NJAS Opinion: Winter, 1990
During the month of October 1989, NJAS staff devoted a good deal
of their time to our state's northern lands the Skylands-Highlands
region. This area, which runs from the New York border on the
northeast to the Delaware River just south of Phillipsburg on
the southwest, will be absorbing an increasing amount of our time
and attention over the next several years. Here's why we're interested
and why we were one of the founding members of the bi-state Skylands-Greenway
Coalition which is working to save these lands from improper development.
NJAS and the coalition are alarmed by the sea change in attitude
toward the use of these lands already underway on the part of
some of the public and private landholders, including the water
utility companies. For close to two generations there has been
a strong public interest in keeping these lands free from development
to protect the purity of the water that many northeastern New
Jersey residents depend upon. But this is changing and the reasons
are complex.
In part the change in attitude reflects the philosophical and
economic national attitude that says: it doesn't matter
so much any more about the way one earns a living, what really
matters is maximizing economic return over the short- to midterm.
Let the philosophers, theologians, and the ecologists worry about
the twenty-five to fifty-year consequences. Put into land use
terms this means that the "best" use of land is always
the one that returns the highest short-term economic gain. The
fact that this attitude is not proving to be always self-sustaining,
that it harbors many hidden costs and may prove to be an ecological/economic
disaster if widely imitated by others, seems to be slowly dawning
on a number of people, but not fast enough.
We can't think of a better concrete example (literally), than
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposal, supported by the New
Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to build the $1
billion (final cost is anyone's guess) Passaic River Tunnel Diversion
Project. By the corps's own admission, building patterns in the
Passaic River's flood plain, over-development throughout
much of its drainage basis, and destruction of wetlands have led
to severe consequences that could have been greatly reduced had
development been less extensive. The corps even cautions that
continued development in the Highlands will only make matters
worse whether a tunnel is built or not.
Another factor responsible for shift in land-use patterns is the
promise of the technological fix (of which the Passaic tunnel
is only one grand, Faustian version). Other examples include "buffer"
zone recommendations and the use of Best Management Practices
(BMP's). Rarely if ever does the state make BMP's (such as detention
basins for removing nonpoint source pollutants) mandatory or enforce
them if they do. NJAS has little confidence in the efficacy of
BMP's to compensate for poor land-use decisions. Our culture has
a sad record of building structures and/or imposing requirements,
and then not providing the funding or resources to maintain them
- a crucial determining factor in how well BMP's function.
The case for saving the New Jersey Highlands does not and should
not rest on the protection of its water resources alone, compelling
as that argument is. The Highlands harbor other abundant natural
and historical resources worth saving, as the following testimony
illustrates. But the final argument in the case for saving this
region can best be made by looking at a map of the area. Notice
the dense population concentrated in the physiographic province
just below the Highlands, in the Piedmont. In 1950,
the Piedmont had 20.9 percent of the total land in New Jersey,
but 67 percent of the population. In 1990, it still has the same
land area, but an even greater percentage of people. Independent
of all the other compelling reasons for not putting the Highlands
on the fast lane of the development track, the open space and
recreation needs of the majority of New Jersey citizens cries
out for a broad conservation strategy for the region.
As this article goes to press, two New Jersey congressional representatives,
Robert Torricello (D, D-9), and Marge Roukema (R, D-5), have joined
Pennsylvania's Peter Kostmayer in working to get several federal
studies of the region under way. We thank them for their support
and look forward to working with them in the future. We hope that
the rest of the New Jersey and New York delegations will soon
join them.
With these thoughts as a background, we present the testimony
from our October 2 appearance before Mr. Kostmayer's subcommittee
hearing on Sterling Forest and Protecting Urban Open Space, held
in Tuxedo Park, New York. We urge all our northern members to
contact their congressional representatives at the addresses and
phone numbers provided, to let them know how you feel. We hope
you can agree with us and join in the plea - don't let these lands
be destroyed!
MARGE ROUKEMA (R, D-5; Bergen, Passaic, Sussex counties),
303 House Office Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20515 (202-225-4465;
NJ-201-447-3900).
ROBERT ROE (D, D-8; Bergen, Essex, Morris, Passaic counties),
2243 Rayburn Office Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20515 (202-225-5751;
NJ-201-645-6299).
ROBERT TORRICELLI (D, D-9; Bergen, Hudson counties),
317 Cannon Office Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20515 (202-225-5061;
NJ-201-646-1111).
DEAN A. GALLO (R, D-11; Essex, Morris, Sussex, Warren counties),
1318 Longworth Office Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20515 (202-225-5034;
NJ-201-228-9262).
