From parks commissioner to OSI leader: Erik Kulleseid’s passion for land preservation

Hudson Valley native steers conservation at Open Space Institute

By Mike Lynch

Growing up in the Hudson Valley, Open Space Institute President Erik Kulleseid found himself surrounded by woods.

His backyard included Hudson Highland State Park, and he could drive across the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River to Harriman State Park. A walk through the woods to the Appalachian Trail took 40 minutes. 

The Hudson Valley is also home to large private landholders and during the 1980s and early 1990s some of those properties went up for sale. That resulted in places like Clarence Fahnstock and Hudson Highlands state parks expanding. 

Reflecting on that period when he witnessed ecologically important land being preserved while simultaneously enjoying access to nearby public land, Kulleseid said the conservation field “was a natural career to get into.” 

Kulleseid, 60, commissioner for the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation since 2019, took the helm of OSI in April, replacing longtime CEO and President Christopher “Kim” Elliman. 

‘Dream job’

“There are some dream jobs in my life and I happen to have one of them right now,” Kulleseid said shortly before finishing at the state. “Being a parks commissioner has been a total joy. I love this work. I love the people-side of the mission. You know that we are all about providing affordable places for people to get away and enjoy nature. I love that part of it. But OSI is another one of those dream jobs.”

This is Kulleseid’s second stint with the organization. He headed OSI’s state park’s program from 2010 until 2019. He also worked as a deputy commissioner for open space protection for the state parks department and as the state’s program director for the Trust for Public Land for 12 years until 2007.

OSI is a nonprofit land trust that has protected more than 2.4 million lands in the eastern U.S. and Canada since 1974. Its headquarters are located in New York City. The organization, whose land trust reached revenues of $53.8 million in 2022, not only buys properties but it provides grants and loans to entities protecting land. It’s land protection runs along the eastern U.S. from southern states through the Adirondacks.

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Serving as the state’s parks commissioner, a post that pays $205,000 a year, Kulleseid oversaw the opening the Shirley Chisholm State Park in Brooklyn; creating a new welcome center at Niagara Falls State Park; and christening the Jones Beach Energy & Nature Center on Long Island, the Sojourner Truth State Park in Kingston and the Autism Nature Trail in Letchworth State Park. 

He also guided his department through the pandemic, a time when getting outdoors was paramount to mental and physical health. State parks have set annual attendance records in every year of his tenure, according to the department. In 2023, 84 million people visited them. 

Joe Martens is the chair for the Olympic Regional Development Authority, former state Department Environmental Conservation Commissioner and headed OSI from 1999 to 2004. He lauded Kulleseid’s appointment to lead OSI.

“He wasn’t the kind of person who sat at a desk in Albany. He traveled all over the state and took a personal interest in every state park,” Martens said. “He could tell you about every state park and the work that they did during his commissionership because he was personally involved in just about everything that happened at state parks.”

Adirondack connections

Kulleseid grew up in Garrison, about 40 miles north of New York City on the Hudson, but he’s spent a lot of time in the Adirondacks. 

His family rented a place on Lake Placid for a couple of summers in the 1970s. He would swim across the lake and also learned to sail. 

But the long drive from Putnam County deterred the family from returning. Instead, in the 1980s, they purchased a summer home in the town of Caroga on a local lake.

Kulleseid and his family that includes husband, Mark Eisenhardt, and two daughters still visit that Fulton County abode, where there is ample biking, sailing, hiking and, of course, swimming, a favored activity of OSI’s new leader. 

Kulleseid said one of the big draws to the new job is that he can return to working on the biggest state park in New York, something that fell outside his former job’s jurisdiction.

“Our footprint is everything but the Adirondacks and the Catskills,” he said. “I’m looking forward to getting back into those landscapes.

Emphasis on access

OSI has contributed to the protection of over 342,000 acres in the Adirondacks through purchases, grants and loans, said Eileen Larabee, OSI’s chief external affairs officer. 

In the Adirondack Park, one of OSI’s biggest contributions to land protection came by lending $25 million to The Nature Conservancy to buy 161,000 acres in the central Adirondacks from Finch, Pruyn & Co. for $110 million in 2007.

The conservancy later sold 65,000 acres to the state for the forest preserve, 89,000 acres to a Danish pension fund with a state-held conservation easement, and several other properties to local towns. 

OSI has bought land in the eastern Adirondacks to bolster wildlife corridors, such as the Split Rock Wildway between the park and Lake Champlain. It’s also worked further south to provide connections within Saratoga County and to Vermont. 

That includes playing a key role in the establishment of the 202-acre Graphite Range Community Forest opened to the public late last year. The land is located a few miles north of Saratoga Springs and contains 5 miles of recreation trails. It is part of a planned recreation and wildlife corridor between the Adirondack foothills and Moreau State Park.

OSI has worked on about two dozen community forest projects throughout the east and provided guidance to the other entities, including Saratoga County and the land trust Saratoga PLAN. 

In the heart of the park, OSI bought the 10,000-acre Tahawus tract in Newcomb at the gateway to southern High Peaks.

It sold off most of the land to the state for forest preserve but kept a 212-acre tract to safeguard the historic mining village of Tahawus and make improvements to the trailhead, including expanding the parking area. Overall, OSI invested $1.3 million in the property.

It’s also partnering with the state and others to purchase land in Lake Placid that would serve as a hub at the eastern end of the 34-mile Adirondack Rail Trail. 

“Increasingly we are buying access points, improving access, buying and building rail trails, or other linear parks, to permit more people to get out into open space,” said Elliman, who stepped down in April after leading OSI since 2004.

Kulleseid’s charge involves protecting land to help curb climate change, but he said he’s particularly excited about working on the issue of access as he returns to OSI.

“Broadening access has been one of the hallmarks of my career,” he said.

Part of that is making sure that all people feel welcome and comfortable in public lands, even if they grew up where they didn’t have access and the woods are unfamiliar. During his original eight-year stint, Kulleseid oversaw the creation of OSI’s parks initiative aimed at making all feel they could get into open space.

“I’m a big believer in diversity, equity and inclusion and making sure that both our staff and the narrative we tell in our parks really reflect the growing diversity of New York and all the visitors we have,” Kulleseid said.

Photo at top: Erik Kulleseid speaks at John Brown’s Farm in Lake Placid in 2021. Photo courtesy of NYS Parks.