- [Announcer] Production of "A Wild Idea, The Birth of the APA", was made possible in part by the Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake and the generosity of these donors.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] New York's Adirondack Park is bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky national parks combined.

It is one of the largest unbroken deciduous forests on Earth.

It has 1,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers and hundreds of crystal clear lakes and lofty peaks.

But here's an even more amazing thing about the Adirondack Park.

Most of its land is privately owned.

And 85 million people live within a day's drive, yet the Adirondacks seem almost completely undeveloped.

How did that happen?

- In the story of land use planning in the United States, the Adirondacks Park Agency is truly significant.

What it was doing at that time, it was on the frontier of land use planning.

- [Narrator] The Adirondack Park Agency was a wild idea when it was created 50 years ago.

It owes its existence to several big trends that combined to create an irresistible force.

After World War Two, a small group of activists spent more than two decades building the case that the Adirondacks needed to be protected from development.

By 1968, they had overwhelming public support.

The activists pressured Governor Nelson Rockefeller to act, Rocke set up a commission that studied the Adirondacks for two years before issuing 181 recommendations that were in a word, bold.

Many of them had never been tried before and despite the risks, Rockefeller eagerly supported the activists cause.

- You know, he believed in big things, he was not a small man in any any sense of the word.

It wouldn't have happened without him, there's no question about it.

- [Narrator] Rockefeller strong armed state lawmakers into passing the bill that created the Adirondack Park Agency or APA.

He ordered the agency to write two master plans for all the land in the park, a territory the size of the state of Vermont, and to deliver them in less than two years.

Nothing like that had ever been done before.

The APAs young staff was brilliant, passionate about protecting the park and extremely hard working.

The plans they produced were revolutionary.

But they lacked two critical things, money and time.

- We were given a very, very tight deadline and a very low budget.

I mean, the budget was just ridiculous.

- [Narrator] The APA also did not try very hard to explain it's tough new regulations to local landowners.

Even though zoning laws had been almost entirely unknown in the Adirondacks, the activists were so focused on saving land, they didn't think about the 100,000 people who lived in the park.

And many of those people were outraged.

- I don't think it ever occurred to me or anyone that I was working with, that maybe the local people might have a very different attitude about this plan to create a state agency.

It just didn't occur to us at the time, just didn't occur.

- [Narrator] Over its first 50 years, the Adirondack Park Agency has been praised and studied as a triumph of land use planning.

Today, the urgent need to control climate change depends on preserving and restoring large forests.

New York did that in a big way 50 years ago, the wide open spaces of the Adirondacks are now recognized as a global treasure.

- The Adirondacks is trying something very hard.

We're trying to have wild nature and human beings make their living in more or less the same place.

The wilderness in the hamlets are intertwined in a way that you see in almost no other landscape on the planet.

- [Narrator] But a lot of people who live inside the park disagree with this view.

Even after 50 years, they still think the agency and its restrictions on private land development are un-American.

They say private property is private, and the Adirondacks don't need more wilderness as much as it needs better jobs.

- The agency has convinced people by repeating this untruth over and over again, that this is the largest park in the United States, and they call all the land inside of this Muland Park which is not true.

60% of that land is privately owned.

No privately owned land is part of a state park.

In other words, they have taken the theory that Hitler practiced, if you tell a lie often enough, it will soon become believed and it will be a fact.

- [Narrator] It's an endless debate that boils down to a basic question, what is wild land worth?

(gentle instrumental music) - Go back wherever you came from, but get out of here.

- The next time they're gonna see what dear life is, then they better have another thought about this because we are deadly serious about defending our rights.

(upbeat instrumental music) - [Narrator] The Adirondack Park is not an untouched wilderness, New York State created the original forest preserve in 1885.

By setting aside land, loggers had cleared and abandoned.

Thousands of acres that are mature forests now, were cut over wastelands then.

In 1891, a state official drew a line on a map that contained these reclaimed parcels, plus the private land that surrounded them.

In 1892, legislators set aside that mix of public and private land as the Adirondack Park.

The state official used blue ink, which is why the boundary of the park is called "the blue line".

But loggers kept abusing state land, so voters banned all tree cutting in the forest preserve in 1894.

New York's voters inserted language into their constitution that soon became known as the "Forever Wild Clause".

It says forest preserve land can never be leased or sold, and the trees on it cannot be sold, removed or destroyed.

The law forbids cutting down a single tree in the forest preserve without a state referendum.

- I don't think there's anything like that in the other state constitution, which designates a place, and says the following things you cannot do there.

A lot of lawyers scratch their heads and wonder about it.

And it's particularly unusual for when it was passed.

This was a time when natural resources were being exploited ruthlessly throughout the country.

It was largely for utilitarian reasons to protect the watershed which supplied the Hudson River and the Erie Canal.

But the spiritual recreational assets were definitely on the table.

