New Jersey's Environments: Past, Present, and Future 9780813539225

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New Jersey’s Environments

New Jersey’s Environments Past, Present, and Future

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Edited by Neil M. Maher

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New Jersey’s environments : past, present, and future / edited by Neil M. Maher. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8135-3718-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8135-3719-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. New Jersey–Environmental conditions. 2. Environmental policy–New Jersey. I. Maher, Neil M., 1964– GE155.N5N49 2006 333.72'09749—dc22 2005011356 This collection copyright © 2006 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2006 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction: Nature’s Next Exit? or Why New Jersey Is as Important as Yellowstone National Park

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Neil M. Maher

Part I History and Contexts 1 A Natural History of the Life and Death of a

Great American City: Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1850–2000

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Bryant Simon

2 Solid Waste Management in “The Garbage State”:

New Jersey’s Transformation from Landfilling to Incineration

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Eileen McGurty

Part II Policy and Law 3 Oysters, Public Trust, and the Law in New Jersey Bonnie J. McCay

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4 Citizen Expertise and Citizen Action in the Creation

of the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act Heather Fenyk and David H. Guston

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Contents

5 The Free Fishing Controversy of Sussex County,

New Jersey

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Robert W. Reynolds

Part III New Jersey Environments Today 6 Tracking New Jersey’s Changing Landscape Richard Lathrop and John Hasse

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7 Evaluating the Effects of Historical Land Cover

Change on Summertime Weather and Climate in New Jersey

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Paul S. Wichansky, Christopher P. Weaver, Louis T. Steyaert, and Robert L. Walko

8 A Century of Natural Disasters in a State of

Changing Vulnerability: New Jersey, 1900–1999 James K. Mitchell About the Contributors 199 Index 203

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New Jersey’s Environments

Introduction Nature’s Next Exit? or Why New Jersey Is as Important as Yellowstone National Park

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Neil M. Maher

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mericans often think of New Jersey as an environmental nightmare. As seen from its infamous turnpike, which is how the great majority of people passing through the Garden State experience its nature, New Jersey’s industrial plants, belching smokestacks, and hills upon hills upon hills of landfills amidst acres of marshy meadows suggest a sort of inverted Garden of Eden. Hard, cold facts support this seventy-mile-an-hour windshield vision of New Jersey’s environment. Perhaps because the state is the most densely populated, the most urban, and the most developed in the nation, it contains within its small borders some of the most polluted land in America.1 Currently the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection oversees approximately 23,000 sites contaminated by industrial waste and, with 108 properties on the federal National Priorities List, more Superfund sites than in any other state in the union.2 Such ecological woes, moreover, are not limited to the state’s land resources. On humid summer days New Jersey’s air is often some of the most polluted in the country, as any nose on the turnpike can attest, and its waters have been fouled by more than a century of industrial activity; waste dumped into the Passaic not only almost “killed” the river between Paterson and Newark but also bestowed on it the dubious honor of being the second most polluted waterway in America.3 As one journalist reporting on New Jersey’s environment explained, the Garden State is “one of the weirdest and least reputable landscapes on Earth.”4 Yet those living, working, and recreating in New Jersey often experience a very different kind of nature during their everyday lives, one more in 1

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line with the experiences of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and presentday wilderness enthusiasts. For instance, for all its dense population and urban growth, two-thirds of New Jersey remains covered in farmland and forest, and the state has more acres of state park and forestland as well as a larger percentage of its land dedicated to such uses than the average for all states across the country. More New Jerseyans also visit these state lands annually than do residents in the majority of states nationwide.5 “It is possible, with a straight face,” explained a recent study of the region’s natural history, “to describe New Jersey accurately as a small and largely underinhabited state.”6 Such environmental attributes are not restricted to the Garden State’s lands. New Jersey also boasts one of the largest and purest aquifers in the nation along with some of the cleanest air in and around the Pine Barrens, a 1.1-million-acre National Reserve and United Nations’ Biosphere area that is home to more than one thousand plant and animal species.7 Large portions of the Garden State are therefore far from the ecological nightmare seen by visitors as they speed along the New Jersey Turnpike. For those who know where to find it, the state’s environment is a dream come true with abundant, wild nature in close proximity to most residents’ homes. It is precisely this ecological schizophrenia that makes New Jersey important for understanding the twentieth-century relationship between Americans and their natural world. Because the Garden State has experienced such a variety of environmental problems so early in its history, New Jersey residents were forced to deal with these issues sooner than those living in other parts of the country. New Jersey was not only the first state to prosecute illegal dumping and to adopt one of the most stringent hazardous waste bills, it also implemented the most far-reaching wetlands protection law in the country. The Garden State similarly has the most rigorous testing for water quality control of any seaboard state in the nation.8 Through such actions New Jerseyans have been slowly putting the garden back into the Garden State for decades. The Hackensack River, for example, which during the 1960s supported fewer than ten species of fish, today boasts more than fifty, and similar ecological resurgences have occurred across the state during the last quarter century.9 This history of heavy industrial development followed by widespread ecological restoration is not only unique, it can also serve as an example for the rest of the country. The Garden State, noted one nature writer, is “a place of such stunning diversity that it is almost America in miniature.”10 At least environmentally, then, New Jersey holds clues to America’s ecological future.

