"Enlightened System" or "Regulatory Nightmare"?: New York's Adirondack Mountains and the Conflicted Politics of Environmental Land-Use Reform During the 1970s. (July 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Siskind, Peter
• Is Part Of: Journal of policy history. Volume 31:Number 3(2019)
• Page Start: 406
• Page End: 430
• Publication Date: 2019-07
• Subjects: Adirondack Mountains, -- environmental land use, -- politics of development, -- Nelson Rockefeller; Policy sciences -- Periodicals; Political planning -- United States -- History -- Periodicals; United States -- Economic policy -- Periodicals; United States -- Social policy -- Periodicals; 320.6097305
• DOI: 10.1017/S0898030619000137
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0898-0306

Abstract

Abstract: This exploration of the politics of land-use reform in New York's vast Adirondack Mountains provides a revealing window onto the ambiguities, evolution, and importance of environmental liberalism during the 1970s. A distinctive set of circumstances, featuring forceful advocacy by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and propitious political timing, led to the creation in the early 1970s of one of the most ambitious state-level environmental reforms in modern American history. But implementation during the mid- and late 1970s proved challenging. Environmental management by a new regional agency that possessed powerful regulatory authority over all public and private lands in the region produced discontents, distrust, and organized opposition among both developers and property-rights advocates on the right and environmental advocates on the left. The result was an uneasy, enduring legacy: the new regulatory institution and key environmental planning ideas of the early 1970s and the later, wide-ranging discontents would coexist in similar forms for decades to come.