There has been a long-held belief about Newcomb among many Adirondackers visitors and residents alike – there’s nothing there. I’ve heard this about Newcomb on and off for thirty years. It’s Nonsense!
Sure, I don’t deny that the Newcomb area could benefit from more places to dine and stay the night. But I can’t think of any place better equipped to appeal to one class of tourist the Adirondack region has so far mostly ignored: ecotourism. » Continue Reading.
A Northern Forest Festival will take place May 23rd from 9 am to 4 pm. The festival, held at the Adirondack Interpretive Center (AIC) at SUNY-ESF’s Newcomb Campus, is free and open to the public. The festival includes activities and demonstrations for all ages, including the 4th Annual Loon Race, the only race of rubber loons in the world.
The festival takes the place of Loons and Logs Day. “We wanted to create a more festive and fair-like atmosphere while keeping the focus on the natural and cultural history of the Adirondacks and Northern Forest region through hands-on, nature-based activities and programming,” program coordinator for ESF’s Northern Forest Institute Paul Hai said in an announcement to the press. The festival includes bird banding demonstrations, guided nature walks along the AIC trails, outdoor nature stations for kids, vintage guideboat tours of Rich Lake exploring its human and natural history, and vendors from local recreation and hospitality businesses. » Continue Reading.
SUNY ESF, through two of its regional campuses, has joined a group of leading biological field stations in a network devoted to bridging the gap between scientific inquiry on one side and arts and humanities on the other.
The college’s Newcomb Campus and the Cranberry Lake Biological Station, both in the Adirondacks, are members of Ecological Reflections, a network that brings together scientists, writers and artists to explore the connection between science and the humanities. The network grew out of a National Science Foundation-funded Long-Term Ecological Research program. » Continue Reading.
Two weekend fly fishing workshops will be offered by the Northern Forest Institute (NFI) in Newcomb this year.
Geared toward beginning fly fishers, the spring and fall workshops will not only focus on the art of fly casting and fly fishing but, in keeping with the mission of NFI, will also emphasize the natural science of fly fishing.
Participants will receive instruction about proper gear and casting; the ecology of Adirondack streams, rivers and ponds; and the insect and fish life that the region’s brook, brown and rainbow trout feed on. The technique known as “catch and release” will be emphasized to promote conservation of the Adirondack’s freshwater fish resources. Participants will also be introduced to the art of fly tying. » Continue Reading.
The SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s (ESF) Adirondack Interpretive Center will celebrate the work of Adirondack artist Rockwell Kent with a daylong event on October 20, 2012.
Caroline Welsh, director emeritus of the Adirondack Museum, will present a program on Kent’s artistic legacy, including many images of his work. Paul Hai, program director for ESF’s Northern Forest Institute, which manages the Interpretive Center, and Marianne Patinelli-Dubay, environmental philosopher with NFI, will provide readings and insights on Kent’s physical and personal adventures.
» Continue Reading.
You are invited to contribute to the discourse, re-interpret the topic and skew the pitch. Join in the process and take part in influencing the way we think about land use and ethics. SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s Northern Forest Institute invites submissions for its Symposium of Interdisciplinary Scholarship in Land Use and Ethics, to be held at the Adirondack Interpretive Center on Huntington Wildlife Forest in Newcomb. See full symposium details here.
On its best day, philosophy succeeds in sending “the conversation off in new directions.” With a free exchange of ideas and a commitment to inquiry, philosophy as both catalyst and conveyor ought to “engender new normal discourses, new sciences, new philosophical research and thus new objective truths.”
I envision this project as an opportunity to open up the dialog around issues of land use and ethics on local, national and global scales. This is the place for ideas in-process, unfinished research and to introduce work in its various stages of development. We’re welcoming research from across professions and disciplines on topics related to balancing individual and community priorities with respect to land use and the associated expectations for human and ecosystem stewardship and social and environmental ethics.
I hope to see independent scholars alongside industry and agency professionals and students from across the humanities and the sciences. Presentations are meant to generate conversation around a variety of approaches to land use, the moral implications of these approaches, as well as the ways that they influence the ongoing debate over how to achieve social and environmental justice.
