The Outsider

Dana

So where are you from?I’m from High Falls New York which is in mid Hudson Valley
And you grew up there?I actually grew up in Westchester which is the lower Hudson Valley but the mid Hudson Valley is a pretty unique area in that people flock to it who do care about environmental issues. It's a huge farming hub theres tons of farms I mean you can get local anything you can live entirely on locally raised grass fed meat people raise chickens eggs tons of produce cheese farms
And would you say most people do choose to live that way?Yeah, I think so because the history of the area is that it is a framing area. There are farms that are 300 years old. High Falls was settled in the 1600’s I think that's what people mainly did was farm. It's interesting because there was a period of  time when that wasn’t happening anymore and now its going back to that which is amazing and since there is all this fertile ground that has been farmed for so long people are really protective of the area the fracking issue is interesting because there are a lot of new people coming in it's a very touristy area there's a lot of money there are a lot of people from their area who don't have very much and the problem is that oil companies are offering people a lot of money to drill on their land and people who are not doing so well are willing to take it but they don't realize that it's going to affect the drinking water for everyone so it's kind of this issue where there are these people who are very anti fracking and pro environment  but then there's the other end of the spectrum which is probably true here too im sure theres tons of that here too I mean there's people that have lived here forever and then theres people that come here who seem like environmental activists but they are imports from other areas. So I think that's kind of the case with why certain places are hubs of environmental activism and other places are not. Its because this place, it's not just the people who are from here people flock to the area because of that which is like Newport New York it's this great place the college is there and there is a ton of environmental activism and its because people are drawn to it for that reason.

Dana Enjoying her Saturday morning at the farmers market.