Wild Forest Lands: Finding History and Meaning in the Adirondacks

The Adirondack Forest Preserve is the largest publicly protected wilderness in the Eastern United States, with a state constitutional provision guaranteeing that it be "forever kept as wild forest lands." But just what does "wilderness" mean today? How has our understanding of that concept shifted, from the colonial implications of the term as first applied to the Adirondacks to a more inclusive usage, still contested, today? Part memoir, part New York history, and part meditation, Wild For...