- [Narrator] The "Forever Wild Clause" was extreme, but it had powerful backers.

Wealthy families who owned estates in the Adirondacks used their influence to make sure state lands around their properties remained untouched.

Some of the families also hired private game wardens to patrol their estates and arrest trespassers.

Locals whose fathers and grandfathers had gone hunting and fishing on these lands were shut out.

They didn't like that one bit.

Forest fires raged to through the Adirondacks between 1900 and 1910 burning about one million acres.

One historian who looked carefully at the records estimated one quarter of those fires could have been intentionally set.

- I was only about three years old when the 1908 fires occurred and the smoke was so thick I remember burning my eyes.

- [Narrator] Clarence Petty was born in 1905 in a squatters cabin on Upper Saranac Lake.

The Great Depression, two world wars and bad roads kept the crowds away.

Squatters like the famous hermit Noah Rondeau, built permanent cabins on state land, hunted out of season and avoided forest rangers in a game of cat and mouse.

But all that changed after World War Two, the number of park visitors began increasing and the land showed the strain.

As a state forest ranger in 1959, Clarence discovered a lot of abuse when a legislative committee sent him out with a partner, Neil Stout to survey the entire park on foot.

Clarence and Neil found a lot of forest preserve land wasn't even close to looking forever wild.

They documented illegal roads leading to squatter's cabins, each with its own garbage dump.

They even found an outhouse built over a creek that drained into a village water supply.

They became friends with a small group of Adirondack hikers, hunters and seasonal homeowners who had been calling for strict protection of the Forest Preserve since the early 1920s.

The leader of this group was Paul Shaffer, a builder who was also a full time activist for Forever Wild.

The early environmentalists were well organized and persistent.

Not many people understood why they fought to keep loggers and jeeps out of the forest preserve.

But Clarence Petty did, he agreed with them that wild land is sacred.

- [Voice Over] I say what you call Jehovah, I call the force of nature.

That's what I see when I'm in a wilderness area.

I think there's no better place for me to gain a balance after everything seems to go wrong with me here going to the most remote wilderness area I can find and everything seems natural there.

I can relate to it.

- [Narrator] Clarence and Neil reported to the legislature in 1961.

Their fieldwork showed more than 800,000 acres of forest preserve met the federal definition of wilderness.

The total could go up to a million acres if the state conservation department abandoned a few roads and cabins.

But the Wilderness Protection Movement was still on the fringe of state politics in the early 1960s.

So the legislature did nothing.

Yet the preservation of scenic areas from development was becoming a mainstream issue.

Hiking and hunting clubs joined with new citizens groups to stop big construction projects like a proposal to carve a power plant into Storm King, a scenic mountain on the banks of the Hudson River.

The wakeup moment for the Adirondacks was a proposal for an interstate highway.

The North way would connect Albany to Canada and run along the East side of the park.

Everyone knew once the road opened in 1967 a lot more families would make the drive.

The park was not ready for them.

More than three quarters of the park's private land is managed for timber production.

These working forests are essential to the park's wild character.

But in the 1960s there were very few restrictions on what could be built on the parks private land.

- Here was the problem at the Adirondacks, development was changing the atmosphere of the Adirondacks, it was uncontrolled.

This extraordinary phenomenon of you couldn't cut a tree on state land, but in the next acre, you could build a Ferris wheel or whatever.

- [Narrator] In 1967, Henry Diamond was a young lawyer who worked for Laurance Rockefeller, one of the world's wealthiest men.

He was also Governor Nelson Rockefeller's younger brother, and the two men were best friends.

- I think Laurance had some influence on him too.

Laurance thought something should be done.

- [Narrator] The Rockefeller Brothers kept their headquarters in the famous office complex their father had built in midtown Manhattan, Laurance commuted to work on a 65 foot yacht.

Nelson split his time between Midtown and the Governor's mansion in Albany, where he was supervising the construction of a futuristic State Capitol Complex.

Governor Rockefeller had displaced 7,000 people to demolish 1,200 buildings on 98 acres.

He was constructing the tallest buildings North of New York City, insisting they be sheathed in white marble.

America does not have a royal family, but wealth on the scale of the Rockefellers came pretty close.

And like good royals, the Rockefeller brothers were committed to supporting noble causes, like medicine and public health.

One of their goals was giving Americans better access to outdoor recreation.

Nelson Rockefeller's younger brother loved America's national parks, and in the 1960s, the parks were in trouble.

They were overcrowded with long lines and overflowing trash cans.

- The challenge of today after all is unchanged, how to accommodate the millions of Americans who want to see, experience and learn from their great natural heritage without having these delicate areas eroded by those who seek their values.

- [Narrator] The answer was to increase the supply of park land.

Laurance's help to the federal government buy millions of acres in places like Cape Cod, Jackson Hole, the Virgin Islands, and the California Redwoods.