Introduction: Nature’s Next Exit?

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Environments like those found in the Garden State are becoming increasingly important to scholars studying society’s relationship to the natural world. In his seminal essay titled “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” environmental historian William Cronon argues that academics and environmentalists alike have paid far too much attention to wild nature. Wilderness, according to Cronon, which we have cordoned off into “areas” designated for outdoor recreation, is as much a product of human culture as a homegrown garden. Furthermore, by focusing our energies primarily on wild spaces “out there” we tend to ignore the equally important nature nearby. “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home,” explains Cronon. The result of this wilderness fetish is the ecological degradation of our own “backyards.” “Most of our most serious environmental problems start right here at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it.”11 The solution to society’s ecological ills, Cronon concludes, is for us to value nature such as that found along New Jersey’s turnpike as much as we do the pristine environments of Yellowstone National Park. Valuing New Jersey nature alone, however, will not solve the state’s environmental problems. A new ethic, by itself, will do little to remove the Garden State’s toxic waste sites from the federal government’s Superfund list, or stop landfills from leaching hazardous materials into the state’s drinking water, or lessen the amount of pollution piped into the air from New Jersey’s smokestacks. Experts from a variety of fields must also act to help the Garden State take back its garden. As one group of authors in this collection explains, New Jersey’s environmental troubles lie “at the intersection of the physical sciences and history, sociology, economics, and public policy.” To help solve these problems “scientists must connect with scholars in other disciplines.”12 Interdisciplinary knowledge, it seems, is central to understanding and correcting New Jersey’s varied environmental difficulties. This collection of essays embraces this interdisciplinary call-to-arms by examining New Jersey nature through three academic disciplines: environmental history that places New Jerseyans’ relationship to the state’s natural environment in historical perspective; environmental science that examines a host of ecological problems currently facing the state; and environmental policy that suggests possible solutions for these environmental crises. Thus while environmental historians in New Jersey’s Environments

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explore New Jersey’s past, and environmental scientists examine its present, the policy analysts in this collection will provide suggestions for the state’s ecological future. Currently there is a dearth of literature examining New Jersey’s environment. Moreover, what does exist tends to focus on a single academic approach to the relationship between New Jerseyans and nature. In other words, the scholarship on New Jersey by environmental historians, environmental scientists, and environmental policy analysts is currently Balkanized; there is no single work that brings these disciplines together. By interweaving history, policy analysis, and science, New Jersey’s Environments fills an important intellectual gap. But perhaps more importantly, it should also encourage readership among both scholars and nonacademics who are interested in learning more about, and taking action on, New Jersey’s environments. Part I of this collection, which focuses on the historic context of New Jersey’s environmental quandary, begins with an essay on one of New Jersey’s most famous places: Atlantic City. Comparing the rise and fall and rise again of Atlantic City to “a fast ride on a roller coaster,” author Bryant Simon explores the environmental history of this “Queen of Resorts” from the 1850s to the present. While gambling plays an obvious role, the real star of Atlantic City’s story lies out over the Atlantic Ocean. Nature, in the form of ocean water and sea breezes, not only drew tourists seeking healthful environments in the late nineteenth century but also kept them away during the mid-twentieth century, when the resort’s sand, air, and water became increasingly polluted. Simon concludes that nature also holds the key to Atlantic City’s future; if gaming establishments would only rediscover the ocean and beach lying just beyond their crap tables, Atlantic City might once again rise from the deep blue sea. In chapter 2 Eileen McGurty takes us from gaming to garbage by examining New Jersey’s growing refuse problem immediately after World War II, when Americans throughout the country embraced a “throw away” consumer culture. McGurty explores New Jersey’s garbage crisis through two case studies, one involving the Hackensack Meadowlands and a second concerning wetlands around Newark. In both instances policy makers attempted to shift solid waste management practices from a dependence on landfilling to incineration because the latter method not only increased acreage available for development but also produced cheap energy, through the burning of garbage, that promised to revive New Jersey’s flagging economy. McGurty thus concludes, somewhat surprisingly, that the shift from

Introduction: Nature’s Next Exit?