Philosopher John Dewey referred to active discourse as “breaking the crust of convention” and I’d like us to use this symposium to get together and get on with it.
For information on how to join the conversation email mpatinellidubay@esf.edu
References from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty
Photo of Arbutus Lodge, compliments of Huntington Wildlife Forest, Newcomb, NY.
Marianne Patinelli-Dubay is a philosopher living, writing and teaching in the Adirondacks.
On its best day, philosophy succeeds in sending “the conversation off in new directions.” With a free exchange of ideas and a commitment to inquiry, philosophy as both catalyst and conveyor ought to “engender new normal discourses, new sciences, new philosophical research and thus new objective truths.”
In this spirit the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s Northern Forest Institute invites submissions for its Symposium of Interdisciplinary Scholarship in Land Use and Ethics, to be held at the Adirondack Interpretive Center on Huntington Wildlife Forest in Newcomb.
I envision this project as an opportunity to open up the dialog around issues of land use and ethics on local, national and global scales. This is the place for ideas in-process, unfinished research and to introduce work in its various stages of development. We’re welcoming research from across professions and disciplines on topics related to balancing individual and community priorities with respect to land use and the associated expectations for human and ecosystem stewardship and social and environmental ethics.
I hope to see independent scholars alongside industry and agency professionals and students from across the humanities and the sciences. Presentations are meant to generate conversation around a variety of approaches to land use, the moral implications of these approaches, as well as the ways that they influence the ongoing debate over how to achieve social and environmental justice.
Philosopher John Dewey referred to active discourse as “breaking the crust of convention” and I’d like us to use this symposium to get together and get on with it.
For information on how to join the conversation email mpatinellidubay@esf.edu
References from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty
Photo of Arbutus Lodge, compliments of Huntington Wildlife Forest, Newcomb, NY.
Marianne Patinelli-Dubay is a philosopher living, writing and teaching in the Adirondacks.
This week I happily begin work as a public environmental philosopher at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s Northern Forest Institute. Naturally I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how I can be of service to the Adirondack community in this position, so I thought this might be a good forum to explain a little bit about what it means to do philosophy followed by what we’re actually planning to do.
On thinking for a purpose
I see philosophy as an integrated practice of right-thinking and right-doing that has led to my decision to work as a philosopher in the Adirondacks. Years ago I became enlivened by an ecstatic pursuit of Philo Sophia and in the process, I became urgently aware that the subtext of my studies drew me towards philosophy as a lived intention that requires its practitioners to push to the outer edge where thinking becomes action and ideas have impact. » Continue Reading.
Her name was Hypatia and she lived, taught and published in Alexandria at the Platonist school from approximately AD 370 – 415. If the practice of western philosophy (φιλοσοφία) as we know it is from the Greek philo meaning lover and sophia meaning wisdom, then Hypatia might have been Sophia herself. One of her contemporaries wrote, “There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time.”
I had Hypatia on my mind this past weekend as I prepared for a Young Women and Girls in Science event sponsored by SUNY ESF’s Northern Forest Institute. I was asked to talk about the intersection of science and the humanities and more specifically, why the study of science is incomplete without the study of philosophy. Not least among the reasons why, is that the western scientific tradition comes from the western philosophical tradition and before knowledge splintered into specializations and narrow silos of information, there was unbounded curiosity and conversation. This style of conversation became the dialectic or discussion model that some of us are trying to move back towards as a method of inquiry, interdisciplinary learning and teaching.
So I thought I’d begin to introduce young women and girls who might be thinking about a career in the sciences, to this question of why scientists should care what philosophers think. It seemed that the best way to do this would be by talking about a philosopher who happens to be a woman and who is as often cited as a mathematician and an astronomer as for her progressive attitudes on sex, or what currently falls within the realm of identity politics. So if taking on the question of what philosophy could possibly have to do with science wasn’t enough, I’d planned to head straight towards what identity politics has to do with science.
