LAKE PLACID -- Any sustainable Adirondack future will gauge biomass consumption against forest preservation, water quality by threats to fish, healthy trees by soil composition and roots.
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While ecoscience is a huge part of regulating the Adirondack landscape, said Adirondack Park Agency Chairman Curt Stiles, a healthy debate is the way to sustain the future.
"We (APA staff) probably say yes more than we say no," he told a meeting of scientists recently as they discussed Adirondack Park research and policy.
"But working to get to that yes is the difficult part."
Stiles said the future of the Adirondack Park lies in an approach that brings people together, not separates them.
He said challenges go beyond issues of preservation and affordable housing to convening a healthy dialogue where controversy and dissent are vetted in public debate.
"We have to be more open, more transparent than other agencies are," Stiles said. "Our meetings are now Webcast so (people can see) ideas put to debate bringing different views to the table. It's not uncommon to see dissent, it is healthy to air these decisions in public forum."
But navigating through debate to regulatory reform, he said, may require revising the APA process.
"Parts of the State Land Master Plan can be modernized," Stiles said, "vetted by science, not popular opinion, not popular point of view."
APA often works under time constraints Stiles called "severe" governed by a time clock that "keeps (APA) centered on the urgent, not the policy."
"We need to return to a more robust set of planning versus regulatory process," Stiles said, naming the top planning priorities as cluster policy, energy-friendly construction and cooperation between APA and the Department of Environmental Conservation.
"The controversy, as long as it's not personal, is a healthy thing," Stiles said, "where the tendency to fight rather than win' isn't really healthy."
The future holds a "huge opportunity for collaboration," Stiles said. "Which doesn't mean you can't regulate in a more enlightened way."
Stiles remarks capped two days of scientific discourse meant to inform and advise a sustainable future.
The Adirondack Research Consortium pooled scientists last week and presented 15 papers from subjects as diverse as the effect of PCBs on song systems in birds to the importance of art in stressed economic times.
Panelists debated how to bring "Forever Wild" to the 21st Century, how to design regional conservation programs, how to adjust regulation to address a changing climate.
As ideas jumped from one scientific discipline to another, the roughly 140 members of the research consortium recombined their work in some new and different ways.
Among presentations, Naj Wikoff brought a panel of experts from the cultural centers in the Adirondack Park.
Theirs was a small audience compared to the raging scientific debate.
But, Wikoff said, despite dire predictions in the numbers of people leaving the park, beyond shrinking schools and growing economic strife, "the arts are growing."
"They are the robins of a new spring, a cultural spring," he said.
The discussion offered a kind of human introspection of it's own predictors.
In the past two years alone, Wikoff said, two new art galleries have sprung up along the AuSable River along with three theatres, a performance space, a dance center and a new museum.
"These are people reinvesting in their own community," Wikoff said, introducing Caroline Welsh from the Adirondack Museum, Nadine Duhaime from Lake Placid Center for the Arts, and Scott Renderer from Upper Jay Arts Council and the Recovery Lounge.
Welsh itemized the arts inventory inside the Blue Line counting 14 art centers, six community theatres, 17 music or dance companies, 45 libraries and 48 historical societies.
"Art has a very special relationship with nature."
Duhaime said the arts are an essential measure of the human condition.
"They deserve to be viewed an essential part of the economy."
kdedam@pressrepublican.com
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