And he knew most Americans were not into hunting or backpacking, they loved their cars.

Laurance thought the Adirondack Park needed a makeover.

He wanted it to match the style of the Northway adding causeways beaches, recreation centers and other amenities people could drive to.

He raised the idea with Henry Diamond and Conrad Wirth known as Connie, who had been Director of the National Park Service before he became a Rockefeller employee.

- When we were flying back from the West somewhere with Connie and Laurance on Laurance's airplane, flying over the Adirondacks and I told Laurance, just always having ideas turned around.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could make a national park in the Adirondacks.

And Connie who never saw two or three million acres that he didn't think should be a national parks, said a wonderful idea.

And so Laurance being Laurance, said why don't you do a report on this?

- [Narrator] Laurance Rockefeller released his proposal at the end of July, about 1/3 of the existing state park would be transferred to federal ownership, and the "Forever Wild Clause" would no longer apply there.

The new federal land would contain the highest Adirondack peaks and the most beautiful lakes.

Lake Placid and other villages would be controlled by National Park Service zoning laws.

There were also 600,000 acres of private land in the proposed National Park, which would be acquired by the feds through condemnation if necessary.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller loved big ideas and cutting edge thinking and he loved his brother, but he was also a shrewd politician, and he didn't love the way the public reacted to Laurance's idea.

Everyone hated it.

In 1967, Peter S. Paine Jr. was a 31 year old Wall Street lawyer.

Paine came from a prominent Champlain Valley family and his father was a close friend of Laurance Rockefeller's.

- The opposition was intense.

Local government obviously didn't like the idea for obvious reasons.

Private landowners who were thinking of developing their land or own their land and didn't wanna give it up.

And the environmental community was not in favor of it.

That puzzled Laurance quite a bit.

He asked me, you know, why is the environmental people so opposed to it?

I think there were two reasons.

One, what do you do with the remaining 60% of the park?

And also Laurance's concept of a national park was rather antithetical to Forever Wild, he believed in, you know, opening parks up and roads and hotels, and so on.

It's nothing wrong with that.

It's a different vision.

- [Narrator] Although the idea for the Adirondack National Park went nowhere, a lot of people agreed with Laurance Rockefeller that the Adirondacks were in danger, and something had to be done.

- There were no land use controls on the private land anywhere in the Adirondacks.

And of course, the intermixture of public and private land meant that if something happened on the private land it would have a dramatic impact on public land and so forth.

And Laurance was absolutely right on on that issue.

And that was the driving force behind creation of the park agency.

- [Narrator] Nelson Rockefeller did what politicians often do in situations like these, he sidestepped the controversy by setting up a commission to study the problem.

But unlike many commissions, the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks actually got results.

It would point to a new kind of protection for the Adirondacks based on a new concept, sustainability.

(gentle instrumental music) Every weekend, Harold and Lynn Jerry left their Albany home and drove two hours to a remote corner of the Adirondacks.

In the Winter, they used snowshoes to walk several miles to a 19th century logging camp that had no electricity or running water.

That to them, was the best kind of fun.

Jerry was a former army officer and state senator.

A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, and he had Nelson Rockefellers trust.

He was also born and raised in Plattsburgh, and he knew how to skin a beaver.

He was a perfect choice to lead the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks.

Jerry had strong opinions about what the Adirondacks needed.

He once told an interviewer that he was proud to be called an extreme environmentalist.

- [Jerry VO] We have to have someone staking out the extreme position.

I believe that there shouldn't be any buildings in the Adirondack back country.

Otherwise, it's death by a thousand cuts.

A little bit here a little bit there and in the end, it's all gone.

- [Narrator] Clarence Petty was the first person Jerry hired for the commission.

Clarence knew the park better than anyone else.

Jerry's second hire was George Davis, a 28 year old ex-forest ranger who had just enrolled at Cornell University.

Davis wanted to find a way to protect natural areas in the Adirondacks while allowing people to work and play there.

Jerry offered him a chance to study that question full time with good pay and benefits.

George Davis was dedicated too and Jerry was quickly impressed by Davis's capacity for work, the young grad student acted like a man on a sacred mission.

- Something happened where we, as a people started to understand that we're really all one system on this earth and if we see something sick, we realize that, that affects all of us.

It is part of the system.

They weren't just individual things going on.

They all were tied together.

- [Narrator] Davis spent a year exploring the Adirondacks with Clarence petty as his hiking partner.

The two men sat together on long car rides and around evening campfires, talking about how the state should manage its 2.6 million acre forest preserve.

The Commission eventually proposed half of the land to be designated as wild forest where motorized vehicles were allowed.

But then there were the million acres Clarence had mapped, which would meet the federal definition of wilderness if the state tore down a few cabins and closed a few roads.

The Temporary Study Commission said this land should remain completely off limits to motors.

