Philip Terrie’s new book, “Wild Forest Lands,” offers just what one comes to expect from this historian and longtime chronicler of Adirondack issues. It’s detailed, thoughtful, challenging and occasionally provocative. This writer loves the Adirondacks. He conveys that well, along with an admonition that all of us who share that view must be forever vigilant in defense of this unique region.

In early chapters, the story serves as memoir. We learn how experiences at a summer camp for boys on Long Lake forever etched enthusiasm for the Adirondacks into the author’s genome. Hiking and camping aren’t enough. In time, Terrie channels his academic efforts into ideas of wilderness and how its meaning has changed in America.

His long career at the Adirondack Experience (when it was still the Adirondack Museum) and then in universities gave him unusual vantage points from which to consider various issues and controversies. His publication Contested Terrain not surprisingly served as the basic text for the first course I took in Adirondack Environmental History.

Several themes run parallel routes through the book. One is the changing concept of what wilderness means. Once associated with fear, then representing something in nature that needs to be conquered and its resources exploited, wilderness evolved to a point of reverence as a place of respite from hectic urbanized and industrialized life. Its next iteration was largely as a place for recreation.

In the Adirondacks, especially, rationale for wilderness has changed over a century. Whereas a key factor during the late 1800s was the need to protect the watershed, to assure water for New York’s canal system and its rivers, the orientation has moved toward a desire to promote recreational use in a natural setting. Terms like “timber” and “wild forest” are debated; so are snowmobiles.

As preservation efforts have moved forward, there’s also been some pushback. From local residents, who resent rules instituted by those from outside the region. From business people, who feel wilderness designation hampers economic development. From more recent historians, who see an elitism and discrimination built into the concept.

In reading the book, one learns a lot about the New York State Constitution. The term “forever wild,” enshrined in Article 6 (since renumbered as the more familiar Article 14), has stayed the same. However, connotations have varied with successive generations. If you, like me, didn’t know that every 20 years or so, New York residents vote on whether to rewrite the constitution, you’ll begin counting down the days to the next opportunity, around 2038.

Some of Terrie’s discourse is academic, but one need not get bogged down in philosophical argument. I learned that texts that have influenced my thinking heavily, like Roderick Nash’s “Wilderness and the American Mind,” are among those that have been critiqued and called into question over the decades since its publication.

William Cronon, for instance, urges people to think about wilderness from the perspective of Native Americans and minority groups. His premise is seeing wilderness as a cultural construction. The way in which different groups might have varying views is encapsulized by a quote from Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Sioux — “Only to the ‘White man’ was nature a wilderness.”

Detailed discussion elucidates significant court cases in which the constitution’s “forever wild” clause was challenged. Fervent and knowledgeable people argue on both sides of each issue. Some biases can be easily predicted; others come as a surprise. Each case reminds that what I seek in a wilderness may not be what my neighbor prefers. Often there’s a gray zone between staying true to one’s beliefs and a sense of “copping out.”

Terrie is a prodigious researcher. He includes extensive notations and a long bibliography. This book is current enough to include such recent additions to Adirondack literature as A Wild Idea, by Brad Edmondson, and The Black Woods, by Amy Godine.

“Wild Forest Lands” will become a standard addition to Adirondack shelves at public libraries and in personal collections. Concepts of wilderness and wild forest are not set in stone. Terrie ensures we understand that, while also enhancing our knowledge so we can be informed participants in future discussions.