Earth Equity News

The Nature Conservancy Buys Slice of Adirondacks. By Martin Espinoza, NYTimes, September 18, 2008. "A 14,600-acre piece of the Adirondacks long prized by environmentalists for its forests and wetlands, including a pond where Ralph Waldo Emerson led a 'philosophers' camp,' was purchased on Thursday by The Nature Conservancy [see TNC article and photos] for $16 million... The [1858] gathering took place at a time when Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others were redefining attitudes toward nature. 'It was an early moment in the development of the idea that there was something sublime about nature,' said Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. 'Nature was starting to play a less utilitarian function and a more aesthetic and intellectual one.' Mr. McKibben, who recently edited a large anthology of environmental essays, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, said the early work of people like Thoreau was one of the reasons why the State of New York began protecting the Adirondacks 100 years ago. He called the Adirondacks one of the world's greatest examples of ecological restoration, because, unlike Yellowstone National Park, there are many communities existing alongside wilderness. In many ways, Follensby Pond is in much better ecological shape now than it was when Emerson and others camped there, Mr. McKibben said. 'It's so heartening to me that that momentum continues in New York State,' he said, 'even while some of the rest of the country is back to chanting Drill, Baby, Drill. New York has done it right for a very long time.'"