“Reflections on Twenty Years of Teaching a College Seminar on the Adirondack Park,” by Onno Oerlemans, the Elizabeth J. McCormack Professor of Literature, was recently published in The Adirondack Journal of Environmental Studies. The article explores the origin and focus of “Forever Wild: The Cultural and Natural Histories of the Adirondack Park,” a course he last taught in 2024.
Though he teaches literature, Oerlemans said his “interests and scholarship have always been interdisciplinary, focusing on how Romantic period writers … have understood and valued the natural world.”
“Forever Wild” was developed with Ernest Williams, the William R. Kenan Professor of Biology Emeritus, who Oerlemans said shared both his interest in the park and interdisciplinary learning. “We both understood that the Adirondack Park was an ideal topic for the program, and that studying it would require many disciplinary perspectives and an openness to complexity and uncertainty.”
Oerlemans said the challenges of the course included finding a broad range of texts and sources – readings around which class discussions could be structured, as well as finding new scholarship on contemporary issues like invasive species, the rise of the conservation easement as a tool of land preservation, and staying up-to-date with issues facing the Adirondack Park Agency.
“What began as a hastily conceived attempt to contribute to a new college program for interdisciplinary seminars became both a passion-project and a long-lived part of the college’s Environmental Studies curriculum,” he wrote. He also noted that the course has become one of his “proudest and most satisfying professional accomplishments,” adding that he hopes it will inspire other teachers to develop similar courses.
Oerlemans is currently working on a book exploring ways “various writers have represented the Adirondack landscape and culture.”
Posted February 19, 2026
