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“Enlightened System” or “Regulatory Nightmare”?: New York’s Adirondack Mountains and the Conflicted Politics of Environmental Land-Use Reform During the 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2019

Peter Siskind
Peter Siskind*
Affiliation:
Arcadia University
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Abstract:

This exploration of the politics of land-use reform in New York’s vast Adirondack Mountains provides a revealing window onto the ambiguities, evolution, and importance of environmental liberalism during the 1970s. A distinctive set of circumstances, featuring forceful advocacy by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and propitious political timing, led to the creation in the early 1970s of one of the most ambitious state-level environmental reforms in modern American history. But implementation during the mid- and late 1970s proved challenging. Environmental management by a new regional agency that possessed powerful regulatory authority over all public and private lands in the region produced discontents, distrust, and organized opposition among both developers and property-rights advocates on the right and environmental advocates on the left. The result was an uneasy, enduring legacy: the new regulatory institution and key environmental planning ideas of the early 1970s and the later, wide-ranging discontents would coexist in similar forms for decades to come.

Keywords

Adirondack Mountainsenvironmental land usepolitics of developmentNelson Rockefeller
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 406 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

NOTES

1. Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks, press release, 19 September 1968, Adirondack Museum Library records, New York State Archives website: http://iarchives.nysed.gov/dmsBlue/viewImageData.jsp?id=172337.

2. For a particularly good analytic comparison of the most ambitious state and local land-use reform efforts in this era, see Popper, Frank J., The Politics of Land-Use Reform (Madison, 1981).Google Scholar

3. Contemporary volumes that capture the breadth of state and local land-use reform efforts in this period include Reilly, William K., ed., The Use of Land: A Citizens’ Policy Guide to Urban Growth (New York, 1973);Google Scholar Boselman, Fred and Callies, David, The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control (Washington, D.C., 1971);Google Scholar Scott, Randall W., Management and Control of Growth, Volumes I–III: Issues—Techniques—Problems—Trends (Washington, D.C., 1975).Google Scholar

4. On the darker economic times and how they would shape environmental politics and management, see especially Jacobs, Meg, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York, 2016).Google Scholar

5. For a particularly helpful analysis of how 1970s-era liberal environmental advocates at once depended on and distrusted government policymakers, see Sabin, Paul, “Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order,” Law and History Review 33 (November 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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8. New York State Department of Commerce, Annual Report, 1969; New York State Department of Commerce, “Agency Appraisal Report,” 15 July 1970, both on Reel 18, 3rd Rockefeller Administration 1967–1970, Rockefeller Archive Center (hereafter RAC); Underwood and Daniels, Governor Rockefeller in New York, 124–25; “The Rockefeller Record,” 11 December 1973, in Folder 103, Box 2, Series 27, RG 15, RAC.

9. Liroff, Richard A. and Gordon Davis, G., Protecting Open Space: Land Use Control in the Adirondacks (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 18–19;Google Scholar Davis, George, “The Early Years of the Adirondack Park Agency,” in The Great Experiment in Conservation: Voices from the Adirondack Park , ed. Porter, William F., Erickson, Jon D., and Whaley, Ross S. (Syracuse, 2009), 244–45.Google Scholar

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11. Public land plan details are synthesized especially from Richard Booth, “New York’s Adirondack Park Agency,” in Managing Land-Use Conflicts: Case Studies in Special Area Management, ed. Brower, David J. and Carol, David S. (Durham, N.C., 1987), 149–52;Google Scholar Porter, William and Whaley, Ross S., “Public and Private Land-Use Regulation of the Adirondack Park,” in Porter et al., The Great Experiment in Conservation, 233–37.Google Scholar

12. Private-land plan details are synthesized especially from Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 26–39, 68–73, 124–27; Booth, “New York’s Adirondack Park Agency,” 152–58; Davis, “The Early Years of the Adirondack Park Agency,” 248–49; McMartin, Barbara, Perspectives on the Adirondacks: A Thirty-Year Struggle by People Protecting Their Treasure (Syracuse, 2002), 36–40;Google Scholar Porter and Whaley, “Public and Private Land-Use Regulation of the Adirondack Park,” 237–40.

13. Davis, “The Early Years of the Adirondack Park Agency,” 249.

14. Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 23–25; Graham, Frank Jr., The Adirondack Park: A Political History (New York, 1978), 242–53.Google Scholar

15. Rockefeller, Nelson, Our Environment Can Be Saved (Garden City, N.Y., 1970).Google Scholar On prominent Republican environmentalists of this era, see Rome, Adam, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York, 2013), 72–73, 136–37;Google Scholar Smith, Thomas G., Green Republican: John Saylor and the Preservation of America’s Wilderness (Pittsburgh, 2006);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Geismer, Lily, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2015), 107–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Davis, “The Early Years of the Adirondack Park Agency,” 246; Siskind, Peter, “Shades of Black and Green: The Making of Racial and Environmental Liberalism in Nelson Rockefeller’s New York,” Journal of Urban History (January 2008);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lifset, Robert D., Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (Pittsburgh, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Rockefeller, Nelson, The Future of Federalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), quotes from 7, 8;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Siskind, “Shades of Black and Green,” 249–52; Connery, Robert H. and Benjamin, Gerald, Rockefeller of New York: Executive Power in the Statehouse (Ithaca, 1979), chap. 5;Google Scholar Brilliant, Eleanor L., The Urban Development Corporation: Private Interests and Public Authority (Lexington, Mass., 1975).Google Scholar