In fact, the "Forever Wild Clause" meant wilderness areas in the Adirondacks would have the strictest protection of any open space in the United States, and maybe in the world.

The staff brought ideas that were considered cutting edge in the late 1960s.

They delivered about as much text to the commissioners as an 800 page novel, but it wasn't fiction, it was all fact.

At one of the first meetings, the staff arranged for the commissioners to ride on a new kind of recreational vehicle called a snowmobile.

Most of the commissioners had never seen one before.

But the number of snowmobiles was doubling every year.

And there weren't many regulations about where these noisy machines could go.

That was a problem for Forever Wild activists who wanted their Adirondacks quiet.

George Davis also produced the first ever analysis of private land in the park using another newfangled contraption, a computer.

It was a state of the art IBM360, essentially a souped up adding machine that was the size of a small sofa.

He ran state tax records through it and discovered something important, most of the parks private land was owned by just a few people.

- And they were if I recall, 626 individual owners of 500 acres or more.

And it wouldn't take very many of those 626 to change the character of the park.

I think it's important to know that most of the land in the Adirondacks is not owned by the people that live in the Adirondacks.

So if you're controlling the use of that land, it's not as if you're limiting their livelihood.

- Harold Jerry also introduced the commission to the ideas of Ian McHarg, a landscape architect whose book "Design With Nature" proposed ways of measuring environmental impact.

Today, environmental impact is a standard metric in land use law.

But in 1969, it was a brand new concept.

- The basic idea was to look at land resources, and figure out what is the land telling us in terms of limitations with respect to human use of the land.

This wasn't just about protecting the pure environment, this was trying to create a land use plan that would protect the wild open character but at the same time, it's a place where people live.

- [Narrator] Staff members gave their findings to 11 commissioners who had the job of making recommendations to the governor.

The commissioners had diverse viewpoints, but as the work proceeded, three of them took the lead.

They were Richard Lawrence, a philanthropist from Elizabeth town.

Peter S. Paine Jr, the well connected young lawyer from the Champlain Valley, who had argued with Laurance Rockefeller.

And the most important Commissioner Harold Hochschild, a retired businessman who lived on a 2,000 acre family estate near Blue Mountain Lake.

At the end of the first year, the commissioners made Hochschild their chairman.

- Harold of course, was a democrat.

He was wealthy, he'd gone toe to toe with, you know, prime ministers and financial ministers of African countries and what have you, and so he was not frightened of dealing with Nelson Rockefeller.

I think that Nelson, I can't say was unhappy, but this was not the ideal situation so far as he was concerned.

- [Narrator] Hochschild was a staunch defender of the "Forever Wild Clause".

He did not want the Adirondacks to be the kind of park Laurance Rockefeller wanted with swing sets and soccer fields.

He thought the park should be more like the state's crowning glory with the private land as the setting for its wild jewels.

And Hochschild had the money, skills and connections to make his vision a reality.

The Commission delivered its report in December 1970.

It made 181 recommendations for the Adirondacks that relied on the most up to date data and the sharpest minds.

The Commission proposed strict state regulations for a region where a lot of residents did not have television.

Some didn't even have electricity, and where bears were far more common than cops.

Harold Jerry persuaded the commissioners their report was about saving land, not economic development.

That proved a costly mistake, because rural poverty is a chronic problem in the North Country.

Back in 1970 1/5 of the adult population in some Adirondack counties received public assistance.

Almost all of the 110,000 people who live in the park will say they feel lucky to live in such a beautiful place.

But absentee ownership has been a source of irritation for them for generations.

When your job depends on a boss, a bureaucrat, or a tourist who lives hundreds of miles away it can leave you feeling pushed around, ignored and misunderstood.

- There have always been the Summer people who mostly have second homes.

There are the leaf peepers who come and go to see the color, the you know, the fishermen, the sportsmen who come up during the appropriate season.

And they all go away in the worst part of the weather.

We definitely need them and they're not evil.

And so we don't want them to stop coming.

But we want them to stop telling us how to keep it pure.

Pristine is one of their favorite words.

How to keep it that way, well, what do they think we've been doing?

- [Narrator] Only one of the Commission's 181 recommendations made it to the legislature for a vote in 1971.

But it was the most important one.

The law created the Adirondack Park Agency, the APA.

And ordered it to enforce interim controls on development, while also drafting two permanent master plans.

One plan for the State Forest Preserve would go to the governor in 1972.

And a bigger plan for the private land would go to the legislature in 1973.

The APA would report to the governor who would have complete control over its staff and board.

- And we felt that the only way you could assure a statewide focus was to give that power to the governor.

Of course subject to confirmation by the Senate and I'm sure we were right.

We would never have achieved what we achieved, had it been otherwise.

The APA law was a wild idea, but its timing was perfect.

Concern about the environment exploded between 1965 and 1970.

By Spring of 1971, the Environmental Movement in New York had become a huge army.

