A hundred years of the Appalachian Trail brings thoughts of large landscape conservation
This year, the United States is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Appalachian Trail.
This iconic footpath is known to hikers and bureaucrats alike as simply “the AT.” However, an actual pathway was not fully completed until 1937, and the first “thru-hiker” would not complete the journey until 1948.
Consequently, this centennial is less about a grounded footpath and more about the groundbreaking idea of “regional planning” — an early precursor of what today is often described as large landscape conservation.
The idea of the AT was put forth by a classically-trained forester, one whom many environmental historians regard as an influential — albeit unsung — early proponent of conservation.
Yet Benton MacKaye was a highly original thinker who was by no means constrained by the agronomic orientation of forestry. Rather, his thinking was expansive in at least two significant ways.
First, in terms of geography, MacKaye envisioned continent-spanning regions rather than localized protected areas.
Second, rather than adopting a narrow focus on resource conservation, he was conceptually most concerned with the relationship between labor, social trends, and land use patterns.
Indicative of MacKaye’s innovative thinking was where he published his 1921 articulation of the AT: The Journal of the American Institute of Architects. Somewhat incongruously, at least from a contemporary perspective, the journal served as the locus for a group of progressive thinkers who were conceptualizing and promoting the idea of regional planning at many different scales.
Had MacKaye focused solely on a physical trail, the Journal’s editors would hardly have considered the manuscript.
But MacKaye envisioned the trail as a connecting cord that would both run through and define a rural region — and thereby accomplish a range of societal goals, from maintaining the region’s character to rescuing the American laborer from urban drudgery.
What is the Appalachian Trail today?
Most Americans will be familiar with the Appalachian Trail as a continental-scale hiking route along the Appalachian Mountains running parallel to the country’s Eastern Seaboard.
Stretching 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine, on any given year approximately three million people hike on a portion of it, though only about a thousand people are registered as “thru-hikers” each year (partly due to efforts to relieve overcrowding on the trail, which have resulted in some complex criteria involved in designating “true” thru-hikers).
But the AT is far more than just a trail; it is also a national iconic treasure that represents something beyond its physical manifestation, an elevation from mere object or place to a phenomenon that elicits some kind of indefinable collective emotive response.
The AT populates the same symbolic realm as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser, the Everglades, or a California redwood tree. All of these are icons of conservation, but with differing inflections in their representative connotations. Where does the AT stand in all this?
For the American public at large, the AT symbolizes opportunity — specifically, the possibility of setting out on a life-altering experience in the great outdoors (or at least a pleasant walk in the woods).
But for MacKaye and the conservation community that followed him (as well as an expanding public audience), the Appalachian Trail also meant the possibility of a space where one could escape the stresses and rigors of a modern industrial lifestyle in a region free of the accoutrements of mostly “natural” environment.
The quandary has been, and remains, how to maintain that space — or more specifically, that region or landscape — in perpetuity. And with the looming threat of climate change impacts on the region, that quandary is becoming more urgent.
The AT as a precursor to large landscape conservation
Historically, most of the practical work on the AT has focused on tying together the thread of the trail itself, which by itself has proved an extremely challenging endeavor.
But MacKaye’s broader original intent has never faded, and over the decades many individuals and institutions across the AT region have aspired to frame the AT as a platform for conservation at a regional scale — that is, at a scale far broader than the narrow trail corridor itself.
One key example was the Appalachian Greenway initiative of the early 1970s, the purpose of which was “to conserve the Appalachian mountain environment through which the Appalachian Trail passes.”
A commissioned 1974 report found that such a regional approach would provide “a conservation ethic and program which can benefit fishermen, hunters, swimmers, campers, walkers, picnickers, cross-country skiers and hikers, as well as protect the city water supplies, provide the city foods, and maintain nearby wilderness areas for those who may not use them but like to know that those options still exist.”
Collectively, the AT has thus served as a precursor of what contemporary conservationists call large landscape conservation (LLC).
A comprehensive 2010 report by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy described LLC this way:
“While it is hard to define precisely what constitutes a large landscape conservation effort, there is a growing consensus that such efforts are multijurisdictional, multipurpose, and multi-stakeholder, and they operate at various geographic scales using a variety of governance arrangements…. The common currency in large landscape conservation is regional collaboration — the ability to work across boundaries with people and organizations that have diverse interests yet share a common place.”
According to this characterization, the AT certainly meets the criteria for an LLC initiative. But for any number of reasons, the AT has not received the recognition it deserves as an LLC effort, even within the conservation community.
Rather, efforts in Florida and Central America dating back to the early 1990s are often highlighted as early large landscape conservation efforts, while efforts to protect a Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem date back to the 1960s (and before) will be familiar to most practicing conservationists.
At an even larger scale, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) has worked since the mid-1990s to conserve habitat and working lands across a region that stretches some 2,000 miles northward from Greater Yellowstone to Canada’s Yukon Territory.
Y2Y has garnered a quarter-century’s worth of deliberative and, to some degree, systematic experience in implementing LLC. Several other large regions around the world have followed suit.
Yet while Y2Y was the first LLC to garner widespread recognition in the conservation world as a “continental scale” initiative, it is noteworthy that the north-south extent of Y2Y is roughly on the same order of magnitude as the AT.
Consequently, and judging from MacKaye’s original conception, the AT can make a strong case for pride of first place.
Bringing MacKaye’s vision to ground
Achieving the goal of large landscape conservation around the AT will not be easy or straightforward.
It will require the best of our creative and innovative thinking to ensure that both the conservation community and the broader public conceive of the AT as the core of a much larger region.
Fortunately, a plethora of land trusts and conservation organizations from Georgia to Maine are tirelessly working to conserve the region of the AT, and these efforts are increasingly coordinated through the Appalachian Trail Landscape Partnership (ATLP), a joint initiative of more than 100 partners led by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (which MacKaye helped establish in 1925) and the US National Park Service (which has protected the AT since the passage of the 1968 National Scenic Trails Act).
In addition, the Eastern Wildway Initiative of the Wildlands Network, an organization active in the ATLP, is working to advance conservation across the AT landscape through national policies and on-the-ground projects focused on maintaining ecological connectivity.
While these conservationists are up against a familiar litany of threats and intense pressures, ranging from habitat conversion and fragmentation to invasive species and climate change, the ATLI has banded together under the recognition that an effective response must be counteracted from a large landscape perspective.
Benton MacKaye recognized the intertwining nature of social problems and natural resource problems, and that recognition led him to conceive of a pathway — both literal and figurative — toward resolving both.
MacKaye’s grand hopes may have been idealistic, even for a man rooted in the progressive movement of the early 20th century. But his ideal remains worthy of pursuit, even if it entails the monumental task of fulfilling the AT’s potential for large landscape conservation in some of the most populated regions of the continent.
Since its conception in 1921, the Appalachian Trail has served as a pathway — again, both figuratively and literally — leading people toward a greater connection to the natural world. But all too often, hiking the AT would be misconceived as solely an athletic endeavor through a linear slice of nature.
Now, at its centennial, the time has come for the AT’s original landscape-scale vision to flourish as a mutually supportive endeavor amongst people and nature in a changing world.
This piece was originally published Aug. 12, 2021 on The Conversation. It was written by Charles C. Chester, U.S. chair of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative Council who also teaches global environmental politics at Brandeis University and at the Fletcher School of Tufts University.
