Abstract
State and national park land management is rife with conflict, be it either over how land is managed within the park or how it affects adjacent private lands. The Adirondack Park in upstate New York is an especially interesting case due to its unique mix of public and private lands within the boundaries of the park, often referred to as the Blue Line. A recent land acquisition by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) and the resultant land classification process is the most recent conflict in the region in a long line of land use/land designation conflicts. In the wake of recent attempts for greater collaboration, we explored this conflict by conducting a framing analysis of both stakeholders’ online presence (i.e., websites and blogs) and local news media coverage of the classification process. Primary stakeholders included local town residents, sportsmen groups, NYSDEC, Adirondack Park Agency, local government, and environmental groups. We found that stakeholder groups’ online materials utilized frames to describe their objectives based on different values. Dominant frames included a “reasonable access” frame used by residents and town officials to highlight rights to accessible use. Environmental groups heavily used an “environmental protection” frame, highlighting the ecologically important wetlands and opportunity to increase lands designated as “Wilderness”. In news media articles, the dominant frame was the “conflict frame”, portraying the decision-making process as riddled with tension and incompatibility. These frames indicate that the conflict over land classification stems from different values of accessibility and strong wilderness protection as well as being communicated as intractable by the media.
Highlights
At 6 million acres and comprised of roughly equal parts public and private lands, the Adirondack State Park in upstate New York is unique in both its size and its composition
Stakeholders in this conflict generally fell into one or more of the following categories: environmental groups, local organizations/governments, and sportsmen’s groups. Within their online text emerged five frames that were utilized among stakeholders: collective action, critical, economy, environmental protection, and reasonable access frames
While at first blush appearing as simple as the age-old development vs. environment debate, the Boreas Ponds conflict cannot be reduced to such a clear dichotomy
Summary
At 6 million acres and comprised of roughly equal parts public and private lands, the Adirondack State Park (hereafter, the Adirondack Park or the Park) in upstate New York is unique in both its size and its composition. In the United States, park creation has been built principally on a model of sole ownership (Sellars, 1997) This translates to federally controlled national parks that have been established through processes of dispossession and marginalization of those residing on today’s park lands, most notably Native Americans who were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands so those lands could be deemed “pristine wilderness” and protected, emparked (Hecht and Cockburn, 1990; Neumann, 1998). Those processes may have been acute and immediate or may have constituted a gradual overtaking, but the result was the same—a federally controlled parcel of land from which traces of former inhabitants had been erased and the land deemed empty and wild (Hecht and Cockburn, 1990; Neumann, 1998)
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