Other Voices

Aaron Mair of Guilderland is the new director of a wilderness campaign for the Adirondack Council. Following the lead of President Joe Biden, Forever Adirondacks will focus on enhancing carbon sinks in forested land to slow climate change. Mair, who retires this month as a public-health epidemiologist working for the state, will combine his skills in data analysis with his passion for preserving the environment. He served as the first Black president of the Sierra Club, a commitment that sprang from his work as an urban environmental pioneer in the 1990s. When Mair lived in Albany’s Arbor Hill, the paint on his new house peeled and his children suffered from asthma; he discovered the root cause of both was the nearby garbage incinerator. “The next frontier,” Mair says in this week’s podcast, “is to save the planet.” First-world nations need to pay attention to their wilderness assets, says Mair, who believes the Adirondacks, properly managed, can be environmentally sound, with clean water, while also creating jobs and promoting eco-tourism. “We can absolutely love something to death,” Mair says of the over-used High Peaks region where crowding and trail erosion are problems. “What is old is new again,” said Mair, citing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps that created jobs during the Great Depression, which Mair termed “an idea borne out of economic necessity.” Mair, a descendant of farmers, sees New York as being on the frontline in the fight to create a vibrant economy while preserving wilderness.