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landfilling to incineration suggested less an accommodation with 1960s environmentalism than a desire for increased economic development. Part II of New Jersey’s Environments shifts gears into the policy and legislative arena with three essays on New Jersey’s water resources. In the first, Bonnie McCay uses the legal history of New Jersey’s early oyster industry to explore the evolution of public trust doctrine in both the Garden State and the nation as a whole. McCay begins her story with a so-called “oyster war” that involved local property owners claiming ownership of “planted” oysters and nearby oystermen arguing instead that such shellfish were public property. According to McCay, after several appeals the United States Supreme Court for the first time in American history affirmed the public trust doctrine by deciding against local landowners. This essay ends by examining similar public trust cases in twentieth-century New Jersey, when oystering declined due to environmental degradation while other conflicts involving beach access and environmental cleanup arose. Chapter 4 turns our attention from New Jersey’s shoreline to its wetlands, and from the state’s legal history to the formation and implementation of its environmental policy. Here authors Heather Fenyk and David Guston examine the 1987 passage by New Jersey of the federal Clean Water Act’s provision regarding wetlands. Fenyk and Guston examine how federal environmental policy formulated in Washington, D.C. influenced state and local politics in places like New Jersey, and also uncover an unlikely alliance between environmentalists, developers, and politicians concerned about the state’s wetlands, albeit for different reasons. Perhaps most interesting is the central role played by women in this wetlands protection effort. Not only were women activists and experts central to the passage of wetlands laws in the Garden State, they were also instrumental in forging a state-wide environmental community with considerable political force. In chapter 5 Robert Reynolds takes us from New Jersey’s lowlands up into its mountain lakes where a very public fight raged over fish. Reynolds examines what he calls “the free fishing controversy” in Essex County, New Jersey, which at the turn of the century pitted working-class residents of local towns and nearby cities interested in maintaining public access to traditional fishing spots, against local and urban elites desirous of privatizing such waters to halt overfishing and out-of-control tourist development. Reynolds concludes that although this legal battle signaled the first step in the privatization of New Jersey’s recreational landscape, during the early twentieth century the state finally stepped in with legislation that ultimately created public “fishing parks” through the purchase of privately owned lakes.

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Part III brings the study of New Jersey’s environment up to the present with three essays by environmental scientists, each of whom examines the ecological implications of rapid land development. In chapter 6 authors Richard Lathrop and John Hasse track changing land use patterns on the county level throughout New Jersey by comparing aerial photographs and satellite imagery from 1984 and 1995, and conclude that during this period the state lost more than 16,000 acres of land to development and now leads the nation in both percentage of land developed and in the rate of development growth. While industry and highway construction were factors in this expansion, the key culprit was residential sprawl, which claimed increasing amounts of farmland, forests, and wetlands across the state. New Jersey, Lathrop and Hasse conclude, is at a critical crossroads; by continuing to develop land at the present rate, it will ultimately “lose the garden in the Garden State.” Chapter 7 examines how many of the landscape changes laid out by Lathrop and Hasse have in turn impacted weather and climate conditions throughout New Jersey. Through a sophisticated combination of numerical simulation modeling and satellite remote sensing, authors Paul Wichansky, Christopher Weaver, Louis Steyaert, and Robert Walko link transformations in the state’s land surface over the past century to significant modifications in New Jersey’s climate. According to the authors the development of agricultural lands, forests, and wetlands across the state between 1880 and the present has caused higher daily and nightly temperatures, decreased cloudiness, drier air, more intense rainfall and sea breezes, and less intense thunderstorms. Such findings suggest that similar changes are taking place throughout the country and the world. New Jersey’s Environments concludes with an essay that links these land use transformations to changing spatial and temporal patterns of natural disasters across New Jersey. By examining the state’s natural disaster record since 1900, author James Mitchell argues that such hazards have changed significantly as the state’s burgeoning population filled its territory, altered its landscapes, reconfigured its economy, and restructured its societal institutions. While floods, coastal storms, and droughts currently inflict more serious losses because population pressures have forced New Jerseyans to settle in vulnerable environments, social policies have decreased the threat posed by wildfires and urban blizzards. This close inspection of twentieth-century hazard ecology, both spatially across the state and temporally throughout the century, provides readers with sobering reminders of both the strengths and limitations of public environmental management policies and the need for continuing innovation.

Introduction: Nature’s Next Exit?

