by Connor Smith, 2020 ANCA Graduate Fellow My introduction to the Adirondack Park was made through a summer camp in 2016 when a friend convinced me to work in Saranac Lake. As a resident of the West Coast, I was excited for an opportunity to explore the East as I knew nothing about the area. Somewhere along the way, I must have caught the Adirondack bug, because four years later I am back in the area. I’ve been working this summer as a Graduate Fellow at ANCA, supporting the work of the Center...Read more

This month, ANCA released our five-year strategic plan with “A New Economy that Works for All” as the central driving vision. Central to our goal of building prosperity across northern New York is creating and sustaining wealth and value in local communities; a key element of this work is the localization of the supply chains that serve our economies and people. Another goal for this work is creating opportunities for the next generation of entrepreneurs who want to live and work here. In that...Read more

Verkhoyansk, a small town in the Arctic Circle reported a temperature of 100.4 Fahrenheit on June 20, 2020, setting an all-time record. Indeed, the last 5 years have been the hottest in recorded history . We are also seeing, in the wake of COVID-19, that the consequences of profligate production and consumption of fossil fuels are causing more trouble than just rising temperatures and massive climate disruption. The New York Times reported on June 18 that, “Pregnant women exposed to high...Read more

Today, on June 19, 2020, ANCA designates Juneteenth an official holiday for our organization. On this day, which marks 155 years since the emancipation of enslaved Black men, women and children in the Confederacy, we recognize that our nation is still plagued by systemic racism and structural inequities. We commit this day as a time of learning, to stand in solidarity with the Black community, to acknowledge and oppose the injustices they face every day, and to work towards becoming antiracist...Read more

ANCA stands with our Black sisters and brothers in this time of nation-wide grief and protest that have resulted from the murders of George Floyd and so many others. We stand with our Black sisters and brothers in declaring that Black Lives Matter. We stand with our Black sisters and brothers as America faces an inflection point, ready to do the hard work of making much needed change. This moment demands intentionality. Intentional language, intentional strategies, and intentional action to...Read more

by Adam Dewbury, Local Food Systems Coordinator and Kate Fish, Executive Director This April, shoppers throughout the country faced empty milk shelves in their grocery stores, while at the same time, North Country dairy farmers dumped tens of thousands of gallons of their herds’ daily production down the drain. Why did this happen? Why are farmers dumping milk when store shelves just a few miles away are empty? The problem is a food supply chain — the network of people, places, and processes...Read more

I was sixteen when my father died. I could scarcely remember his face, since I was 10 years old when last I saw him. That’s when I left Jamaica to attend school in Norway. Yet, while his visage was a sunny-somewhat-mythologized blur, the memory of the day he died remains stark… I was thinking, in class at Kvinnherad videregående skole , about how my little sister Nilla Brit had annoyed-the- faen out of me the entire morning. Thinking about testing the teeny bit of sexual angst that had morphed...Read more

On this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I think about my sister’s prescient and intentional decision to live a life that is marginally dependent on global systems, as locally sourced as possible, and with as light a carbon footprint as she can muster. My sister lives on a high mesa in Utah. Her home sits 16 miles up Sand Flats Road, just outside of Moab. She has no power, no water, no cable or WiFi, or connections to the normal things that link most of the rest of us to greater dependence on...Read more

These are the most turbulent times in any of our memories. Some of us remember all the way back to the 70s when we were marching in the streets demanding the end to wars and the launch of clean air and water standards. (OK Boomer!) Some of us came of age when the markets crashed and the global economy burned in 2008. Some of us have been deployed into unknown dangerous territories. But this feels worse. Day by day, terrible uncertainty and fear grow as the Coronavirus spreads and takes its toll...Read more

Every ten years since 1790 — that’s 22 times over 220 years! — the United States government has conducted a national count of everyone who lives in the country. ANCA is helping spread the word about the Census here in the Adirondack North Country because this short and simple survey has a direct and lasting impact on our communities. Representation Census data determines how many seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives and how congressional districts are appointed. This...Read more