The difference from the 1950s was that in the 70s, many of the environmental movements most effective activists were women.

Millions of American women in 1970 felt newly empowered to fight for political causes, like the environment.

And in 1970, only 43% of women held jobs outside the home compared with about 60% today.

Women were the Environmental Movements hardest working volunteers - [Voice Over] In Rochester in the late 60s and early 70s.

It was largely women.

Which is not to say that men were not involved but they sort of they were the followers.

They weren't the leaders, they were the followers.

- [Narrator] Public demand to fix the environment was overwhelming and politicians had to figure out how to stay on the right side.

On April 22nd 1970, the first Earth Day, Nelson Rockefeller rode a bicycle and called it a non polluting vehicle.

He also signed a bill creating a new mega agency called the Department of Environmental Conservation.

A few weeks before Governor Rockefeller, submitted the APA Act to the legislature in 1971, television stations began running a commercial that would become famous.

The spot shows a Hollywood version of a Native American shedding a tear when someone throws litter at his feet.

Americans went nuts for this ad, cleaning up litter became a national craze.

At that moment, few politicians would dare to oppose a plan to save the Adirondacks.

The APA Act had the support of the governor plus a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republican legislators.

Adirondack Assemblyman, Glenn Harris and a group of conservative Republicans lobbied hard to kill the law.

They were able to delay the vote until the last minutes of the session, negotiating until they were down to one last point.

They wanted to delay the date that the bill would go into effect.

So the current year's projects could escape the new regulations.

It all came down to a last minute meeting in the office of the Assembly Speaker Perry Duryea.

- He was a very tall, handsome, white haired gentleman and full of bull (beep) if I can put it that way, and it was very late at night.

It was about 11 o'clock at night.

- Perry Duryea was better looking than Harold Hochschild, but Hochschild had a secret weapon.

He was close friends with John Oakes an editorial writer for the New York Times, which had the power to make or break politicians in those days.

And he knew that Duryea wanted to run for governor.

- And so we sat there and speaker made his pitch.

You know, that he would only do this everything would be fine.

And you know, I've got to deal with my apple mockers the eight or nine Assemblyman from the Adirondacks had constituted his majority 'cause all of Democrats would vote for it.

Harold said to him very quietly no, Mr. Speaker, I'd rather have no bill than that bill.

And let me assure you my contacts with the New York Times that you will be made very clear who was responsible for this.

And there was a huddle with the speaker and his people and he said, well, alright, Mr.Hochschild, you win.

And he turned around to his minions and said pass the (beep) thing, and that's how it passed.

- [Narrator] When the Adirondack Park Agency started up in September 1971, it was really just one staff member, George Davis, his friend and advisor Clarence Petty, who he lured out of retirement, and two board members, Richard Lawrence, and Peter Paine.

All were alumni of the Temporary Study Commission, and they were eager to turn its recommendations into law.

But they didn't have much money or time.

George Davis remembered his first day on the job.

- I went to the building, got the key from the fella next door at DEC and went in and there's absolutely nothing there.

So I went down and bought some toilet paper to start with that was my first purchase.

And it was very practical, not only for the obvious reason, but because I had two cases and I used one for desk and one for chair.

And coffee cup sitting on it, is about all I had.

I brought it in a coffee pot, and eventually a phone sitting on, but that lasted for a few weeks like that.

- [Narrator] George Davis had 15 months to do the impossible.

He had to finish a master plan for a collection of state owned lands that covered more acres than Yellowstone National Park.

That was the easy part.

Much harder was the master plan for the parks private land, which covered as much acreage as the state of Connecticut.

Nobody had ever done anything like that before.

The agency also had to write and enforce interim rules for all that private land, even though it didn't have any enforcement officers.

And the APA also started up during a budget crisis.

It couldn't hire a complete staff until four months before the deadline.

The Adirondack Park is so big that it can take two hours to drive from the agency's office in Ray Brook to a work site, the driving revealed other problems.

- We were getting these black painted cars that were rejects that other agencies had gotten rid of, and some of them were pretty shaky.

Trooper walked up to my car, put his hand on the roof and said, what the heck are you driving here?

Said I've seen much better cars in the dump.

- [Narrator] Gary Randorf and other early staffers said these obstacles didn't matter.

They were on a mission to save the Adirondacks.

Also, they often got paid to go hiking.

When it's the early 1970s and your office is 165 miles away from the State Capitol, you can get away with a lot.

Several APA staffers had longish hair, and the boss even let them drink on the job.

- One of the first things we got was a beer refrigerator and kept it full of beer, it did.

It was really time pressure.

I mean that the pressure was on every day, it never let up.

On the other hand, I wouldn't have it any differently, it would never have stayed with it as well as we did.

- [Narrator] Full time residents of the park didn't know what to make of these newcomers.

They were irritated by the idea of a new state agency bringing in a lot of new rules, and only a few of them understood what the APA was really up to.

