The Adirondacks – Where Wilderness Preservation Began
Today is Sept. 3, 2024, the 60th anniversary since the National Wilderness Preservation Act was signed into law on Sept. 3, 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson.
Today we celebrate the fact that the federal Wilderness Act protects:
- More than 800 wilderness areas from coast to coast – each of which has achieved Wilderness status through individual acts of the U.S. Congress
- 111,889,002 million acres of protected wilderness
- Wilderness areas in all 44 states and Puerto Rico.
Did you know that the National Wilderness Act was modeled on New York’s Forest Preserve, protected by our own Article XIV of the New York State Constitution? Here is that story.
Bob Marshall, who had grown up at Lower Saranac Lake, the original Adirondack 46-er, founder of The Wilderness Society in 1935, died suddenly and tragically at age 38 in 1939. After his death, New York resident and Forest Preserve advocate Paul Schaefer met Bob’s brother George Marshall who brought to Paul’s attention to several large dams planned for the South Branch of the Moose River in the southwestern Adirondack Park.
Paul investigated and launched a ten-year campaign to save this wild valley known as the Moose River Plains from inundation for hydropower. In 1945, he and others took a film of the Moose River Plains to the annual National Wildlife Conference in New York City. In the audience was Howard Zahniser, newly hired executive secretary of The Wilderness Society. Zahnie pledged his complete support for the campaign to preserve the Moose River Plains, and understood the precedent these dams would set.
At least 30 other Adirondack river valleys were under consideration for big dam projects.
After seeing the Moose River film, Howard Zahniser decided to investigate the Adirondack Park with Paul Schaefer and Ed Richard as his guides. Their August 1946 climb went through the High Peaks, from Heart Lake to the Flowed Lands and down the Opalescent River.
Zahnie was overwhelmed with the wildness of this country and told Paul at their Flowed Lands lean-to: “I’ve been trying to make a comparison of this view to some other ones I know, but there’s nothing else I’ve seen quite like it. It has the same kind of perfection I have sensed when looking at the Grand Teton. So this was Bob Marshall’s country. No wonder he loved it so.”
Then he and Paul began their lengthy discussions of the relevancy of New York’s Article 14 to the national situation.
Paul recalls Zahnie saying: “In addition to such protection as national parks and monuments are now given, we need some strong legislation which will be similar in effect on a national scale to what Article XIV, Section 1, is to the New York State Forest Preserve. We need to reclaim for the people, perhaps through their representatives in Congress, control over the wilderness regions of America.”
Zahniser helped Schaefer and his allies to defeat the dams on the South Branch of the Moose River. The final vote against those dams came in 1955 when New York’s voters turned down Panther Mountain Dam by over 1 million votes. That successful campaign in the Adirondacks also inspired the successful campaign to defeat Echo Park Dam on Colorado’s Green River in 1955.
It took 18 years of Zahniser’s life as chief lobbyist for the Wilderness bill, and 66 drafts of the legislation before The National Wilderness Preservation Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on Sept. 3 1964. At the time, the Act protected just nine million acres as Wilderness. Today, that number is 112 million acres.
A short time after their High Peaks hiking trip in 1946, Zahnie bought a small cabin in the Adirondacks near the Siamese Ponds Wilderness just above the slope where Paul’s own cabin was located. Once purchased, this Adirondack cabin gave Zahnie the rest, wilderness setting, inspiration, and distance from Washington he needed to relax with his family and consider and begin to draft key language in the evolving Wilderness bill. The cabin remains in the family to this day.
It not only stands as a landmark appreciated by the family and people in the Adirondack town of Johnsburg, but by state, national and international champions of wilderness who consider a visit to the cabin a kind of pilgrimage.
Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act at its Annual Meeting on Oct. 11, 2024 at the Tannery Pond Community Center in North Creek.
For more information and to register for this meeting, free and open to the public, visit www.adirondackwild.org/events.