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| Adrian Kuzminski and wife, Antoinette, at their farm in the Fly Creek Valley, their home since 1980. |
As recently as a month ago, you would have seen him front and center at the Otsego County Board of Representatives’ meeting.
Sixty-something, neatly trimmed beard, signature vest and piercing eyes, he had brought 50 like-minded people, including wife Antoinette, to urge the county’s legislative body to take a stand against “horizontal hydrofracking,” a term few of us knew anything about a year ago but now – in large part, due to him – can discuss quite knowledgeably.
You would have noticed Adrian Kuzminski and, if you hadn’t yet met him, would certainly have said to yourself, “Who is that guy?” How many people have asked themselves that question in the past 30 years?
For, whether you’ve been involved in local planning and zoning, Democratic (or Green) politics, environmental issues (from “Motorless Otsego” through windmills and, now, natural-gas drilling), anti-war activism – any aspect of public life, really – you would have bumped into the great “Kooz-MEEN-ski,” as he announces himself on the answering machine of his Fly Creek Valley home.
This year, however, he’s outdone himself.
While many people have stepped forward to oppose hydrofracking – Lou Allstadt, the retired Mobil executive; Nicole Dillingham, president, Otsego 2000; Simon Thorpe, president/CEO, Brewery Ommegang, and private citizens like Fly Creek’s John Kosmer and Hartwick’s Jim Herman immediately come to mind – Kuzminski is in the front ranks with them.
He’s written letters to the editor and op-eds aplenty, spoken at forums, helped organize public meetings and protests, but two things push him to the forefront:
• One, the burgeoning sustainableotsego listserve, (to join, e-mail sustainableotsego-subscribe@lists.riseup.net), in effect, a new medium that allows instant communication between 500-plus subscribers.
“Suddenly, people became aware they weren’t alone in their concerns,” said Kuzminski.
• Two, unrelated to gas drilling: for keeping the 22-acre former estate Brookwood Garden, one of the last public points of contact with Otsego Lake, in the public sphere in perpetuity, under the umbrella of the Otsego Land Trust.
The transfer of the property was announced in August, but it grew out of objections raised to the state Attorney General’s Office in 2009 by Kuzminski and three friends, Ron Bishop, James Dean and Michael Whaling.
The proceeds of the prospective sale to now-Congressman Richard Hanna would have created an environmental fund. But, Kuzminski said, “We would be losing a tangible asset for something much more ephemeral. It was too high a price to pay.”
When Adrian Kuzminski arrived here from a tenured professorship at the University of Hawaii in 1980, he was a young 36, but had covered a lot of territory, geographical and intellectual, by that point.
He was born in Washington, Pa., outside Pittsburgh, in 1944, the son of a priest in the Polish National Catholic Church, which broke away from Roman Catholicism in 1897 over a dispute in Scranton, Pa. Both sets of Adrian’s grandparents were involved in that initial break, which was led by the austere Father (later Bishop) Francis Hodur, (whom the young Kuzminski met before his death in 1953. “He was the first person I ever saw with long hair.”)
He was 12 when his father was assigned to a parish in Rochester, where at 3,000-student Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School he entered a circle of “brainy kids playing chess” and tracking the stats of his beloved Pittsburgh Pirates – a highpoint before “greed and drugs” ruined the game was Bill Mazeroski’s World Series-winning home run in 1960.
The Polish National Catholic Church provided Adrian with an intellectual tradition – his parents wanted him to follow his father into the priesthood – but its rigidity rankled.
“It made me suspect of authority,” he said in one of two interviews for this article. “It made me think about metaphysical questions. These issues were raised, but they were not explained to me.”
In any event, “the broader world beckoned,” and he went off to Amherst in 1962 to study history and philosophy just as Kennedy era idealism was at its height.
“There were huge problems – assassinations, riots, much more volatile than today,” he recalled. “But there was also a sense: People can respond; problems can be solved.”