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Taken together, these essays in New Jersey’s Environments provide a detailed portrait of nature across the Garden State. Perhaps more importantly, they bring together historians, policy analysts, and environmental scientists for an interdisciplinary assessment of not only the state’s environmental wonders and woes but also possible solutions to a host of environmental problems. For readers interested in the wild nature of the region, or for scientists concerned more with ecological ills in our own backyards, this collection also shares one important characteristic with the abundant nature found along the New Jersey Turnpike. Like the Meadowlands, Pine Barrens, and crabgrass just beyond the guardrails of the Garden State’s most infamous thoroughfare, New Jersey’s Environments stands as a powerful reminder of our complex and ever changing relationship to the natural world. Notes Like a good rest stop along the New Jersey Turnpike, numerous people and institutions helped make the production of New Jersey’s Environments a more pleasurable journey. The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis supplied the vehicle for this collection by sponsoring both the “Industrial Environments” project from 2001–2003, and the “New Jersey’s Environments: History and Policy” conference in April of 2003. The chapters presented in this volume grew from that conference. The project’s two co-directors, Susan Schrepfer and Philip Scranton, supplied the road map for those two years, and drove the wonderful and diverse community of scholars who came together each week to discuss nature and technology before eating catered lunches that were far better than those found at the Vince Lombardi, Clara Barton, and Molly Pitcher rest areas. This collection would also not be possible without the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which through a New Jersey environment grant put additional gas in the tank at a critical juncture. Thanks to Clement Price for introductions at the Dodge Foundation. Finally, I want to thank our editor at Rutgers University Press, Audra Wolfe—I could always go to Audra for directions when I felt the project was getting lost or stuck in traffic. 1. On New Jersey being the most densely populated and most developed state in the union, see New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “Anti-Sprawl Agenda: Taking Action to Combat Sprawl” at http://www.nj.gov/dep/antisprawl/ .New Jersey has the highest percentage of urban population in the U.S., with about 90 percent of its people living in what the U.S. Census terms urban areas. On urban New Jersey see “New Jersey Firsts, Facts, and Trivia” at http://www .shgcities.com/nj/facts/. 2. On New Jersey’s contaminated waste sites see the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Superfund website at http://www.nj.gov/dep/srp/ superfund/sf_faq.htm and “New Jersey First, Facts, and Trivia” at http://www .shgcities.com/nj/facts/. 3. For the history of the Passaic River see Timothy J. Iannuzzi, David F. Ludwig, Jason C. Kinnell, Jennifer M. Wallin, William H. Desvousges, and Richard

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

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W. Dunford, eds., A Common Tragedy: History of an Urban River (Association for Environmental Health and Sciences, 2002). Richard Conniff, “Swamps of Jersey: The Meadowlands,” National Geographic, vol. 199, issue 2 (February 2001): 64. On two-thirds of New Jersey being covered in farms and forests see Jim Hartz, “New Jersey: A State of Surprises,” National Geographic (November 1981): 570–71. For facts on New Jersey’s parks and forests see New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Science, Research, and Technology, “Fact Sheet, June 2004,” at http://www.nj.gov/dep/. Hartz, “New Jersey,” 576. On New Jersey’s Pine Barrens and its aquifer see David Yeadon, “New Jersey’s Surprise Wilderness,” National Geographic Traveler, vol. 198, issue 4, no. 7 (October 2000): 121; and the State of New Jersey Pinelands Commission, “New Jersey Pinelands Commission, The Pinelands National Reserve,” at http://www.nj .gov/pinelands/pnrpc.htm. On New Jersey’s illegal dumping legislation and its hazardous waste bill see Hartz, “New Jersey,” 593. On the state’s stringent water quality control measures see “Stupid Facts about New Jersey” at http://www.mistupid.com/facts/page068 .htm. On the resurrection of the Hackensack River see Conniff, “Swamps of Jersey,” 65. Hartz, “New Jersey,” 576. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon, 85 (W. W. Norton, 1996). Paul Wichansky, Christopher Weaver, Louis Steyaert, and Robert Walko, “Evaluating the Effects of Historical Land Cover Change on Summertime Weather and Climate in New Jersey,” in New Jersey’s Environments: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Neil M. Maher (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

Chapter 1

A Natural History of the Life and Death of a Great American City Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1850–2000

