As the locals know, the Adirondack Park is the largest publicly protected state park, at six million acres. Because it is so large and widely protected, taking care of it is very important for wildlife, the environment and local communities within it.

The small town of Saranac Lake is in the northern part of the Adirondacks, so we’re pretty environmentally conscious. We have many programs to support this, such as a community power program, programs to promote electric vehicles, urban and community forestry programs (where we plant trees in the village such as at Mt. Pisgah and downtown) and an organic waste program at our local sewage plant. We’ve switched our street lamps to LED lights, we use clean energy for heating, we work to create a climate smart community and, last but not least, we have a walkable community.

All of these are wonderful programs and I love that we have them. But although Saranac Lake is already so environmentally friendly, we have some work to do. I want to focus on where most of our carbon emissions come from: heating.

Our sewage plant uses methane gas, which is produced from the sewage waste when it is heated and separated. This methane gas is what powers the digester boiler, reducing carbon emissions. A few buildings in town are also using geothermal heating — heating and cooling that comes from the ground — which is amazing but very expensive. To get it, you would dig up your yard and put pipes underneath it to collect the heat and cooling from the ground and pump it into your house. Even so, we still have a large carbon footprint.

Let’s start off with why small town carbon footprints are so much larger than if you were to live in a city. For one, we have to travel farther distances to get to town. There’s also less public transportation. More people own their own homes so they all have to pay for heating, whether that be with electric, gas or wood, compared to an apartment building where there is one source of heat for the whole building.

So what can the average person in Saranac Lake do to reduce their carbon footprint? You can get a gas efficient car to reduce the amount of fossil fuels your car needs. You can have some sort of clean energy producer such as solar panels or wind power to reduce your electric bill if you have electric heating. There are so many other ways to reduce your carbon footprint and these are only a few of them.

The programs Saranac Lake offers are funded through grants and charities. But what else can we do and work on as a community? We have a great river for us to put in a form of hydro power to power our community. We should also work on making public transportation more available for the people who live farther away. The community garden needs to be worked on so we can have fresh greens and fruits for our community. These are all things for locals to think about and work on to create more environmentally friendly communities and lower all of our carbon footprints.

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Fern is a senior at Saranac Lake High School who loves nature and hopes to study it in the future.