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The purpose of this paper is to investigate historical environmental destruction and subsequent land use policies enacted over the last 400 years in the Adirondacks Park & Preserve – America's largest park and preserve in the lower 48 states.

The paper includes a historical analysis using an extensive literature review. The historical analysis is divided into four distinct waves of time analyzing the specific environmental destruction and the policies enacted. They closely mimic century waves: 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and the present 2000s.

Findings indicate that each of the major policy or land use instruments applied to the Adirondack region were appropriate at the time, however, were retroactive approaches to stem widespread environmental devastation. These strong measures still impact the region today, impairing the 2.5 million ha and the ability to ensure a sustainable future of environmental protection, economic prosperity, and societal well-being. The conservation easement as a tool can proactively return the region to a sustainable balance.

While there have been studies analyzing the historical importance and others highlighting the political uniqueness of the Adirondacks, this paper fills the gap in reframing the history and policies in a sustainable planning paradigm. Exposing retroactive responses when the environment was on the brink of destruction, the paper suggests a proactive approach using the conservation easement. Here, sustainability can be achieved through partnership between government, non-profit, and private business. This collaboration can build on one of the best regional planning models in the nation and ensure a balance between environment, economy, and society for more than one century wave.

Purpose – The purpose is to show that the influx of new seasonal and year-round residents to the small towns located in and around protected areas has numerous implications for governance associated with land management and regional planning including reconciling the competing values of wilderness (amenity vs. livelihood, motorized vs. non-motorized recreation, active vs. passive land management).

Methodology/approach – We use case studies from the Adirondack Park in Northern New York State and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the western United States to demonstrate the land management and governance challenges facing local communities in and around internationally renowned, protected areas.

Findings – We highlight how these transforming communities meet diverse needs and competing interests and how partnering with a non-governmental organization benefits local governance issues.

Originality/value of chapter – The paper presents research from the United States, which theoretically and empirically contributes to the scientific discourse on exurbanization, protected areas, and governance.

Across New Hampshire citizens at town meetings are petitioning the federal government to force reductions in sulphur emissions. Canada's film, “Acid from Heaven” is being labeled “political propaganda” when it is shown to American audiences. In California, the fog stings the eye; in the Adirondacks, some lakes are now crystal clear but devoid of fish and all other life—victim, some scientists claim, of highly acidic snow melt and rain; in Wheeling, West Virginia, rain has been recorded that is sourer than vinegar. There seems to be a consensus that acid rain, the catchall term being used for all kinds of acidic deposition from the air, is a problem. Why them the controversy? In this country, the electric utilities, which emit sulphur and nitrogen compounds, the coal industry, and some scientists argue that not enough is yet known about the precise relationship between specific sources of emissions and particular damaged sites. Environmental groups, some scientists, and the New England states and Canada, which find their areas particularly threatened, argue that there is sufficient evidence to begin a cleanup now. Libraries need to be collecting information for their patrons on this hot dispute. Luckily, some of the best is free or inexpensive.

William R. Freudenburg’s work contributes to an understanding of how local and external factors influence environmental quality through land-use planning and growth management. A recent Adirondack planning study (Ruzow Holland, 2010) explores and analyzes, through the methodological lens of Participatory Action Research (PAR), how the town comprehensive planning process evolved within the community of Willsboro, New York (2010 Population 2025). Access to knowledge, technology, and deliberative decision making reduces the power of the “Privileged,” including external influences, to control the rate and type of local land development. The analysis illustrates the conversion point(s) of Freudenburg’s sociology of knowledge, power, and natural resources with the lessons learned from a place-based PAR, land-use planning project.

The Co‐ordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) is a social constructionist theory of human action which provides insight into the structure and process of multi‐person decision making. In the CMM analysis presented here, the Hughes family′s vacation decision making supplies an episode within which the family′s socially constructed resources are expressed and recreated. CMM is a technology offering considerable promise to new paradigm consumer researchers.

Field-based education for environmental studies has been a foundational principle for the Environmental Studies program at Stockton University, which began in 1971. Located within the 445,000 hectare Pinelands National Reserve, on an 800-hectare campus near Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA, two professors in the program discuss our rationale and experiences teaching students about the environment within the environment. Expounding on the interdisciplinary literature of field-based learning, we present four unique case studies including local and regional experiences, as well as student learning abroad. The first case proposes that learning outdoors might be beneficial for students with learning disabilities. This is exemplified during a one-week field study to the 2.4 million hectare Adirondack Park & Preserve. The second instance reveals the benefits of working with local towns and environs acting as consultants in a multidisciplinary capstone experience. Next, we show how on-campus data collection and hypothesis formulation help students to learn about environmental design and statistical analysis. Finally, an international trip to the Caribbean opens the minds of students through a service learning project. While on campus, in town, across the United States or at an international destination, learning in the field gives students the opportunity to expand their knowledge through field-based active learning strategies.

This chapter focuses on the authentication of wilderness and the mechanisms of power and agency through which the wilderness has come to assume its patina of authenticity, often associated with masculinity, challenge, self-(re)creation, pristine landscapes, and, perhaps above all, authenticity. Rather than examining the concept of authenticity, this chapter focuses on its process; using notions of “hot” and “cool” authentication, it attends to the ways individuals and groups navigate social terrain through discourse and performance to construct authenticity in wilderness landscapes. It examines the various mechanisms through which authenticity in wilderness is constructed, measured, and assessed, attending to the “hot” and “cool” authentication of the American wilderness.

The purpose of this paper is to delineate shifts in environmental sustainability leadership in the Olympic Movement through a historical narrative.

A systematic literature review was conducted and data were analyzed chronologically.

Four eras are identified, distinguished by different leadership and levels of commitment toward the natural environment: public-driven environmental sustainability, host city-driven environmental sustainability, International Olympic Committee-mandated environmental sustainability and environmental regression.

This paper is limited to secondary data collected through a systematic literature review.

The findings inform a list of best practices for Olympic environmental sustainability, grounded in evidence of past successes and lessons learned from environmentally insensitive events.

This is the first historical narrative and synthesis of environmental leadership in the Olympic Movement, a topic previously covered in studies focused solely on the institutions responsible for hosting the event, ignoring external parties and the deep history of environmentalism dating back to the 1930s, or focusing just on actions, ignoring the actors who drove the environmental movement.