In Utah’s defense, New York doesn’t have 70%+ of its land in goverment hands, only about 20%. ‘Forever wild’ might not be so popular if the government were every farmer’s landlord.

There have been attempts to amend the state constitution to eliminate ‘forever wild.’ They have all been roundly defeated. There was also an attempt by the Federal government to create an ‘Adirondack National Park’ in 1967. The attempt was wildly unpopular and went nowhere, but prompted an agonizing reappraisal of the governance of the region and the creation of a State Land Master Plan that made great changes in management – mostly for the better. The fact that nearly everyone loves to hate the Adirondack Park Agency is an indicator that they’re successfully steering a middle course among competing interests.

New York seems to have different priorities than Utah, to put it mildly. 🙂

The conservation department can be and has been underfunded, the law is enforced with more or less strictness, and it’s surely not perfect, but the legislature can’t destroy it all with a stroke of a pen. Much less can the executive do so.

New York appears to be relatively safe from radical corporatists. One of my greatest fears for the great parks that are New York’s crown jewels is that Uncle Sam will seize state lands under eminent domain in order to destroy their constitutional protection. It’s already been held that the US Government can seize State assets in eminent domain, and that doing so completely extinguishes any State interest. The State interest is not restored if the Federal government resells the land.

As a result, for instance, the only parts of the Pacific shoreline in California that do not belong to the State of California are those that were formerly on now-closed naval bases, resold to developers. This anomaly created an inflated value for the shoreline, through the artificial scarcity of having the only truly private beaches in the state. In order to restore the protection, California would have to compensate the new landowner for the inflated value, while it was paid no such premium when the Federal government first seized the land.

It is widely suspected that there are some large parcels of New York State land for which natural gas concerns are lobbying the Federal government for a similar maneuver – seize the land for some fictitious purpose, abandon the purpose and resell it. (Or simply announce that natural gas production is a public good, and use that to justify eminent domain!) Since some of New York’s prime wilderness lies atop the Marcellus shale bed, the idea actually is plausible. (If true, how is this not a constitutional crisis?)

To me, out-and-out destruction is an even greater threat than Disneyfication, particularly since in the case of New York, it can be ignored by the other 49 states as Someone Else’s Problem.

Another data point. During one of the government shutdowns, the NPS bureaucrats made noises that New York would have to close Harriman because the AT (an NPS asset) runs through it. The only thing is that Uncle Sam never purchased a corridor over New York State land, nor even negotiated a formal easement. The AT is just there. New York’s reply was basically, “see you in court!” AT maintenance, and the AT corridor where Federally owned, were formally shut down, but the corridor shutdown was never enforced, since the Federal staff who would do so were furloughed, and the county sheriffs had no interest in enforcing it. The only effect was the suspension of maintenance, and even that was questioned since the AT mostly shares treadway with other trails and woods roads, and there was certainly a credible assertion that the custodians of those ways had the right to maintain them.