Nature Conservancy Buys Large Area of Adirondack Land - NYTimes.com

• By MARTIN ESPINOZA
• A 14,600-acre piece of the Adirondacks long prized by environmentalists for its forests and wetlands, including a pond where Ralph Waldo Emerson led a “philosophers’ camp,” was purchased on Thursday by a preservation group for $16 million, the group said.
• The property, southwest of Lake Placid and on the boundary of the High Peaks Wilderness Area, was until Thursday among more than 2.6 million acres of unprotected privately owned land in the six-million-acre Adirondack Park.
• The land bought on Thursday includes Follensby Pond, the site of a famous 1858 gathering known as the Philosophers’ Camp, where Emerson and other Boston-area intellectuals spent a month fishing, hunting, painting and writing. Among those joining Emerson were the painter William James Stillman, the poet James Russell Lowell and the scientist Louis Agassiz.

• The gathering took place at a time when Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and others were redefining attitudes toward nature.

  “It was an early moment in the development of the idea that there was something sublime about nature,” said Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. “Nature was starting to play a less utilitarian function and a more aesthetic and intellectual one.”

• Mr. McKibben, who recently edited a large anthology of environmental essays, “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau,” said the early work of people like Thoreau was one of the reasons why the State of New York began protecting the Adirondacks 100 years ago.
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• He called the Adirondacks one of the world’s greatest examples of ecological restoration, because, unlike Yellowstone National Park, there are many communities existing alongside wilderness. In many ways, Follensby Pond is in much better ecological shape now than it was when Emerson and others camped there, Mr. McKibben said.