as primitive as the Adirondacks. Those places have roads, mostly require reservations in advance and sometimes cost money. The Adirondacks do not. The Forest Preserve is always free, does not require reservations and doesn't have roads in wilderness.
Lack of roads is the primary defining characteristic of wilderness.
The renegade "road" is in the southwest corner of the High Peak region marked on maps as the "MacIntyre East Tract." It was acquired by the state and added to the Forest Preserve in 2015. Whenever land is added to the forest preserve, it has to be classified by DEC under one of several categories with varying degrees of restriction on use. The strictest classification is wilderness, which forbids the construction of roads and structures as well as the use of machines--even bicycles are prohibited.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo classified the MacIntyre East Tract wilderness in 2018. Under DEC regulations governing wilderness, roads are not permitted. The tract came with pre-existing logging roads. DEC's management plan requires re-wilding of the roads. The road in question was re-wilded by DEC in 2019-20 by digging holes and making mounds in the roadbed to facilitate speedier rewilding, according to photographs of the area taken at the time.
MacIntyre East Tract wilderness, High Peak Wilderness Complex, Adirondack mountains, New York. Photo Credit: court records.
Gov. Cuomo resigned because of sexual harassment allegations Aug. 10, 2021. Cuomo was replaced by his lieutenant, Kathy Hochul, sworn into office Aug. 24. That Fall, weeks after Hochul was sworn into office, DEC undid the re-wilding work it had done under the Cuomo administration and began reconstructing the road it had previously deconstructed , according to the lawsuit.
The suit seeks a court order requiring DEC to stop reconstruction of the road and re-wild it in accordance with its wilderness designation.
"I’ve never seen anything like this fiasco before,” said Peter Bauer, Executive Director of Protect the Adirondacks!, the group that filed the lawsuit. “Top leaders at the DEC in Albany simply made things up and ignored long established rules, policies, and the law to rebuild a road in a Wilderness Area.”
Bauer and Protect! have been monitoring the Adirondacks for more than a quarter century.
"The rest of us have to live by the rule of law," Bauer added, "the DEC should have to do the same."
I reached out to the DEC and Hochul for comment. If they respond, I'll update this report with it.
UPDATE: DEC says it “does not comment on pending litigation.”
THE FREE LANCE NEEDS YOUR DONATIONS TO SURVIVE. DONATE HERE.