Remember, pre-Facebook, how colleges would published books with mug shots and particulars of their undergrads? Adrian saw Smith College’s and was particularly taken by one long-haired young lady. He called her and their first date was to see “Black Orpheus,” the 1959 classic, which they both enjoyed and then debated.
In his senior year – T’nette, her nickname, was a year behind him – they dashed off to a justice of the peace in nearby Shutesbury over their parents’ objections, (and later staged two separate ceremonies but the benefit of their families.)
“Love. We were in love. Isn’t that why people get married?” he remembered. The marriage is in its 44th year.
He began work on his master’s in history at the University of Rochester, and by 1970 the couple was off to Ireland; he’d received a Fulbright and a designation of Woodrow Wilson scholar to pursue his doctorate at Trinity College, Dublin.
His topic was George “If a tree falls in the forest...” Berkeley (pronounced BARK-lee, although BERKE-ley, Calif., is named for him) and his “immaterialism.” Any surprises? “That he owned slaves. I was surprised. I probably shouldn’t have been. It probably says more about me than it does about him.”
As he dove into his studies, T’nette, who had studied liberal arts undergraduate, began the pre-med studies that eventually led them to Cooperstown, where she is still an internist at Bassett Hospital. Their first son, Stefan, now a computer programmer and entrepreneur in Westchester County, was born.
As the year wound down, Kuzminski heard from a friend who was dissatisfied with a position at the University of Hawaii; the friend left his job, and recommended Adrian to replace him, and so the young family left Dublin’s gloom for Oahu’s sunlight.
“Hawaii is the future,” he says today. “A small place with finite resources that was overcrowded” – 800,000 people in an area two-thirds the size of Otsego County.
He plunged into teaching the history of philosophy and new intellectual interests.
One was Pyrrho, a Greek philosopher who accompanied Alexander to India, was exposed to Buddhism, and sought to incorporate it into Greek thought. Pyrrho separated knowledge – what is provable – from belief, and posited the latter as “the source of human distress.”
Another was Jefferson’s concept of a “ward republic,” where – New-England-town-meeting-like – most of governance would be conducted by “citizen assemblies” at the local level. A third, Wittgenstein’s empiricism.
In 1977, the Kuzminskis returned to Cooperstown for T’nette’s residency; they had first visited in the ‘60s, when her sister was a Bassett resident. Second son, Jan, was born then; he now teaches English in Vietnam.
By that time, Derrida’s deconstructionism held sway in academe, and Kuzminski became disillusioned with being a professor. There was too much relativism; “I wasn’t happy in that environment.”
And so the family returned to Otsego County, where T’nette joined Bassett. They found a house on Donlon Road, and Adrian spent two years turning it into a bright, welcoming home.
He was “philosopher in residence” at Hartwick College, and filled in while professors took sabbaticals, but he never taught fulltime again. The family raised Angus cattle; lately, they’ve shifted to sheep, mostly Romneys. His parents, Edward and Janina Kuzminski, moved from the father’s final assignment, in Rome, to Grove Street; they have since passed away.
Kuzminski’s first foray into local activism happened almost by accident: A neighbor, Hank Forster, Town of Otsego Planning Board member, asked him in the mid ’80s if he’d like to join the board.
At the time, as Kuzminski tells it, longtime Supervisor Bob Murdock had experienced a rift with the GOP powers that were, and he courted Democrat B.J. O’Neil, then Planning Board chair. In exchange for Democratic support, Murdock would agree to allow the Planning Board to pursue zoning.
By the time zoning moved to the hearing stage, Kuzminski was Planning Board chair and facing “a big brouhaha.” There were 250 people at the hearing, “yelling and screaming: You can’t tell me what to do with my land.”
A new administration was voted in at town hall, but “the zoning law survived, even though they kicked me and everyone else out.” (Two decades later, Cooperstown attorney Michelle Kennedy is exploring how local zoning laws may be used to keep gas drilling out of a municipality, so Kuzminski’s effort is coming full circle.)