JIM COURTER (R, D-12; Hunterdon, Mercer. Middlesex, Morris, Somerset,
Sussex, Warren counties),
2422 Rayburn Office Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20515 (202-225-5081;
NJ-201-538-7267).
Protecting Open Space in Urban Areas: The Skylands-Highlands
Region
In New Jersey, the Skylands region. which is also known as the
Highlands region, forms a distinct physiographic province characterized
by ridges and valleys of between 600 and 1,500 feet elevation,
extensive forests, lakes, rivers, and wetlands. Of its 576,000
acres, only 60,000 are guaranteed public open space in federal
or state holdings. In New Jersey, and the Highlands region follows
the pattern, over 83 percent of the forests are privately owned
and 83 percent of these private holdings are in tracts of over
20 acres. We are concerned by a growing trend among some of the
private owners of lands once used for sound watershed protection
purposes to view them through an increasingly narrow economic
prism. In this area, lying so close to the densely populated north
Jersey-New York metropolitan region, that means even more intense
development pressure and a consequential destruction of the primary
conservation features of the region. Because of the area's uniqueness,
we think the following values should guide land use planning efforts:
- Protection of forest resources, especially large contiguous
tracts.
- Protection of wildlife, especially threatened and endangered
species.
- Protection of water resources, before pollutants enter
the water column.
- Protection and creation of appropriate recreational activities.
- Protection and enhancement of historic and archeological sites.
Because of time limitations, we will pass over the important details
of each of these preservation goals and direct the subcommittee's
attention to the supplemental material we have provided. But we
do want to stress that there are competing visions for the future
of this area that has, by more than a minor miracle, survived
nearly intact so close to one of the nation's most developed regions.
Within twenty miles of New Jersey's northeastern cities, visitors
to the Highlands can find native trout, black bear, river otter,
120 resident bird species, and 23 of our New Jersey endangered
and threatened species, 16 of which are resident.
We think there are two basic development "scenarios"
for the region. One, which we want to avoid, would drift along
with current trends of converting the privately held lands to
their highest economic return, largely oblivious to cumulative
impacts of development on the sensitive natural features we have
mentioned. This is the approach that has been tried and found
wanting in the area surrounding the Great Swamp National Wildlife
Refuge. This "choice" might preserve some of the most
striking historical and natural features, but that would not be
its primary focus, and the water, wildlife, and forest resources
would lose much of their ecological integrity. We would expect
the land use pattern to end up, in twenty years, to look much
like northern Bergen County, New Jersey, and for State Route 23
to turn into a northern cousin of Route 46.
The alternative vision, to be built out of different preservation
tools and techniques and relying on governmental, nonprofit conservation
and local citizen group initiatives, would invert the value order
of the conventional development path, placing the emphasis instead
on protecting the natural and historical features first, confident
that a quality job done in preservation will naturally draw tourists,
primarily day and weekend ones, with economic returns surely following
to reward the owners and employees of the service industry that
will rise to meet tourist needs.
NJAS has called for the passage of a bi-state piece of legislation
to set up a commission to study the area and to consider various
acquisition and conservation strategies.
We believe that the exact tools chosen to protect the natural
and historical gems in this little known part of New Jersey are
less important than the need to act expeditiously and decisively
and on a broad enough scale so that we don't end up with isolated
parks and "museums," linked by the suburban sprawl that
so many of our citizens want to escape.
Although we have talked about a specific bi-state region today,
we want to close by linking it to a broader perspective. By acting
wisely for preservation in the Highlands region, we will be doing
our share to mitigate hemispheric air, water, and species preservation
problems. Forest preservation is assuming greater importance as
a means of counteracting global warming. In New Jersey, the entire
state is a nonattainment region for ozone pollution. Many species
of birds that migrate to Central and South America for the winter
are losing their forest habitat there at an alarming rate. A surprising,
substantial number of these species nest in our Highlands
region. Some are very dependent on the abundant, pure water resources
of the area, as are the downstream human water consumers.
Now the science of global warming is not precise, but the trends
are alarming. We could be wrong about the final impacts of what
has been called the "great experiment" - the alteration
of the chemical composition of the atmosphere by human impacts.
But by choosing the conservation path for the future of the Highlands
region, we are leaving ourselves the option of changing our minds
twenty-five to fifty years later, as well as creating beneficial
short-run outcomes for air and water quality and habitat protection.
A "business as usual" pattern of development in this
area leaves us with no such option. We believe that science and
civic prudence point to the preservation choice as the one that
makes the most sense for both local and hemispheric problems.
William R. Neil
Assistant Director of Conservation
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