Talking with young women and girls about why philosophy matters to science made me think about why women and girls matter to science. In other words, why should we care that women and girls enter into the sciences? Why, for that matter, should we care that any particular group is represented in any public/professional area? In the case of science the answer is somewhat heretical (and I’m mindful here that Hypatia met her unspeakable demise for such acts…). Science is not objective; in its entirety it is not the pure and objective pursuit of extracting truth from the physical world.
As the philosopher Cornel West puts it truth “is a way of life, as opposed to a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world.” Well, that’s all well and good for the humanities but science isn’t subject to the complicated dynamics of culture, perspective, subjectivity and the human condition generally – or is it? As philosopher and scientist Hypatia cautioned “Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth — even more so, since a superstition is intangible, you can’t get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”
The scientific method is bookended by the philosophical method. Empirical data collection doesn’t emerge in a vacuum but first a mind (not exhumed from, but as one part of the sensual human condition) has to be drawn to an inquiry, has to draw the parameters of that inquiry based on the desire to discover one thing or another about the physical world. These elements of drawing towards and of desire have no relationship to the type of objectivity that science is premised upon. (I’ll leave politics and capitalism as drivers of science for another post…) Even the most basic scientific discovery has to be interpreted, given meaning and brought about in language and often through metaphor.
All of which brings us again into the philosophical domain including ethics, emphasis, coercion, manipulation, bias and on and on. Every discipline including science, which in contrast with West’s earlier assertion, understands truth and fact as discoverable aspects of the world through its method, is a discipline brought about in the context of the human condition and the human condition is the concern of philosophers.
I understand truth to be something that is emergent and as the philosopher Richard Rorty suggested, it is created in the swamp of the human condition or in the lifework of a people rather than discovered whole in an objective state. Moreover, as soon as we begin pointing out truth with certainty and locating it within particular disciplinary or societal boundaries, then we invoke a universal style of truth that can’t be extracted from dynamics of power and ultimately (at least ultimately as history shows us) hegemony.
Philosophy (or at least some of its more recent work) has become about recognizing the amorphous nature of nature and navigating it for – as a conservation biologist colleague of mine so beautifully states, for “meaning and purpose” rather than mining it for truth and certainty. This leaves us on very unstable ground wherein all of these issues (including scientific issues) seem endlessly unstable. It is not, I believe, a matter of firming up that ground but rather of entering the landscape differently, recognizing that stability is (as Foucault would say) a chimera and the only truth that we can hope to achieve is subject to culture, identity and perspective.
If these ideas are useful at all I hope it is because they bring us closer to answering the question of why philosophy and women matter a great deal to science and why science as our most exacting tool of understanding the physical world, should be important to all of us. I hope it also seeds the ground for more conversation around these topics …
Portrait of Hypatia by Elbert Hubbard, 1908
Marianne is a philosopher living, writing and teaching in the Adirondacks.
It’s been a busy week couple weeks for new contributors and today I’ve got some more good news for our readers who enjoy the Almanack‘s natural history side.
Please join me in welcoming Paul B. Hai as our newest contributor. Paul is the Program Coordinator for the Northern Forest Institute for Conservation Education and Leadership Training of the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) and the leads the Adirondack Interpretive Center (AIC) in Newcomb, the former Newcomb VIC, and now the educational outreach venue of the NFI. He is co-founder of Children in Nature, New York and serves on the Grassroots Leadership Team of the Children & Nature Network.
Paul is passionate about creating interdisciplinary programs using natural history, inquiry-based activities and outdoor experiences as the foundations for teaching the process of science, exploring the Adirondack experience, and for getting children outside. He says that his commitment to using informal science education as a vehicle for reconnecting children to nature will form one of the key programmatic themes of the Adirondack Interpretive Center.
Paul first “visited” the Adirondacks at three-months old, returning with his family to camp on the islands of Lake George two weeks each summer for the next 14 years. He also spent eight summers attending Adirondack Swim and Trip Camp on Jones Pond, an experience that took him by foot and paddle all over the region.
Paul and his wife, ecologist Stacy McNulty, Associate Director of the Adirondack Ecological Center, live in Newcomb with their two daughters. Prior to moving to Newcomb, Paul spent four years living in Bolton Landing and working in Chestertown and Warrensburg before moving to Syracuse to attend graduate school at ESF.
