Adirondack Forever Wild, A Constitution That Beat the Loggers

In eighteen ninety-four, the delegates to New York's constitutional convention faced a problem they had created themselves. For nearly a decade, the state had been purchasing land in the Adirondacks, acquiring millions of acres of cutover and partially logged forest in the northern wilderness. The stated purpose was conservation. But the state was also quietly leasing those same lands back to logging companies. Conservation on paper; destruction in practice.

A group of delegates proposed a solution that had never been tried anywhere in the United States. They wanted to write the prohibition directly into the state constitution, not as a statute, where a legislative majority could change it on any given Tuesday, but as constitutional text, requiring a statewide referendum to alter. The language they adopted for Article Fourteen was absolute: "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."

The Adirondack Park that exists under that mandate today covers six million acres. That is larger than Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park combined. It is the largest park in the contiguous United States, and it is also one of the most unusual: roughly half its land is privately owned, with about one hundred thirty thousand year-round residents living inside the park boundary, subject to state land-use regulations they had no say in creating.

Since eighteen ninety-four, New Yorkers have voted twenty-one times on proposals to modify or weaken Article Fourteen. Most have failed. The forest that had been stripped nearly bare in the eighteen eighties has grown back. The clause that the loggers dismissed as impractical is now one hundred thirty years old.