Peter Bauer has spent the past 35 years working to conserve the Adirondack Park and the natural environment. He has led the FUND for Lake George as well as the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks. Since 2012 he has served as the executive director of Protect the Adirondacks.

He is stepping down, but plans to stay involved part-time.

I’m in in my, you know, mid 60s, and it’s really time to step aside and try and work a little less, try and drive around a little less, and the organization protect the Adirondacks is in a good spot. We’ve got two really great environmental attorneys leading the organization. Claudia Brammer is set to be our next executive director. So, you know now was just the right time to do it. And because of, you know, all of the work that I’ve been doing all these many years, as you know, I wrote about when I started this in the late 80s, and was working with, you know, the Adirondack commission under Mario Cuomo. You know, I was one of the youngest people in the room during those years. And in all of these years driving around as a professional meeting goer all around the Adirondacks, all around Albany. You know, I’ve grown to be one of the oldest, and now, now’s the time to step aside and let the next generation in.

What got you involved in environmental advocacy in the first place?

I did a lot of hiking and cross-country skiing and canoeing and hiking, and I met a lot of young people who had moved to the area or grown up in the area at those times. So, it was really a lot of fun to be in the Saranac Lake, Lake Placid teen area, all around the high peaks. In the mid-1980s I started working at Adirondack life as the assistant editor, and really had a couple years of driving around the park, getting to know the park much more in depth than just being around the high peaks. Writing stories about people around the Adirondacks, it was really a great education in the history and the culture. At the end of that, I did a big story on Adirondack land conservation. The park was at a critical moment with some big changes in land ownership in the park. And I met George Davis and his wife, Anita. They were working as private consultants, but George has had a long history as really, you know one of the people who had envisioned the creation of the Adirondack Park Agency. When he worked for the temporary study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks in the late 60s under Nelson Rockefeller, he was one of the first people hired at the staff for the APA. Helped put together the APA is land use and development plan map, which endures to this day. And as I was working, you know, he helped me with this article by helping to identify parcels, private land, parcels that were threatened at that time. Six months later, after that article came out, George was named to Mario Cuomo Adirondack commission as its executive director, and I was brought on to help with media, to help with editing all sorts of technical reports and then hit the ground running in ‘89.

Over the course of the 35 years, you’ve been doing this advocacy work, is there any achievement in particular that sticks out to you?

You know, in the time that I’ve been doing this work, you know, there have been dozens. Of organizations and literally hundreds of people doing conservation work in the Adirondacks. And you know, I’m very fortunate that, you know, I followed a long tradition. You know, this Adirondack conservation advocacy started before the Civil War. You know, the park was created in 1892 the Forever wild happened in 1894 there have been a number of major milestones in the last 125 years for the park. And you know, just dozens and dozens and dozens of people who you know did this work before me, and I’m confident that there will be dozens and dozens doing this work after me. But you know, in the last 30 years, we saw significant expansion in the public forest preserve. We saw a number of conservation easements that were purchased Governor Pataki his 12 years from, you know, 95 to 2006 made land protection a real priority in the Adirondacks. And, you know, he worked closely with the conservation community and the land protection groups to achieve that goal, to take advantage of some historic, you know, once in a generation, actually, once in a century, changes in land ownership in the park. So, you know, seeing, you know, wilderness areas like the five ponds wilderness, the high peak expanded, seeing new wilderness areas created, like, you know, the Round Lake wilderness, or the William C Whitney wilderness, or the Hudson gorge wilderness. You know, seeing the, literally the APA land use map change with state ownership of these new lands has really been a high point my time putting together 27 years of water quality monitoring data with our Adirondack Lake assessment program and partnership with Paul says college trying to bring really good, sound information to the public on economics and population, trying to bring information about ATV abuse on the forest preserve. We always felt good science drives good policy. Those are all critical. And then, of course, being involved in the article, 14 lawsuits, 10 yearlong effort that ended up in New York state’s highest court, and they thankfully upheld article 14 and upheld the Forever wild cause of the state constitution. So, you know, I had a hand in a lot of those things and but worked with dozens and dozens and dozens of others to bring it all, to bring it all in.

What does the future of the Adirondack Park look like to you?

