Barbara McMartin narrates the history of Adirondack environmental policy in depth, beginning with the 1970 formation of the Adirondack Park Agency, set up to regulate private development and to oversee the planning of public terrain. Although hailed as the most innovative land-use legislation of its time, it ignited a wildfire of controversy, creating a landscape of conflict. Park residents protested. Government stood firm. Over the decades, disparate groups have sought to shape an effective program to protect Adirondack wildland but cannot seem to work together. This is the first comprehensive account of that ongoing drama: a stirring story of the environmental movement, public action, and government failure and success.

A Wild Idea shares the complete story of the difficult birth of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). The Adirondack region of New York's rural North Country forms the nation's largest State Park, with a territory as large as Vermont. Planning experts view the APA as a triumph of sustainability that balances human activity with the preservation of wild ecosystems. The truth isn't as pretty. The story of the APA, told here for the first time, is a complex, troubled tale of political dueling and communities pushed to the brink of violence. The North Country's environmental movement started among a small group of hunters and hikers, rose on a huge wave of public concern about pollution that crested in the early 1970s, and overcame multiple obstacles to "save" the Adirondacks. Edmondson shows how the movement's leaders persuaded a powerful Governor to recruit planners, naturalists, and advisors and assign a task that had never been attempted before. The team and the politicians who supported them worked around the clock to draft two visionary land-use plans and turn them into law. But they also made mistakes, and their strict regulations were met with determined opposition from local landowners who insisted that private property is private. A Wild Idea is based on in-depth interviews with five dozen insiders who are central to the story. Their observations contain many surprising and shocking revelations. This is a rich, exciting narrative about state power and how it was imposed on rural residents. It shows how the Adirondacks were "saved," and also why that campaign sparked a passionate rebellion.

One hundred full-color photographs illustrate this history and current health of upstate New York's Adirondack Park, the first private-public partnership dedicated to the protection of a U.S. wilderness area. "Here is the first lesson about the Adirondacks, captured in Gary Randorf's magnificent photos. It is not only alpine granite—in fact, of the park's six million acres, only about eighty-five, scattered on top of the tallest mountains, are that gorgeous pseudo-Arctic. Aside from the touristed High Peaks, the Adirondacks comprise millions upon millions of acres of Low Peaks, of beavery draws and bearish woods, of hills and hills and hills, countless drainages and muddy ponds . . . The second point about the Adirondacks, a glory carefully revealed in the words and pictures of this book, is that it represents a second-chance wilderness and, as such, a hope that the damage caused by human beings is not irreversible. It is metaphor as much as place."—from the foreword by Bill McKibben In The Adirondacks: Wild Island of Hope, Gary A. Randorf offers 100 photographs to illustrate this unique, comprehensive history and natural history of the Adirondack Park, the first private-public partnership in the United States dedicated to the protection of a wilderness area. Situated in northeast New York, this regional park of six million acres represents a unique blend of public wildlands intermixed with commercial forests, farms, mines, private parks, prisons, scattered homes, dozens of villages, and a year-round population of 130,000. The ongoing attempts over the last century to make the Adirondacks a park have made this region a "striving ground" for living with the land, rather than outside or above it. Much of the strife is over finding a right relationship to the land, treating it not as a commodity to be exploited but as a community to which all living things belong and upon which all depend. Today, the Adirondacks regional park with its six million acres "represents a second-chance wilderness"—as Bill McKibben writes in his foreword to this book. The concerns of this park are the same concerns that apply to all of America's parks, recreational areas, and wildernesses with the addition of how to maintain the fragile peace between human and natural communities. How that "second-chance" can be realized is the focus of Gary Randorf's text and stunning color photographs.