Geologists are moving toward declaring that our Earth is in a new geologic age: the Anthropocene. This epoch is not caused by some outside force like an asteroid strike. It is caused by us, Homo sapiens, human beings. Theoretical chemists Paul Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer have identified 1784 as the “onset of the Anthropocene,” while palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has argued it was the agricultural revolution 5,000 years earlier that marked the start of human beings as a biophysical force.

Either way, scientists around the world have come to the consensus that humans have forced climate change and that we are in the midst of mass extinction of species.

On this page for decades, we’ve highlighted and supported local environmental initiatives but the half-century-old mantra of “think globally, act locally” wasn’t going to cut it. A world movement, now underway, was needed, and with the election of Joe Biden as our president, we had renewed hope. He immediately rejoined the Paris Agreement so that the United States could work with the nations of the world to tackle the climate crisis — a crisis that every day hurts people around the world and here at home with extreme weather conditions.

Rather than adopting the false premise of the previous administration — that green energy is harmful to the economy — the Biden administration clearly stated, “Climate change poses an existential threat, but responding to this threat offers an opportunity to support good-paying, union jobs, strengthen America’s working communities, protect public health, and advance environmental justice.”

We still need to act locally, and that point was driven home to us last week by Aaron Mair of Guilderland in a podcast interview. Mair has just been named as the wilderness campaign director by the Adirondack Council. Mair is enthused, as are we, about Biden’s focus on the importance of forests.

Part of Biden’s climate-change agenda is protecting 30 percent of our nation’s lands and ocean territories by 2030, known as “30 by 30.” Currently, about 26 percent of the United States’ ocean territories are protected but only about 12 percent of our nation’s land area is protected.

The protection is imperative because natural landscapes pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store carbon in trees, shrubs, grass, and soil.

A group of conservation biologists in 2019 proposed a “Global Deal for Nature” as a companion pact to the Paris Agreement to “help ensure that climate targets are met while preventing species extinctions and the rapid erosion of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the terrestrial, freshwater, and marine realms.” In their policy framework based on scientific guidelines, the scientists point out that protecting natural landscapes and seascapes “not only safeguards biodiversity but also is the cheapest and fastest alternative for addressing climate change and is not beholden to developing carbon removal technologies unlikely to be effective or to scale in the time-bound nature of the current twin crises.”

The core mission of the Adirondack Council, Mair notes, is to protect wilderness. He notes that the headwaters of the Hudson come from the Adirondacks and that many municipalities rely on clean water resources. New York State is rich in wilderness, Mair notes, as close to 7,000 square miles are protected by the state’s constitution as part of the Adirondack Park. Mair, a former Sierra Club president, notes “About a dozen of our biggest national wildlife monuments would fit inside the Adirondacks.”

But, unlike many of the national landmarks, the blue line defining the Adirondack Park encompasses not just government-owned wild areas but a combination of public and private lands with farms, businesses, and residential areas. With Biden’s call for investment in infrastructure, Mair is committed to simultaneously protecting the wilderness — both private and public lands, the all-important carbon sinks — while generating the revenues that communities need with living-wage jobs.

He envisions jobs ranging from biologists and forest rangers to hospitality jobs for growing eco-tourism. Data collection, Mair says, is essential at the start of any planning process. Gone are the days, he says “of just willy-nilly blind use and laissez-faire …. We can absolutely love something to death,” he says of the High Peaks area, where overuse has led to erosion and crowding on trails.

Mair is well-versed in data collection as he retires this month from his work as a public-health epidemiologist for the state’s health department. He was a member of the spatial analytic team that worked at Ground Zero after the terrorists’ attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to recreate the digital infrastructure for New York City.

He also worked to contain the ebola outbreak where initially, he said, the method was using census data, based on Africans’ self-identification, which Mair, an African American, termed a “racist way of doing things.” Drawing on his military experience, Mair said he realized terrorists were tracked by looking at their visas, so that method — “looking at how people were moving through the international transportation system of air travel” — was used to track the spread of the disease.

Gathering data about Adirondack uses, Mair believes, will lead to management plans and policies that will at once protect the wilderness while at the same time spurring the economy. “We want to put the heart back in the Adirondacks ...,” said Mair. “We must do so with the jobs and the resources to make it happen.” In creating jobs, he said, population will be retained so youth “don’t have to go out of their state or county. They’re going to find those jobs in a community that they’ve grown up in, that they love and can now help thrive.”

Mair became a pioneer for environmental justice when he lived with his family in Albany’s Arbor Hill. The paint on his new house peeled and his children suffered from asthma; he discovered the root cause of both was the nearby garbage incinerator. He is carrying that pioneering spirit to his new job. The next frontier is to save the planet,” he says.

Grandiose? Maybe. But also essential.

The idea is not new to our country — it is merely more urgent. In 1851, Henry David Thoreau gave a lecture in Concord, Massachusetts where he lived — later published as an essay in The Atlantic — in which he spoke his now famous words, “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” People, said Thoreau, were “part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”

The effort to save the planet from ourselves will take all of us. We are lucky to live in a state with such a vast wilderness area and luckier still to live in the Capital Region, making it easy for us to both enjoy the Adirondacks and to contribute to the park’s prosperity and preservation.

“What is old is new again,” says Mair, citing the Civilian Conservation Corps created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when, during the Great Depression, he was governor of New York; spawning a program in the Adirondacks that became national after he was elected president. The government program paired needed jobs with conservation.

This January, in announcing his plan to combat climate change, Biden called for a Climate Conservation Corps to be formed “within existing appropriations, to mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs.”

The executive order on tackling the climate crisis says, “The initiative shall aim to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.”

That’s a tall order. But it is also a call to action. It’s not just the Amazon rainforest that needs to be protected, or even the Tongass National Forest in Alaska — both of which we hear so much about — the need is right here in our midst. With every piece of land that the local Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy secures an easement for, with every private parcel that a landowner donates development rights on, we get a little closer to, as Mair puts it, saving the planet and saving humanity.

“I say, go in, lean in, and let us expand wilderness ...,” says Mair. “Really push back and be serious and intentional about our efforts as a country and as a people with regards to the worst effects of climate change. And, here’s the thing, New York State and all of us are frontline communities in this fight.”

The battle is joined. We are, each of us, on the front line. Let’s meet the moment.