The job of public interpreter is to assist the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation in educating, monitoring, and managing public recreational use of Forest Preserve and conservation easement lands so as to protect and preserve the area’s natural resources. Interpreters jobs includemanaging the access trail, fire tower and related facilities, and surrounding Forest Preserve lands. An interpreter also assists the tower friends committee in their stewardship mission.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The official role of NYS fire towers as sites of active public education began nearly a century ago. In the wake of widespread, devastating forest fires in 1903 and 1908, the fifty or so towers that were hastily erected to form a network covering the Adirondack region, as well as the observers they employed, at first had only one primary, practical purpose: the accurate spotting and efficient suppression of fires. But the automobile soon brought a growing flood of recreational tourists for whom fire towers were attractive hiking destinations. By 1915 the Conservation Commission began replacing wood towers with prefabricated steel structures retrofitting with stairs to accommodate recreational visitors, and Commissioner George Pratt launched a statewide campaign of public education in fire prevention, in which the tower observers performed an essential role in conservation education.
Many changes over the last forty years now call for an expanded, clarified definition of this original educational purpose. These include growing recreational pressures and attendant management needs on public lands; the problematic legal justification for retaining fire towers in the Adirondack Park; and perhaps most compelling, the justification for allocating NYS funding to support a renewed, expanded program of public education at fire towers.
A COMPELLING REASON FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION
Many citizens, particularly many who nurture strong opinions about regional land use decisions, do not complicate those opinions with the essential understanding that the Adirondack Park State Land Master Plan (SLMP) has the force of law which state agencies, notably the Adirondack Park Agency and the Department of Environmental Conservation, are bound to uphold in their regulatory rulings and management policies and practices. On the one hand, the only provision in the SLMP that justifies the preservation of fire towers in the Forest Preserve is lamentably anachronistic on the subject of primary purposes; on the other hand, it offers education as a (subordinate) purpose for this preservation: “The educational and informational aspects of certain fire towers should be encouraged and wherever feasible these fire towers should be retained where consistent with their need from a fire control and communications standpoint” (p. 36). Since fire towers no longer serve either fire control or, with a few exceptions, communication purposes (and since recreational purposes are not mentioned), serving educational purposes becomes by loose interpretation and default the primary legal justification in the SLMP for the preservation of Adirondack fire towers. Moreover, Environmental Conservation Law governing Adopt-A-Natural-Resource (AANR) agreements with local fire tower committees names “interpretive services” among the activities that “provid[e] positive benefits to the natural resource [and its ‘related assets’]” (§9-0113-2).*
WHY PROPOSE STANDARDS?
Accordingly, AFTA anticipated in 2006 that as the DEC developed more coherent and consistent policies in its Comprehensive Fire Tower Plan, the department would not only strongly encourage active public education at fire towers, but it would adopt standards of some kind for education, particularly if its practitioners are employees who receive NYS funding. The only existing model was SUNY-Potsdam’s curriculum, developed over six years in cooperation with the DEC, to prepare its Environmental Studies students to serve as summit guides at fire towers. Since AFTA’s charter members all choose to employ Potsdam students, and all wanted to ensure state funding support for this expense, AFTA proposed a simplified, generic version of Potsdam’s interpretive training standards to the DEC officials drafting the Comprehensive Plan, for possible inclusion in its appendix (see the link on this page). The aim was NOT to ensure that Potsdam College students would be the only eligible candidates for employment; rather, it was to provide an example of eligibility standards that would justify a provision in the Plan to allocate NYS funding to support employment for summit guides. AFTA was successful in this, as the Funding Guidelines acceptable to the DEC and subsequently adopted demonstrate (see the link on the page under the "NYS Funding" tab).
TO BE CONTINUED
* For a more detailed discussion of the obscurities and conflicts among the SLMP’s further provisions and other NYS laws and DEC policies regarding fire towers, see Todd Thomas, “Fire Towers and the Law” in Bauer and Collins, The Future of Adirondack Fire Towers (RCPA, 2004).
