Brad Edmondson - A Wild Idea: How the Environmental Movement Tamed the Adirondacks

The Adirondack Park Agency has taken the theory that Hitler practiced, said Frank Casier. If you tell a lie often enough it will soon be believed and will become a fact.

It was 2004, and we were sitting in Casiers spotless living room in a large house in the Village of Saranac Lake, New York. The lie, he explained, is the statement that the Adirondacks is a state park. Sixty percent of the land inside the Blue Line is privately owned, and private land is not part of a state park, he said. But through generations of people, each being converted a bit more, they have convinced almost everyone that all of this land is a park. There are only a few people left, like me, old enough to point out the difference.

Casier was a poor boy who pulled himself up. Born in a mining town on the northern edge of the Adirondack Park, he contracted tuberculosis while serving in World War II and was sent to a Saranac Lake hospital to recuperate. He regained his strength and began working like a man who had been given a reprieve. He started a furniture and appliance business, expanded into rental properties and local homes, and achieved success as a land developer in the Adirondacks and Florida. He was married for sixty-five years to a woman he adored, and every winter they escaped to their home in Fort Lauderdale. He had a large circle of friends and was generous to his community. He died in 2016, at age ninety-seven. But when talk turned to the Adirondacks he became bitter, like a defeated soldier from the Great Lost Cause.

The law was not on Casiers side, but that hardly mattered to him. The Adirondack Park was established in 1892 by an act of the New York State Legislature. Its boundary is known as the Blue Line because the first state map that showed it used blue ink. Another state law, passed in 1912, clarifies that the park includes the privately owned land within the Blue Line. In 2021, about 3.4 million acres of the 6-million-acre park is privately owned. The other 2.6 million acres comprises the Adirondack Forest Preserve, owned by the state. The forest preserve is freely accessible to the public, but theres a catch.

In 1894, New Yorks voters added a section to the state constitution that put severe restrictions on how the forest preserve could be used. That amendment, Article 14, included the words that came to be known as the Forever Wild clause: 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. They shall not be leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed.

Frank Casier didnt have serious problems with the Forever Wild clause or other regulations on state-owned land. He also tolerated several other laws that had been passed to establish parkwide standards for signs and other improvements. But he was infuriated by the Adirondack Park Agency Act, which gave a state agency the authority to regulate privately owned land inside the Blue Line. He was one of many who unsuccessfully challenged that law and its executor, the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). He tried to overturn the law by organizing protests and filing lawsuits, but was unsuccessful. In 2004, Casier continued to believe that the law was illegitimate and unjust. When he referred to it, his face twisted into an expression of disgust. Private property is private, he said.

The truth is that the parks privately owned lands are like precious metal that forms the setting for an elaborate collection of jewels.