The Adirondack Park has been, you know, has been this landscape that has been evolving over the past 125 years. The Adirondack park was created. It had a million or so acres of forest preserve. What the relationship was to the between the public land and the private land for decades, early in the 20th century, that was, that was unresolved the state, decade over decade, kept buying land to add to the Forest Preserve, there was public clamoring for the for the blue line, for the park to be expanded into places like the Champlain Valley and Lake George and down around the SAC and DACA reservoir. So even as the park was being expanded by millions of acres to go from 3.5 to over 6 million acres. You know how the park was managed between its public and private lands was something that wasn’t tackled until the creation of the Adirondack park agency in the late 60s under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, where they tried to integrate the management of the public and private lands into a coherent, comprehensive program. Now, you know, over the last 50 years, there’s been considerable land protection, but we’re at a point where we’re seeing just, you know, a huge rise in vacation homes spiked after COVID, spiked with sort of the great unequal wealth in this country, we’re just seeing a lot of land and a lot of development pressures, and a lot of lands being developed in the park, where, if land is not protected in the next 1015, 20 years, it’s probably going to be developed. And why this? The Adirondack. Park has been evolving, and the public private land relationship has been, you know, slowly changing. We’re going to see that harden over the next couple decades, and the final shape of what’s public, what’s private, what’s developed, what’s still wild, that’s all going to come those lines are going to harden, and that’s all going to take a final shape.

As climate change continues to impact the world and our region, how have you been able to stay positive? If not positive, at least keep your head in the game?

In the last three decades, I’ve been very lucky, because I’ve been able to work, you know, largely within the Adirondack Park. At times, I could pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist outside the boundaries of the Adirondack Park. Unlike a lot of Adirondack advocates, I’ve lived in the Adirondack Park in Blue Mountain Lake for most of that time in the center of the Adirondacks. So, you know, I was able to live and work in a park and dedicate, you know, decades to try and to protect a park. And we were able to accomplish a number of those things over the years, we’re seeing dramatic changes in the Adirondacks now with climate change, you know, our winters are getting shorter. It’s just as likely to rain as it is to snow. We get great snow in the Adirondacks, and then a few days later it rains. The amount of ice cover that we have on our lakes is less and less. You know, year over year, our long-term trends, we’re seeing our winters warm, the spring and fall is warm. The growing season expanded. People can now grow tomatoes in Blue Mountain Lake, where, 30 years ago, you couldn’t grow tomatoes in Blue Mountain Lake because our summer temperatures have warmed and our growing season has lengthened, we’re seeing dramatic changes in our forest composition, invasive species coming into the park. We’re going to see long-term, we’re going to see changes in our wildlife composition as well as our forest tree composition. But there’s a lot that we have been able to accomplish in the Adirondacks to protect land, and we hope that by having a bigger, more robust forest preserve that that can be a hedge and help to mitigate some of the impacts of climate change. A lot of folks have written that the Adirondack Park is going to be a refuge, you know, this is going to be a place of intact forests and intact habitats that you know as a lot of the rest of the country and a lot of the rest of the state continues to see a significant amount of development. Even though our population has been relatively flat for 30 years in New York State, the amount of developed areas in the state continues to go up and up. So conservation work is as I think I wrote about it, it’s heartbreaking work at times, places that we had hoped would become Part of the forest preserve and would be protected forests, we end up seeing housing and subdivisions. So there’s this loss in that respect. Well, lakes that were beautiful lakes have become infested with different invasive species, and the ecology of those lakes has changed. So you know, we do see these change, and we do experience loss, but you know, we always have to keep, keep fighting and we can, and we can see real accomplishments, and we always have to work hard and hope for better outcomes in the future. And what we’ve been able to accomplish in the Adirondacks over the last 30 years, I think, paved the way in this bold experiment of people living with wilderness and regional land use planning and that we’ve been able to carve out here in the park and carve out, you know, in the world’s greatest experiment in, you know, multi racial democracy. So those are the, those are the things that give me hope is, is the park and our democracy, and trying to continue to hold both of those things together.

Environmental Attorney Claudia Braymer will become Protect the Adirondacks’ Executive Director January 1st.