Aaron Mair

By Jack Rightmyer

Residence: Schenectady
Age: 60
Family: Wife, Elizabeth Floyd, writer for the Altamont Enterprise; Four daughters, Marjana, Heba, Maryam and Olivia
Primary Sports: Hiking, Walking, former Runner
Profession: ‘Forever Adirondacks’ campaign director, Adirondack Council; retired, epidemiologist for NYS Dept of Health

For over 35 years Aaron Mair has been working double duty for the NYS Department of Health and as an environmental activist, a Sierra Club volunteer leader, and from 2015-17 he was the 57th president of the national Sierra Club. “It was like I had two full-time jobs,” Aaron said. “It’s nice to be retired from the state now and pursue this new job as the director of the Adirondack Council’s new policy initiative called Forever Adirondacks.”

This new job will allow him to focus on getting more funding and policy measures from federal and state officials around the issues of clean water, jobs and wilderness protection for the Adirondacks. With all his experience, he knows the job is not an easy one. “I remember back in 2016 looking at the ominous data concerning the climate and realizing the urgency to get our act together and enact some real change. We basically had ten years to do something before it would be too late. The Obama administration brought me in to speak at a Senate hearing and Ted Cruz used all his skill as a lawyer to make a case against the scientific evidence I was presenting. We had an opportunity to finally do something right for the environment and humanity, but Cruz used it as an opportunity to pontificate. Sadly, for Cruz, it was all theatrics. His stock went up. The fossil fuel industry began sending him large donations, and it resulted in another delay of climate action.”

Aaron was encouraged to hear President Biden speak in January about the importance of protecting our wild areas not only as a way to preserve wilderness, but as a way to create jobs. “My calling today with the Adirondack Council is to do just that, to expand Adirondack wilderness, protect what we already have and help to create jobs. We need people to repair trails and make new trailheads. We also need scientists to study our trees, plants, lakes and streams. We need more rangers, foresters, educators and engineers. We can create thousands of good paying jobs in the Adirondacks so these people can buy a home, raise a family and stay in the towns we already have to enjoy the area’s pristine outdoors.”

He is continually amazed at the genius of the Forever Wild amendment to the NYS Constitution in 1894 and how it has preserved so much of the Adirondacks. “I grew up in Peekskill, the Hudson Highlands in the 1960s when it was very undeveloped and had many farms. Some of my favorite memories are walking in the woods with my grandfather and my father, but today much of that area is paved over and no longer wilderness. I came from a family of nine, and fishing was not for sport. It was important to catch fish and provide for my family.”

Aaron learned from his grandfather the art of salt packing fish they would catch in the Hudson. “My grandfather learned how to do it as a young boy from his enslaved relatives. We’d pack 100 pounds of fish in a barrel, keep it in the basement, and live off that almost year-round.”

He was an avid track and cross-country runner at Peekskill High School in the 1970s with best times of 4:38 in the mile, 2:03 for the half-mile, and 16:40 for a three-mile cross country race. “I ran many road races at that time, but what I enjoyed the most was running alone on the wooded trails at Blue Mountain State Park. I loved being in the woods during a summer thunderstorm with the rain pouring down. I’d run five or ten miles with only me and the sounds of the woods with my feet pounding the trail.”

Aaron also had a 15-mile loop he’d run, all backroads from Montrose to Peekskill to Van Cortlandt Manor down to Croton and back. “I had the roads all to myself. There were a handful of cars that would go by me.” He loved to push himself as a runner to go faster and farther. “Running showed me the importance of discipline, and it demonstrated that I could always do better. I remember running up hills and catching some beautiful sights of the Hudson River. I felt powerful when I was young and ran like that; like I could do anything.”

He’s proud of his four daughters who all are runners, tennis players and swimmers. “Like me, they all love the outdoors. They’ve also been involved with environmental activism, especially when we were trying to clean up the PCBs in the Hudson. My two oldest daughters, who ended up graduating from US Military Academy at West Point (both are now Majors in the US Army), attended hearings and spoke out about how the PCBs were killing and infecting the fish. They even brought along some students from their high school biology and chemistry classes.” They were moved to careers in military service in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Aaron’s cousin Linda Mair died in the North Tower, and they watched their dad work as a first responder for two months at Ground Zero.

In the 1990s, his daughters participated in a youth program for winter sports at Mt. Van Hoevenberg. “I took my girls on trips to the Adirondacks so they could see the beauty of the place and get a sense of its history. We toured the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, and I talked to them about abolitionist Gerrit Smith who provided land for Black families to farm in North Elba.”

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020, as he was on a daily training run in rural Georgia, was a reminder to Aaron that there were some communities he knew not to run in when he was a teenager. “There were definitely pockets of virulent racism near Peekskill, and I knew I could be harmed if I ran there. My family also had regular reunions in Greenville, S.C., on free land where our enslaved ancestors had been emancipated. I remember going there frequently in the 60s and 70s, while being instructed to stay right on the property.”

He was very moved to see so much protest last summer after the murder of George Floyd, especially the numbers of young people and white Americans. “It was the first time I saw towns and communities with very few African-Americans going out and marching in the street. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died, whites did not go out in downtown Ballston Spa or Glens Falls to march.”

Moments like that keep him motivated to continue the fight for equality and to find ways to protect our wilderness areas. “According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018 special report, we only have ten years to act to preserve our climate. This should not be a political or racial issue, but John Muir, who created the Sierra Club over 100 years ago, often said that everything is linked together.”

When Aaron was the Sierra Club national leader, he had the opportunity to meet with President Obama in Yosemite Valley and show him first-hand the impacts of climate change. “I felt the spirit that day of John Muir meeting in the same spot years earlier with President Teddy Roosevelt.”

Being a runner in his youth continues to give him reserves of energy to keep going and not give up when the struggles seem insurmountable. “I blew my knee out running in the late 1990s, which brought an end to my high impact sports career, but I still hike and walk six or seven miles a day. We are blessed to have so many beautiful places to walk and hike in our area from the Adirondacks to the Catskills, the Berkshires and Vermont. The vistas are available for all of us.”

Jack Rightmyer (jackxc@nycap.rr.com) of Burnt Hills was a longtime cross-country coach at Bethlehem High School and today is an Adjunct English Professor at Siena College. He has written two books “A Funny Thing About Teaching” and “It’s Not About Winning.”