There were seven protesters from Greater Adirondacks Bioregion Earth First! at Little Green Pond that day. Three of them were floating in inflatables in the middle of the pond, one shaped like an alligator, the others a whale and a dolphin.
This is what 60 law enforcement officers discovered on the morning of Thursday, August 23, 1991, when they showed up armed with revolvers, billy clubs and police dogs to ensure that agents from the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) could dose the 69-acre pond in Santa Clara with 420 gallons of rotenone, a chemical that efficiently kills gilled organisms. The DEC argued that the fish kill was necessary to prevent yellow perch in the pond from infesting nearby Little Clear Pond, the state’s only hatchery for Atlantic landlocked salmon. Earth First! countered that damming the channel connecting the two ponds was preferable to killing all the fish.
The Earth First! “swimming party” was the latest skirmish in 16 months of protests and counterprotests as locals and environmentalists reacted to the release of a report from Governor Mario Cuomo’s Commission on the Adirondacks in the 21st Century in May 1990.
Some local residents and business owners were upset by the report’s 245 recommendations, including a suggested year-long development moratorium on much of the Adirondack Park’s private land and a plan for the state to purchase an additional 650,000 acres. People were worried that if the state bought large tracts of land for preservation, the local economy would suffer. In protest, the Adirondack Solidarity Alliance, a citizen’s group advocating “home rule” and property rights, organized a traffic slowdown on the stretch of Northway running through the Adirondack Park. A second motorcade attracting around 450 vehicles was led by State Senator Ronald Stafford, who sided with the protesters. The Adirondack Minutemen, a group founded in 1976 by Anthony D’Elia to protect property rights, threatened a revolt against “King Cuomo.”
But the report also attracted environmental groups who came to the Adirondack Park to defend New York State’s closure of roads in wilderness areas, protest pond reclamation and overdevelopment, and argue for more protection of wilderness areas. Of these groups, Earth First! drew the biggest headlines and the most heat.
When 20 members of Earth First! convened for a three-day “rendezvous” camping trip on Lewey Lake to study the governor’s report, the Citizen’s Council of the Adirondacks, a group that advocated for more local control over decision-making in the park, threatened to send a contingent to confront the activists at their campsite. They never showed up, but the threat ratcheted up anxiety among the environmentalists.