This Land is Your Land: The Birth of ‘Forever Wild’

Three men making camp at Slant Rock on the Johns Brook trail up Mount Marcy, NY, June 1920.

Three men making camp at Slant Rock on the Johns Brook trail up Mount Marcy, NY, June 1920.

Rampant logging threatened the forests of the Adirondacks. When writer George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature in 1864 he raised awareness about the dangers posed by decimated wildlands. A best seller, the book sparked a national, political debate about the merits of preservation, eventually leading to the New York’s ‘Forever Wild’ constitutional amendment in 1894, which has effectively protected and preserved the Catskill and Adirondack regions for the past century.