Geoscience Reference
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local landscape and its history. From this, the fundamental question guiding what
follows becomes: is the contemporary Adirondack landscape an appropriate 'place'
for wolves to be brought back into? In order to address this question contextually,
creatively and thoughtfully, it is necessary to consider how and when these animals
'lost' this (their) place to begin with. Further questions emerge from this. For
example, how, when and why did the wolf become an animal 'out of place'
(Cresswell 1996) in the Adirondacks?
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Were wolves re-placed in the socio-physical
landscape, and if so by what? How did these factors interact with and/or dictate the
wolf's extermination from and its potential restoration to the Adirondack landscape?
Questions of historical and geographical context appear fundamental to any
consideration of wildlife restoration today. Any attempt to address them requires
the location and consideration of those past and present social, economic and
cultural processes which are fundamental to the construction of current landscape
meaning and perception. I therefore leave the exposition of the ecological
appropriateness of the Adirondack landscape to wolf restoration to others (indeed,
ecological appropriateness is too often all that is considered), and will instead focus
upon the landscape's social and cultural appropriateness.
This chapter traces the evolution of landscape meaning in the Adirondacks as it
has been represented since its settlement by Euro-Americans in the early 1800s. In
particular, I focus upon that fifty-year period between the mid-nineteenth century
until the turn of the twentieth century when the Adirondacks and the surrounding
areas experienced two very distinct 'waves' of white settlement and exploitation,
each resulting in a very different use of and, subsequently, application of meaning to
the local landscape. This period witnessed the parallel processes of wolf extirpation
(local extinction) and the marginalisation of the region's early settlers, each resulting
from an urban-based change in landscape meaning in which both wolves and
settlers found themselves effectively 'out of place'. These historical and concurrent
processes, I argue, are imperative to any discussion concerning wolf restoration to the
Adirondacks today. They constitute the historical context, the socio-cultural
foundation upon which this discussion must be based. Furthermore, they remain at
the fore in terms of current landscape meaning and use.
Examination of the historical changes in landscape meaning and the place of the
wolf in the Adirondacks is accomplished through the analysis of the myriad
narratives of the region as they appear in documents, accounts and artwork. It is
within and through these narratives that the
imaginative
repertoires
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of wolf, people
and place are constructed, promoted and contested, and within which landscape
meaning emerges.
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It is within these narratives that the evolving ideologies applied
to the Adirondack landscape are identified and their inclusive and exclusive
capacities exposed (Willems-Braun 1997). Finally, it is within these narratives that
we are able to track the wolf's loss of place, as well as the place of the region's early
settlers and their subsequent re-placement in the Adirondack landscape. They
provide invaluable insight into and clarity regarding the context within which wolf
restoration into upstate New York is currently being debated.
