Like his mentor, Lake George’s John Apperson, Paul Schaefer mostly eschewed “the white trousers” of the conservation movement.
“I’d like to throw some mud on them,” Apperson was wont to say, Schaefer recalled.
Unlike the wealthy elites with whom he would one day collaborate, Schaefer was not weaned on a belief that wild nature should be preserved for its aesthetic and spiritual value.
He came to appreciate wilderness as something to be prized for its own sake the hard way – on his own, as a twelve-year-old, hunting, fishing and camping in the Adirondacks and ransacking the second-hand book shops in downtown Albany for anything and everything about the Adirondacks.
As an adult, hunting near a remote pond, Schaefer was startled by the sound of a jeep’s engine crashing through the otherwise undisturbed wilderness. The moment was a seed – not the only seed, but a significant one nonetheless – that would germinate into an idea that the Forest Preserve could and should be zoned, with some areas left free of any trace whatsoever of urban society. It was an idea that found its way into the recommendations of the mid-century Joint Legislative Committee on Natural resources, into the deliberations of the Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondacks and finally, into the State Land Master Plan, approved by the legislature in 1972.
“Despite limited financial resources and no college education, Paul Schafer matured to influence the attitudes about wilderness of nine New York governors,” writes David Gibson in his new book, “A Force For Nature: Paul Schaefer’s Adirondack Coalitions.”
No one is more qualified than Gibson to tell the story of how Schaefer, who made his living as a contractor, became the single most influential advocate for wilderness preservation in New York State during the movement’s crucial, formative years. In addition to being the last executive director of the venerable Association for the Protection of Adirondacks, where he was educated – not always gently – by Schaefer, Gibson is a founder of Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve, an organization that perpetuates Schaefer’s ideas and principles.
Drawing on Schaefer’s own writings, as well as interviews and family narratives, Gibson paints a vivid and comprehensive portrait of both a man and a movement.
By Schaefer’s own admission, his teacher in the ways of mobilizing the public and political support necessary to advance conservation was none other than Apperson, who waged successful campaigns to extend the boundaries of the Forest Preserve to include the east shore of Lake George, to remove squatters from the publicly-owned islands and who tried to force the hydropower dam at the outlet of Lake George to be removed in order to protect the shores from erosion, which was accelerated by the fluctuating, erratic lake levels.
“I was led step by step in 1931 to the home of John S. Apperson, an official at General Electric,” Schaefer once recalled. “He was, I was told, the pre-eminent conservationist in our region. My association with Apperson began what turned out to be a lifelong commitment to the integrity of the Forest Preserve.”
Schaefer also attributed his decision to add documentary film making to his advocacy toolbox to Apperson. As he would later recall, “No one I ever met advocated the use of film more than Apperson. Within weeks after my first meeting him, he put a16-mm Bell and Howell camera, which happened to belong to Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir, in my hands. ‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Go up to Tahawus and shoot the lumbering operation and the marvelous country it ruined. We will wake them all up.’”
Coincidentally, the 23-year-old Schaefer was using Langmuir’s camera to film a forest fire from the summit of Mount Marcy in 1932 when he met another man who would become a mentor, Wilderness Society founder Bob Marshall.
Film proved to be to be an amazingly effective medium, enabling people who never ventured into wilderness to understand the complicated issues related to watershed forests, the damming of wild rivers, the erosion of lakeshores and the vulnerability of the Forest Preserve to politics and ill-considered policies.
As Gibson documents in unimpeachable detail, Schaefer made adept use of his contacts with powerful people – Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Averell Harriman, Assembly Speaker Oswald Heck, Nelson Rockefeller, State Senator Ron Stafford, Mario Cuomo – to defend wilderness: not for the sake of a literary or philosophical abstraction, but on behalf of the people whose voices would otherwise be mute. Schaefer held that an undiluted experience of wilderness should not be limited to the few – contra the elites – but to anyone and everyone willing to seize a share of the legacy of 1894 – the state constitutional convention that drafted the Forever Wild clause.
That legacy became the nation’s in 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the federal Wilderness Act, and with one stroke of his pen, protected more than 9 million acres of undeveloped federal lands.
According to David Gibson, the bill’s chief author, Howard Zahniser, freely admitted that New York State provided a model for a national wilderness-preservation movement and acknowledged that he himself was inspired by the state constitutional amendment that declared the Adirondack Forest Preserve “forever wild.”
As it happens, Zahniser was introduced to New York’s “forever wild” clause by Paul Schaefer. Zahniser built a rustic camp in Bakers Mills, Johnsburg, near Schaefer’s own and together they hiked and explored the Siamese Ponds Wilderness, the High Peaks and other, more remote sections of the Adirondacks. In fact, Zahniser drafted parts of the National Wilderness Act at his Bakers Mills cabin.
Wilderness, however, is never permanently protected, state constitutions and federal laws notwithstanding. Threats will emerge from unanticipated sources and unexpected opponents. Paul Schaefer’s lesson – and the lesson of David Gibson, through this biography and through his work with Friends of the Forest Preserve, a group founded by Schaefer himself in the 1940s – is never succumb to complacency. It is one that bears repeating, frequently.
“A Force for Nature: Paul Schaefer’s Adirondack Coalitions” is available from Syracuse University Press, for purchase at local bookstores, or from Amazon.