During this period, the Kuzminskis were raising their boys, who – T’nette recalls – called their father “The Wizard,” because he knew “everything.” She shoots a question at him: When did Democracy take hold in the Ottoman Empire?
The family remembers the father, lost in thought, sitting in an armchair in the corner of the kitchen, by the wood stove. Once, Jan ran up to him: He had been stabbed in the neck with a pen. The father calmly removed the pen and returned to his reading.
In the ’90s, Kuzminski became involved in the campaign against a large expansion to the boat launch at Glimmerglass State Park. He and Michael Whaling conceived “Motorless Otsego,” which came up with various exercises to dramatize threats to Otsego Lake, the source of Cooperstown’s drinking water, including a lecture by Andy Mele, author of “Polluting for Pleasure.”
About that time, Kuzminski was drawn to the Green Party, which had won “ballot status” in New York State in 1998 when Al Lewis of “Granpa Munster” fame polled 50,000 votes for governor.
He attended the Green Party’s convention in 2000 in Denver, served on the party’s state committee and worked for Ralph Nader’s campaign in 2000. He founded the Otsego Greens, and ran for county board in 1999.
As this century began, he sought to raise the visibility of anti-Iraq-War sentiment, with efforts peaking at a rally that drew 200 people to Templeton Hall in March 2007.
Later that year came the founding of Sustainable Otsego, spurred by reports that “peak oil” had been achieved, and it was now a declining resource. A highpoint was a lecture by Sarah James, co-author of “The Natural Step of Communities: How Cities and Towns Can Change to Sustainable Practices.” Raised in Cooperstown, she returned to speak to a crowd at the county courthouse.
It was Sustainable Otsego that birthed the listserve, an idea suggested to Kuzminski by Cooperstown’s Russ Honicker. But it was hydrofracking – Adrian was at the village’s Board of Water Commissioners when the issue first arose – that started the listserve humming.
“That’s where I realized, this is coming to our area,” he said. “Then, we realized what we were up against, how big this was.”
At the informational and organizational meetings that followed – in Cherry Valley, in Oneonta, among the 200 protesters at the county courthouse in August – Kuzminski would distribute a pad and folks would add their e-mail addresses; the list grew from about 100 to five times that.
With The Freeman’s Journal the only weekly covering the issue and the Daily Star doing so only periodically, Kuzminski reasoned, “We don’t have enough local media. No radio. No TV. No website. This list filled this vacuum to some extent.”
More than 6,000 posts have gone up this year. In November, 586 e-mails were posted; by Christmas Day, 468 e-mails had been exchanged during December.
The posts include debate on tactics among “The Coalition,” local environmental groups loosely collaborating in the anti-fracking fight and, sharing of Web sites and news reports, and some original news: It’s likely many local people first heard on the listserve that Governor Paterson had extended a moratorium through June by executive order.
The listserve helped raise the visibility of “Gasland,” and anti-drilling movie that featured flames coming out of a water faucet. And it includes such experts as Walter Hang, the Ithaca uber-environmentalist, sketching out what’s to come.
For his part, Kuzminski has tried to stay ahead of the issue. For instance, he returned from the People’s Oil and Gas Summit in Pittsburgh in November with new research out of Cornell that finds methane “dirtier than coal. It’s dirtier than any other fossil fuel.”
During his time on Otsego County, Kuzminski has completed three books and is working on a fourth.
“The Soul” was published in 1994, and argues “soul” provides a means of perception beyond body and mind. Given the lengthy process of academic publishing, “Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism,” and “Fixing the System: A History of Populism, Ancient and Modern,” were both published in 2008.
His next book has the working title, “The People’s Money: How to End the Usurious Economic & Obtain a Sustainable Economy.” Interest on loaned money, which requires growth to repay the debt, has put us on a treadmill, Kuzminski said.
“...It’s created overshot,” added T’nette. “Overshot” – perhaps the foe of all these battles.
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