Adirondacks

While much tourism scholarship isolates various aspects of tourist motivation/experience and tourism sites, few studies have addressed the connections between motivation, the tourist’s role in constructing place, and the power of ideology in constructing both the tourism subject and the tourism site. Lacan’s formulation of alienation provides the foundation for exploring tourists’ motivations for visiting wilderness, while theories of power and ideology from Althusser and Foucault are employed to further investigate the power of the wilderness ideology in the formation of both the Adirondack Park as wilderness and the ‘Nature Tourist’ as subject. This study, through examination of the ways alienation/authenticity and ideology work in tandem in the construction of place and subject, yields greater understanding of how and why tourists come to value wilderness areas, and what motivates visitors to seek out these areas. Wilderness, constructed as pure, pristine, and sacred, is seen by many nature tourists as the antidote to their own feelings of alienation, and thus serves as the material manifestation of these tourists’ ability to reconcile their alienated selves with their true, whole selves. Because many nature tourists are motivated by the search for the authentic in both tourism site and experience, the site, as ideology materialized, and motivation rooted in the search for the authentic, are two sides of the same coin. Further, through their own narratives and practices in wilderness, visitors themselves become active agents in the construction of the Park’s identity as wilderness.

Keywords: Wilderness, Tourism, Nature, Ideology, Alienation, Authenticity

Loss of small herbaria is an unfortunate global trend, and initiation of new collections at small academic institutions is an increasingly rare occurrence. In 2006, a new herbarium was established at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh. The PLAT herbarium has since grown to more than 7,000 specimens, many of them representative of the flora of northeastern New York (especially Clinton County). Previous to 2006, this region was without a recognized herbarium, the nearest in-state collections being more than 150 miles away. Although botanists have previously worked in the region, relatively few plant species were recorded for Clinton County by the New York Flora Atlas – a resource providing species distribution records based on specimens accessioned in herbarium collections. Given the dearth of available distribution data for Clinton County (including the eastern Adirondack Mountains and the western Lake Champlain valley), this project sought to provide records of previously unreported species by comparing NY Flora Atlas maps with current holdings. 203 species will now be added to the NY Flora Atlas for Clinton County, roughly half of those considered exotic. This exercise has amplified the importance of supporting and maintaining small regional herbaria as repositories of valuable biodiversity information. Likewise, this project also highlights the enduring value of training in floristics and taxonomy.