Officials from the Adirondack Park Agency (APA) and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) announced today that on July 1, 2010, the APA will transfer ownership of the state-owned buildings and equipment of the Visitor Interpretive Center (VIC) in Newcomb to SUNY-ESF. The College will then begin a transitional period with the goal to manage future Newcomb VIC programs, according to a press release.
SUNY-ESF has announced its intention to integrate operations of its Adirondack Ecological Center and the Northern Forest Institute. SUNY-ESF President Cornelius B. Murphy, Jr., said the agreement supports the work of the college’s Adirondack Ecological Center, which is located on the Newcomb property. “This new initiative extends the mission of the AEC, with additional educational resources for both students and visitors so they can learn about the wonders of ecology in the Adirondacks,” Murphy said.
APA staff are expected to provide traditional VIC programming in consultation with SUNY-ESF at the Newcomb facility during the transitional period. Staff will provide interpretive services for the public Tuesday through Saturday from 9am till 5pm. The public will continue to have access to the trail network and exhibit rooms. During this time period, APA staff will also assist SUNY-ESF in the identification of programming needs that meet the college’s goals.
The agreement will include the transfer of all state-owned buildings on the 236 acre Newcomb site. The 6,000-square-foot main public assembly building with its 150-seat multiple purpose room, 700-square-foot exhibit room and staff offices as well as an adjacent 2,500-square-foot garage and classroom building will be surrendered to SUNY-ESF.
After December 31, 2010 programming needs in reference to staffing, hours of operations, public visitation, special programs inclusive of groups and schools, off site programs and outreach will be directly managed and funded by SUNY-ESF.
The DEC has officially announced that the historic Masten House (at left), on the site of the former iron mines in Tahawus in Newcomb, Essex County, will be the site of “a new leadership and training institute that focuses on the research and management of northern forests.” Northern forests is intended to mean the area that “extends from Lake Ontario at Tug Hill, across the Adirondacks to northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.”
Regular Almanack readers know that Eliot Spitzer’s budget called for $125,000 from the Environmental Protection Fund to be put toward SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s purchase and rehabilitation of the Masten House – that had apparently fallen through, late in the budget process, but was apparently found somewhere in DEC’s budget..
The DEC’s press release notes:
The project is a cooperative effort that will enhance forest preserve and wildlands management research and contribute to the local economy. ESF will run the Northern Forest Institute (NFI) on a 46-acre portion of a property owned by [Open Space Institute’s] Open Space Conservancy and leased on a long-term basis to the college for $1 a year. Establishment of the institute is being aided by a $1 million grant from Empire State Development to OSI and $125,000 from DEC to ESF. In addition, DEC has committed $1.6 million over the next four years to ESF scientists who will conduct three research projects on visitor demand, experiences, and impacts, as well as a training program for DEC employees responsible for managing recreational visits to New York State forest preserve lands.
The NFI will focus on meeting the educational and research needs of professional audiences, including representatives of state agencies, business leaders, and educators. The institute will also serve the general public, particularly college and secondary school students.
Here is some history of the Masten House from DEC:
Masten House is within the state historic district that encompasses the former town of Adirondack at the southern entrance to the High Peaks Wilderness area. The town was settled in 1826 and was home to one of the region’s first iron mines and early blast furnaces. The village was resettled in the late 19th century as the Tahawus Club…
The eight-bedroom Masten House was built in 1905 near secluded Henderson Lake and was used as a corporate retreat by NL Industries, which operated a nearby mining site. Masten House is within the state historic district that encompasses the former town of Adirondac at the southern entrance to the High Peaks Wilderness area. The town was settled in 1826 and was home to one of the region’s first iron mines and early blast furnaces. The village was resettled in the late 19th century as the Tahawus Club. Then-Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was staying at Tahawus in 1901 when he learned that President William McKinley had been shot. [Actually, as is noted by a commenter below, Roosevelt already knew McKinley was shot, he thought that the President would be OK and so went to Tahawus].
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