To save their wilderness, people in this politically divided rural area in New York decided to start talking

Adirondack Park boasts 6 million wild acres.
(VisitAdirondacks.com photo)

In an era where public discourse can dissolve into shouting matches and expletives, politically divided residents in rural New York have found a way to listen and discuss heated topics civilly, reports Brian Mann of NPR.

To understand how this fragile peace took shape, a visit back to the 1990s in New York's Adirondack Park where a "CBS cameraman captured a violent confrontation. An environmental activist was attacked by a local government leader named Maynard Baker." According to Mann, Baker went on to yell, "'Go back wherever you come from, but get out of here, out of our lives and out of our business.'"

The history of tensions turned violent more than once. Mann explains, "The Adirondack Park is 6 million acres. Small towns here are surrounded by big chunks of heavily regulated land. Historian Phil Terry says the fight over environmental rules turned dangerous." Terry told him, "There was an attempt to set the Park Agency headquarters on fire. One of the Park Agency staff members had bullets flying around his car one day."

Green highlight encircles the massive
New York park. (Wikipedia map)

"In a lot of ways, the Adirondacks then resembled America today. Conspiracy theories and threats of violence were commonplace, " Mann reports, "Former New York Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, lives now in the park. He says the stakes were high. When he took office, huge tracts of privately owned land in the park were being eyed by developers. . . . Pataki unveiled an ambitious environmental plan to keep that from happening. . . . Pataki says the battle lines then were pretty much like what we see now across the U.S.--pro-business vs. pro-environment, urban vs. rural, people looking for agreement versus those who wanted to fight. He says his message to furious locals was simple. Let's start talking."

Zoe Smith, an environmental activist on the Adirondack Park Agency board, told Mann, "Our agenda is simply to have civil discourse. There are a lot of long conversations that happen, phone calls after hours."

"Everyone interviewed for this story said the Adirondack experiment has been successful so far but also messy," Mann adds. "They say the peace here often feels fragile, shaken by occasional lawsuits and by angry flare-ups on social media. But Zoe Smith with the Common Ground Alliance says people here keep talking, in part because they know how bad things can be when neighbors turn against neighbors."

The peace is an ongoing community effort to build bridges instead of burn them down. Mann reports, "So far, nearly a million acres of wild forest and lakes have been protected here with local buy-in and local input -- makes you wonder what could be done in other parts of the U.S. if people started talking again rather than making threats and shouting each other down."