"The Saranac Experiment": a feature article on the history of the NLT in Adirondack Life Magazine, 2016
- newlandtrust
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
This article, written by Joe Connelly with photos and photo illustrations by Ben Stechschulte, is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the New Land Trust. A laminated copy of the article has been on hand in the Clubhouse for years for interested readers to peruse, and it's considered to be a definitive history of the NLT.
Read the article at Adirondack Life's website:
Some quotes from the article:
"THEY MET AT THE MINER INSTITUTE, an annex of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh devoted to environmental studies. The specialty school was only two years old in 1974, and the small group of students lived and ate and attended the same classes, staying with the same professor for days at a time. It was called a "semester immersion" program, "Man and his Environment," and it grew in them not just a passion for ecology, but an ethic for living it."
'The Trust put up three tepees on Strawberry Hill, in an open field that's now a forest. They cooked on an outdoor stove, taking water from a stream at the bottom of the hill. They dug coolers into the earth to keep their food and used an open toilet made out of tree limbs. The only livable structure on the property was the old Rasco barn, and they worked feverishly to prepare it to house them in winter. They didn't make it."
"In the fall of 1992 Damian moved into the Barnhouse and became the land's caretaker. He believed the Trust needed to change to move forward, with a new form of Agreement, less about living in harmony with the land, and more about showing how to save it."
"...One night, at a board meeting in 2008, a man came in with a plan. He wasn't an original member, not a hippie nor an eco-radical, but a guy who lived across the road...Steve Jenks moved to the area in 2004, and for many years he'd been cross-country skiing there, on the handful of trails the members used. He'd helped establish a bike-trail system in Vermont, and he proposed a similar plan for the Trust: build a series of trails and promote the Trust as a center for skiing and hiking."
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