What We Do
Wild Places in the Adirondack Park
The Adirondack Council has worked with partners for 50 years to help protect lands and waters across the Adirondacks from development and to ensure state lands are managed in a way that prioritizes resource protection.
Lasting wilderness protection doesn’t just preserve lands and waters, it maintains and enhances the integrity of natural systems, provides habitat for plants and animals, and bolsters the processes that provide us clean air and water.
Key to this is the ongoing implementation of best management practices by the state agencies charged with protecting wild places. The Council’s work to protect wilderness goes beyond acquisition and includes holding decisionmakers at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Adirondack Park Agency accountable for implementing science-based management practices in protected wilderness areas.
Council Insights
Check out our reports and publications on some of the most pressing issues facing the Adirondack Park.
The Council also works to halt harmful potential changes to the New York State Constitution before they could gain political traction or get the Legislature’s preliminary approval.
The Council’s role as watchdog of the “Forever Wild” clause of the New York Constitution (Article 14, Section 1) has required that the organization review, assess, critique, and raise awareness of more than 100 attempts to alter, undermine, and repeal the Constitution’s ironclad protections for the Adirondack Forest Preserve. If not for the Council’s efforts and the coalitions of allies it has rallied to provide statewide support, the Forest Preserve would have been subjected to severe consequences. Proposals would have allowed commercial leases, “salvage” logging, rental cabin construction, and a host of intensive recreational uses not suitable in wild landscapes.