Film: Parcelizing the Catskills and the Boiled Frog Syndrome

The Catskill Mountains is a region in the Southern Tier of NYS covering an area of 3.8 million acres. The Catskill Park Preserve is an area of "high peaks" covering 700,000 acres within the region. The State of New York owns 300,000 within the "Blue Line" of the Park Preserve which are designated "forever wild" by Article 14 of the NYS Constitution. In the aggregate, NYS and NYC own less than 12% of the region. The remaining 88% is privately owned.

The Catskill Region is essentially a forest ecosystem and provides a plethora of essential natural services. Clean, potable water flows by the force of gravity to 9 million NYC residents from six city owned reservoirs. The Delaware and Susquehanna River basins provide fresh water to 10s of millions of downstream residents in NJ, PA and MD. The regions forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere and provide the deep interior forest habitat needed by rare neotropical songbirds, an underutilized abundance of valuable hardwood timber, an easily accessible foodshed and a variety of seasonal recreational activities for 23 million residents of the NYC metro area.

But the long term sustainability of these increasingly valuable natural services is in doubt. Slowly but steadily, parcelization, exurban development, second home construction and urban sprawl are supplanting productive farms and forests and creating new and greater demands for municipal services. This ominous trend may raise real estate values and taxes and reduce the feasibility of farming and logging, already under severe economic stresses and compel farmers and non-industrial private forest owners, the traditional gatekeepers of open space, to sell their unprofitable holdings to their "highest and best use".

According to the US Census Bureau, the population of the NYC metro area now exceeds 23 million, almost double that of 1950, and is expected to reach 41 million by 2050.

The film, "Parcelizing the Catskills and the Boiled Frog Syndrome", questions the sustainability of the traditional, vitally needed natural services provided by the Catskill Region.