Houghton in Adirondack Park

Studies in Environment and Culture

Study in a stunning natural environment that is ecologically, culturally, and politically unique.

High Peaks

A Unique Ecology

The Nature Conservancy calls it "one of the last great places" on earth. The 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, a diverse eco-region as large as the state of Vermont, contains the largest remaining temperate-deciduous forest in the world, as well as the largest intact wilderness east of Denver. The Park includes 43 mountain peaks above 4,000 feet, 2,000 lakes and ponds, numerous boreal bogs, and some 30,000 miles of streams. Wildlife is abundant—including bald eagles, loons, black bear, lynx, and a healthy and growing population of moose. The largest old-growth forest east of the Mississippi includes 100-foot pine and northern hardwoods, which yield to sub-alpine spruce/fir forests about 2500 feet and alpine tundra crowning the highest summits.

Learn more about current research.

A Unique Culture

Adirondack culture has grown out of the human encounter with wilderness, producing a rich history replete with Great Camps, Adirondack guide boats and Rushton canoes, logging camps and iron mines, landscape painting by greats such as Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington, and a two-time winter Olympics venue at Lake Placid. The culture includes a unique architecture and rustic furniture and a substantial literature. Today, 130,000 people continue to make their homes within the Park's boundaries, some of whom trace their ancestry back to the original settlers and loggers of the 1800s. Combining wilderness preservation with local settlement, the Adirondack Park is a living laboratory of the human encounter with nature.

A Unique Model of Governance

The Adirondack Park has no single organization in charge. It is governed instead by a complex environmental regime that includes state constitutional protection, regional land-use controls, and strong oversight by multiple environmental organizations. The conservation legacy begun in the Adirondacks by Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Marshall (founder of the Wilderness Society), and Howard Zahniser (author of the 1964 Wilderness Act), is carried on today by the Adirondack Park Agency and Department of Environmental Conservation and civic associations such as the Association to Protect the Adirondacks (founded in 1901), the Residents Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, and the Adirondack Mountain Club.

Students witness the continuing debate over wilderness and sustainable development. An introduction to environmental studies that uses the Adirondack Park as its living laboratory, it features an interdisciplinary faculty, each teaching in an area of individual expertise, together with field lectures from environmental professionals working in the Adirondacks (see accompanying list of resources). Reading and writing are connected to experience, enabling students to formulate a vision of Christian environmental stewardship.