A New Day for the Catskills

2007-09-17T21:31:38Z

People think of the Catskills and they think of "Dirty Dancing." But really, it's about barns and cows and fishing and hiking. The first fly fishermen fished in the Neversink and the Beaverkill. We have a great river system, trout system, and hiking system. There are several thousand operating farms in the Catskills. When you add up all the public spaces and wilderness and wildlife preserves that are in the Catskills you will soon find it's the biggest recreational area within reach of New York.

NRDC and other groups just ended a seven-year standoff over a massive development for the Belleayre Resort, right in the heart of the Catskills. Through years and years of work, we've convinced the parties to preserve two-thirds of the land as "forever wild" in the State Forest Preserve and to build a smaller and more environmentally sensitive project on a portion of the remaining land. It was a very difficult fight because of the pressure for economic development, pressure not only from the developer but people in government, and elsewhere.

I'm from Sullivan County, in the center of the Catskills. And I think the most important thing about that long fight was the debate it created over the future of the Catskills -- a whole new awareness about what we should be doing up there.

I look at the work of the Open Space Institute. Over the past 15 years they have purchased as much as 25,000 acres in the Shawangunks, as much as 18,000 in the Catskills. They are working now on farmland preservation. New York City is working on the Catskills in the watershed area.

And most recently, through the efforts of a number of people, the Catskill Mountainkeeper (http://catskillmountainkeeper.org/) has been started. They are going to be working to help to organize the Catskills, the people from north, south, east and west who don't have the same newspapers or radio stations or ways to talk to each other, yet they have common interests: in highways, and power lines, and in development, like casinos. We know these folks care deeply about the beauty of the Catskills. And once they know that they can have a voice together, we think that the future of the Catskills, the branding of the Catskills, the planning of the growth of the Catskills will take place in a responsible way. With a protected watershed, clean rivers, more trail heads, more recreation, more tourism, and more industry that is Catskill-appropriate.

So I would say the day of the Catskills has come.

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A New Day for the Catskills