Nobody had ever told the locals they lived inside a park, where private land was subject to state regulation.

Most of the towns in the park were too small to have planning departments.

But a fair number had planning boards and the volunteers who served on those boards, often recognized to the need for the agency.

In 1970, John Collins was on the planning board of Indian Lake.

- The first issue that the Indian like Planning Board was faced with was a proposal for 300 lot subdivision.

Well, you know, one would have to count long and hard to find 300 home in Indian Lake already and suddenly double the potential size of the community was quite a challenge.

And the Planning Board was absolutely unprepared to meet it.

And it was that experience I think more than any other that made me aware that somebody better know these things.

- [Narrator] The APA's work had a sense of urgency because two giant vacation home developments were planned in 1971.

A new community called Ton-Da-Lay would add 4,000 homes a few miles North of Tupper Lake.

and the horizon Corporation had purchased 38 square miles of land near Canton, where it planned to subdivide and sell as 10,000 house lots.

Nothing on that scale had ever happened in the Adirondacks.

The idea made people uneasy, even inside the blue line.

- I think Bill Verner put his finger on that one, when he said if they hadn't existed, we would have had to invent them.

Because they were that important.

It was wonderful for the environmentalist.

Instead of having to make up these horror stories that happened somewhere else they could say look what's happened in your own backyard.

- [Narrator] The law required the APA staff to release a draft of the private land use plan for public comment at the end of 1972.

But time was short, and the amount of work was overwhelming.

A half dozen field workers had to collect and check data on soils, slopes, plants, wildlife and scenic vistas for three and a half million acres of land.

Turn the data into a ranking system and put the results on maps.

The system overlaid base maps with sheets of clear plastic film called Mylar, and they indicated each sites limitations by applying a clingy plastic film screen called Zipatone.

One layer of Zipatone meant proceed with caution, four layers meant no buildings allowed, ever.

- And so for example, areas with steep slopes should generally have less development on them than areas that are gentle.

Areas with very shallow soils where bedrock is very close to the surface and therefore you don't have drainage for septic systems, etcetera.

Areas that have important wildlife resources, wetlands, stream corridors.

And so what the agency staff did was to build a series of overlay maps to reflect these different limitations on development.

- Oh dear, so many nights I get ready for bed and find Zipatone in my underwear.

Yeah, it was everywhere 'cause it sticks to everything.

- [Narrator] The APA staff reported to nine board members, Governor Nelson Rockefeller had picked to review and approve the APA plan.

Most of the board supported the Temporary Study Commission's vision of preserving the parks wide open character.

But Dick Lawrence, who was chairman had lived in the Adirondack hamlet of Elizabeth Town for 25 years.

He knew it would be difficult to turn in a plan on time, and that the agency would be criticized no matter what it did.

The staff was proposing something entirely new and unfamiliar.

- There were lots of examples of suburban subdivision ordinances that talked about open space.

I mean, that was not an uncommon topic in local planning.

But at the scale we were talking about, there really wasn't anything to look at.

Collectively, we had to kind of merge ideas that came out of local zoning, but realized it had to be operable on a much much larger scale.

- [Narrator] As the Summer of 1972 ended and the deadline approached.

The APA board waited impatiently to get a look at the staffs plan for private land, but George Davis would not show them the maps before they had been thoroughly checked.

Davis was an ecologist and a planner.

He didn't didn't care much about politics, he was driven by his professional standards.

So he pushed the staff to collect more and more data until the last possible moment.

- Well, George was an individual who was very bright.

He knew that, I think he thought you should know that.

But at the same time, he saw himself as a leader.

He saw himself as somebody who was leading from the front, and his energy level was very high.

And that, in a sense was catching.

- [Narrator] As the deadline approached, the work became non stop.

George Davis remembers a work day with Anita Reiner, that turned into an all nighter on the night before, they absolutely had to turn in the maps.

- We had left Saranac Lake where we both lived at the time, at five o'clock or thereabouts in the morning, we wanted to be in Southern Hamilton County to look at the land itself and compare it to the way we had in the office, classified it.

And it took the whole day, we drove every road, public road and private road that was open.

We got out to the Alpine Inn on Route eight, at dark, and I called the office to see if anyone was there, and there was at eight o'clock at night.

And so I told whoever it was that we had the work done.

Now we needed it copied onto a map, we needed the maps revised, we took off and we got up to the office at close to midnight.

And there was the whole crew ready to go.

All the pencils, all the new maps, all of the light tables, all set to go.

Even the janitor was there 'cause he brought the beer.

- [Interviewer] Beer.

- Absolutely, we lived on it.

- [Narrator] The plan and the big map were finally released for public comment on December 21st 1972.

It proposed six categories for the private land in the park.

The APA would have very little authority in existing towns and villages.

But the further away you got from these settlements, the fewer buildings were allowed.