18. Among the more important volumes providing overviews of this era of environmental law-making, see Hays, Samuel P., Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge, 1987);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Turner, James Morton, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics Since 1964 (Seattle, 2012). For a useful overview on new state laws, seeGoogle Scholar Rome, Adam, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2001), 225–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Terrie, Contested Terrain, 168–70; Graham, The Adirondack Park, 241, 247–50; McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 28–32; Heiman, Michael K., The Quiet Evolution: Power, Planning, and Profits in New York State (New York, 1988), 201–2.Google Scholar

20. Heiman, The Quiet Evolution, 192–216.

21. Graham, The Adirondack Park; Turner, James Morton, “‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” Journal of American History 96 (June 2009), 123–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 25, 29, 32–33; Angus, Christopher, The Extraordinary Adirondack Journey of Clarence Petty: Wilderness Guide, Pilot, and Conservationist (Syracuse, 2002), 189–92.Google Scholar

23. Terrie, Contested Terrain, 168–70; Graham, The Adirondack Park, 250–53; Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 28–29, 126–28; D’Elia, Anthony N., The Adirondack Rebellion (Onchiota, N.Y., 1979), 48–60;Google Scholar Glennon, Robert, “A Land Not Saved,” in Porter et al., The Great Experiment in Conservation, 266;Google Scholar McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 38; Silverman, Michael R., “The Impact of Competing Pressure Groups on the Passage of the New York State Adirondack Park Land-Use Bill of 1973” (PhD diss., New York University, 1976), esp. chap. 4.Google Scholar

24. Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 42; Davis, “The Early Years of the Adirondack Park Agency,” 250.

25. Schneider, Paul, The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness (New York, 1997), 299;Google Scholar McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 40.

26. Graham, The Adirondack Park, 259–61; Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 44–49, 137–41.

27. Popper, The Politics of Land-Use Reform, 108–9, 154–60; Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 41–44; Healy, Robert G. and Rosenberg, John S., Land Use and the States (Baltimore, 1979), 46–54.Google Scholar

28. Popper, The Politics of Land Use, 159–60, 163; Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 98–102.

29. Graham, The Adirondack Park, 262; McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 43, 50; Popper, The Politics of Land-Use Reform, 148, 166; APA Meeting Minutes, 23 July 1976, in Box 4, Series I, APA Papers, Adirondack Museum.

30. See APA Meeting Minutes for 1976 and 1977 in Box 4, Series I, APA Papers; APA 1977 Annual Report, in Box 1, Series I, APA Papers.

31. Schneider, The Adirondacks, 300; D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, 1–2; Graham, The Adirondack Park, 261.

32. Graham, The Adirondack Park, chap. 28; Malmsheimer, Robert, “Legal Structure and Defense of the Adirondack Park,” in Porter, The Great Experiment in Conservation, 218–26;Google Scholar Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, chap. 7; McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 28–29.

33. D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, chaps. 7–12; Graham, The Adirondack Park, 254–63; McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, esp. 40–43.

34. Graham, The Adirondack Park, esp. 254–57; D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, 138.

35. D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, v, 16, 59.

36. Terrie, Contested Terrain, 167–73; Alice Wolf Gilborn, Adirondack Faces (Syracuse, 1991), xx.

37. D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, 162–63; McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 43.

38. D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, chaps. 12–13; Heiman, The Quiet Evolution, 210; Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 153–54.

39. Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 144; Popper, The Politics of Land-Use Reform, 148; D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, chap. 13.

40. McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, chaps. 2–3, 7, quote from 26; Davis, “The Early Years of the Adirondack Park Agency,” 247–48; Stuart Buchanan, “The Evolution of the Department of Environmental Conservation,” in Porter, The Great Experiment in Conservation, chap. 18; Terrie, Contested Terrain, 170–71; Haskell, Elizabeth H. and Price, Victoria S., State Environmental Management: Case Studies of Nine States (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

41. D’Elia, The Adirondack Rebellion, 115. See, for example, “Statement of the Chairman of the Adirondack Park Local Government Review Board,” 17 November 1977, in Box 4, Series I, APA Papers.

42. McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 43; Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 102–4.

43. Liroff and Davis, Protecting Open Space, 44, 150–51; Glennon, “A Land Not Saved,” 270–71.

44. McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 54–57, 96–99; Cox, Graham L., “The Adirondack Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations,” in Porter, The Great Experiment in Conservation, 431–50.Google Scholar

45. McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 55–56, 85–86.

46. Booth, “New York’s Adirondack Park Agency,” 168; Schneider, The Adirondacks, 299; McMartin, Perspectives on the Adirondacks, 38.

47. Schneider, The Adirondacks, 306ff., 318; Booth, “New York’s Adirondack Park Agency,” 171; Terrie, Contested Terrain, 178; James Howard Kunstler, “For Sale,” New York Times Magazine, 18 June 1989, 22–25, 30–33.

48. Terrie, Contested Terrain, 170, 182; Johnson, Christopher, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains (Durham, N.H., 2006), 4.Google Scholar