The two most restrictive categories were rural use, which allows one building on every eight and a half acres of land and resource management, which allows one building on every 43 acres.

And the proposal put 85% of the parks private land into the two most restrictive categories.

The plan got good reviews almost everywhere in New York State.

But inside the park, it was like throwing a lit match into a puddle of gasoline.

- One of the things that irritated us, us, being the local people, was that we weren't consulted about this agency to stop big developers.

No one asked us Tony Delia had plans to build 1,000 vacation homes a few miles north of Saranac Lake.

He had sunk his life savings into Loon Lake estates.

And he realized immediately the APA, his proposed rules would cut deeply into his profits.

So Tony started working on his neighbors, organizing them to stop the plan.

He told them the APA would ruin the local economy and force their children to leave to find work.

He went to his own expense to have this printed, it's about 10 pages or so.

And he explained what was coming, how they were appointed officials, not even residents of the Adirondack Park.

He explained what it would do to the tax base.

That was horrific, he gave a date at a time and he said this will happen.

- [Narrator] In fact, the plan would have little to no effect on the towns and villages where most full time residents of the park lived.

Even in rural areas, existing homes would not be affected.

But none of this was clear at first.

The plan was complicated.

Its details were unclear, and even Adirondackers who didn't have anything to lose personally, still felt insulted.

The insult ran deep, fed by decades of envy toward rich visitors and resentment at their disregard.

- And I used to think about that, they yeah, they are opposed.

And they don't think of this as a park they're thinking about it as where we live.

This is where our kids go to school.

This is where our parents are buried.

This is where we go to church or synagogue, all right.

And they didn't see it as a park.

They saw it as as their hometown.

- [Narrator] APA board members and staff presented the land use and development plan at 15 public hearings held over 12 days in January 1973.

800 locals packed the high school auditorium in Saranac Lake.

Richard Lawrence who ran the meeting said local police officers were terrified.

They thought they might have a riot on their hands.

After a spokesperson for the Sierra Club defended the plan at that meeting, a local resident threatened to cut his throat.

But Dick Lawrence wasn't overly concerned about the angry locals, he knew the people he needed to convince were far away in Albany.

And they weren't paying attention to the protests.

- I recall attending a hearing in Saranac Lake, which was among the most violent evenings I've ever had.

I mean, there were State Police in the back.

And Dick handled this just perfectly, and I was so shook up by it, then I ran off the road.

On may way back to Willsboro.

Dick and Liz were there, and they pulled me out of the ditch.

And I remember Dick saying, you know, he said the animals always feel better when they've had an opportunity to shout and yell and scream.

- [Narrator] After the hearings, the agency made more than 500 revisions that took care of a lot of objections.

The laws opponents simply could not match the organization and connections of the environmental lobby.

Dick Lawrence got the APA board to endorse the private land plan in March, the legislature passed it and Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed it into law on May 22nd 1973.

Local officials and business people could only stand and watch, it gave them a sinking feeling.

- No, we had no leverage, we had zero leverage.

By then everybody and nobody and in the legislature knew the bill was gonna pass, a bill.

And they had a bill but they wanted to pass in its entirety.

They didn't wanna make any changes.

Anyway, I watched the bill pass.

And I think the Senate adjourned you know, so everybody got up and walked out and I walked out the back door and then the Senator Bill Kissel walked out.

He had been a supporter of it, I knew that and I said, well, you've got your law passed.

I said, now you're gonna have to enforce it.

- Outside the park, experts hailed the law as a landmark in regional land use planning.

But hardcore opponents of the APA had become a determined minority.

They rallied around the slogan "abolish the APA", and they would keep up the fight for decades.

In 1973, opponents of the Adirondack Park Agency were swimming against the tide.

Politicians were eager to pass environmental programs because voters in New York and others in key states demanded action.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller knew a strong environmental record might add millions of votes to his presidential campaign.

- With God's help, let us continue to maintain New York as a model to the nation of what creative, responsible, state government can achieve for the people.

- [Narrator] But the tide quickly began to turn against the APA.

Just three months after the land use plan passed, Governor Rockefeller told his staff he was resigning to make his fourth run for president.

The APA's father left to the baby while it was still in its crib, and its budget remained underfunded for years.

1973 was also the beginning of a long economic decline and out migration in Northeastern states and in rural New York, the pain was acute.

The public school in Andy Halloran's hometown had 215 students in 1973.

Today, there are 107 students at Minerva Central School.

- They took value, they basically destroyed value in so many parts of the park, lot by lot.

Somebody who's got five, 10, 20 acres wanted to build a little beauty shop down on their property, whatever, they took all that away from these people and they never got a penny, never got a penny.

- Opposition to the APA became so strong inside the blue line, the agency's staffers could not work openly with local officials.

Town supervisors had to bad mouth the APA to get reelected.

Locals often blame to the Adirondack Park Agency for the problems in their towns, whether or not it deserved the blame.

- But I have a funny feeling that there are some people in the Adirondacks who won't bother going to court, they're just gonna lock and load one round.

And I think it's about time over there, that we considered a number of alternatives to stop these people from doing what they think they're about to do.

- [Narrator] Resentment of the APA flared up stronger than ever in 1990 when a state commission was stopped short by intense, well organized opposition.

This time the opponents had a violent edge.

They used gunshots, vandalism, and even some old fashioned Adirondack arson.

That rebellion eventually faded, but its leaders never changed their minds.

Donald Gertz staged anti APA stunts that had a way of attracting television cameras.

He died early.

Frank Casier continued speaking out against the APA until he died in 2016.

And Maynard Baker, the man who punched an environmentalist in footage that was broadcast nationally, died in April 2021, at the age of 91.

Baker kept organizing against the Forever Wild Adirondacks until just a few months before his death.

- If I had to do over again, I would do more aggressive things than we did.

We thought violence would probably not bode well for us.

And I think if I had to again, I see how other people gain by violence, I think maybe we'd have done better if we'd have been stronger.

- People are gonna stand to take this, no future for my kid, how is she gonna earn a living here?

How can she bring up a family here?

- Please give.

- [Protestor] You've taken our livelihood, you've take our children's livelihood.

(cross talking) - [Protestor] It's time for you to go.

- [Narrator] The difficult birth of the Adirondack Park Agency shows protecting land is difficult if you don't have the support of the people who live next to it.

But the agency kept doing its job and slowly, attitudes changed.

Bill McKibben saw the change in 1992 when his neighbors rallied to stop a huge landfill in the small town of Johnsburg.

- So I'll never forget the night that we had a hearing up in Ray Brook, bitter cold night.

And dozens of us from town carpooled up there to Ray Brook, including the town supervisor.

Which in those days was very hard thing for the you know, local elected official have anything to do with the APA.

But one after another people stood up and explained what this place meant to them.

At the end of the day, the APA voted not to allow the landfill to happen here.

But I do think that it brought out two things.

One, that people could understand that there was a lot to be said for the APA and the laws around it.

And two that there was an enormous deep love of the physical surroundings that we live in, even from people who would never have described themselves as environmentalists or conservationists or anything like that.

- [Narrator] Today, the APA is far from beloved, few zoning boards are, but most park residents agree development in the park needs to be regulated.

In fact, the agency's harshest critics now are environmental activists who say it isn't going far enough.

And despite its flaws, the APA remains a rare and important achievement.

It was one of the first efforts to protect the natural integrity of an entire region.

- The basic fact about the Adirondacks is people took a step back here a century ago.

And when they did the natural world responded, it recovered in profound ways.

Well, the world over we're gonna need to figure out how to take a step or two back in the decades ahead.

I think that the lesson from the Adirondacks is that if we take that step back, that there'll be enormous benefits.

Nature retains some extraordinary power yet to fill in where we leave some space for it.

And the Adirondacks is the best example on the planet of that.

- [Narrator] The APA has endured because New York voters have always supported the agency's focus on protecting open space, urban and suburban voters are what keep the park forever wild.

- It's really a spiritual issue for a lot of people.

Wilderness, the idea of a nature that is not tampered with by people is spiritually significant to a lot of people, including myself.

And the Constitution of the State of New York, makes it official.

And from the very beginning, there's been a cost involved there.

We're paying a price for this wilderness.

And people of New York have decided it's worth it.

Of course, the big question for the next few decades is will they continue to think it's worth it?

We're not sure, nobody knows for sure.

- [Narrator] In 2021, the APA celebrated its 50th anniversary in a world very different than the world of 1971.

Climate change has become an urgent global threat.

And scientists agree one of the most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gases is protecting and expanding large intact forests.

The APA's mission is balancing the health of the natural world and the needs of society.

With the reality of climate change bearing down on us, the entire planet is now racing against time to see whether it can reach the same goal.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Interviewee] You go to Alaska and you see what deep deep wilderness looks like.

But the Adirondacks is the Alaska of redemption, a place that was cut down, standing stern, but allowed to recover.

It's kind of second chance Eden, and there aren't other places like that on the earth.

It's an extraordinarily important place in a lot of ways right now.

- [Announcer] Production of "A Wild Idea, The Birth of the APA", was made possible in part by The Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, and the generosity of these donors.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Narrator] Brad Edmonson's book "A Wild Idea: How The Environmental Movement Tamed The Adirondacks" is available for $21 plus shipping and handling.

Order online at mountainlake.org/awildidea or call 1-800-836-5700.

The DVD of "A Wild Idea, The Birth of the APA" is also available for 19.95 plus shipping and handling.

Order online at mountainlake.org/awildidea or call 1-800-836-5700.

(gentle instrumental music)