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Bryant Simon

Introduction The history of Atlantic City, America’s first great middle-class resort, resembles appropriately enough a fast up-and-down ride on a roller coaster. For much of the first half of the last century, Atlantic City reigned as the “Queen of Resorts.” It hosted tens of millions of people each year. It was home to the largest boardwalk in the world, the only one spelled with a capital B. It was where the Miss America Pageant and salt-water taffy were invented. (There is, by the way, no salt water in the candy.) It was where Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin first got together and where other members of the Rat Pack honed their acts before heading to Las Vegas. And it is from the streets of Atlantic City, finally, that the board game Monopoly took its property names. By the 1960s, Atlantic City earned a new sort of renown. The city had become a poster child of urban blight and decay. Journalists started to dub it the “Bronx by the Bay,” and compared it to bombed-out Dresden and wartorn Beirut. By the decade’s end, comedians folded the city’s downfall into their stand-up routines. “This town really swings,” one performer quipped; “every Friday night we shop till 10 at the supermarket.” When someone asked him what had happened to all the action, the comedian cracked, “Are you kidding? Listen, the typical couple visiting Atlantic City these days is a very, very old lady . . . and her mother.”1

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With the local economy at rock bottom, casino gambling came to town, bringing the crowds and even the Rat Pack back to the Boardwalk and the hotels. In the middle of the 1990s, more people came to Atlantic City each year than any other place in America—more than Disneyland or Dolly Parton’s Dollywood or even Las Vegas. Yet at the same time, the town has become a jarring version of the tale of two cities. Within blocks of Donald Trump’s gaudy and gilded showplace, the Taj Mahal, lie some of the meanest, loneliest, and most desolate streets in all of America. There are, of course, many ways to tell the story of Atlantic City’s roller coaster past. Politics and policy can explain much of the city’s rise, fall, and awkward reemergence. Like it did in other places, race, and more specifically white flight, played a central role in the life and death of this terribly flawed wonderland. Technology also played a part in this rocky history, so too did flamboyant characters—men like the locally famous Reese Palley and the international casino mogul Steve Wynn. And then there is nature—or more to the point, ideas about nature. Nature, in the broadest sense and as a cultural construct, pushed the roller coaster that was Atlantic City’s history. But this nature was never simple or static, nor was the crowd on the Boardwalk a constant or a given in the city. It is, in fact, the relationship between these two things—nature and the crowd—that most shaped Atlantic City’s past. Atlantic City was never a niche market town; it was from the beginning a mass resort. It was in the business of attracting crowds—crowds that it counted in the millions, not the hundreds or the thousands. When city leaders produced the kind of nature that the masses wanted, the city thrived. But when they could not, the city rotted, almost literally in the mean salt air. Looking at nature and the crowds in Atlantic City, therefore, tells us a great deal about how a large cross section of America thought of outdoor and indoor places, the interiors and exteriors of buildings, the meanings of leisure and vacations, and the perception of urban crowds and private living rooms, and how these ideas have changed over time and made and remade an American city.

The Making of the “Queen of Resorts,” 1850–1950 “Atlantic City,” commented a fictional private eye, “had belonged to the ocean before it was bought by the casinos, and that made me feel better about the city.”2 What William Cronon called “first nature”—the physical world of topography, climate, and location on a map—was why Atlantic

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City was originally founded and established.3 Atlantic City stands on the northern tip of a barrier island off the New Jersey coast. On the western side of the island is the bay; on the eastern side, the Atlantic Ocean. Even more important than water to the city’s history is geography. Ten years before the outbreak of the Civil War, more than 125,000 people traveled annually to Cape May, New Jersey, a town sitting at the very bottom of state and known for sea breezes, salt water, and fancy hotels. Several Philadelphia speculators took note of this number and one afternoon pulled out a map and drew a straight line from their city to the shore. They landed in what would become Atlantic City and began plotting how to turn the swamp, with a few dozen inhabitants, into a thriving beach resort. In June 1854, Jonathan Pitney and Richard B. Osborne, a doctor and a civil engineer, chartered the Camden and Atlantic Railroad. They sold thousands of shares of stock in the venture in just over a week, and on July 1, a brass band played as they watched the first train drop off six hundred “reporters and dignitaries” by the ocean. Atlantic City’s first tourist boom was immediately underway. Within a few years, business people built a market, a railroad terminal, and several wooden hotels that looked like barns with dormers and porches in the city. By 1877, another group of investors erected another railroad. Competition lowered the price of a trip to the shore and more people came. More hotels, restaurants, and stores sprouted up to service the new crowds.4 Throughout this initial boom phase, city leaders promoted their town as a health resort. “When you go to your physician and tell him your brain is full of cobwebs, or your liver is misbehaving itself,” one brochure asked, “what does he say in nine cases out of ten? ‘Take a sea voyage, if you can spare the time.’ ”5 Philadelphia physicians traded testimonials about the health benefits of a trip to the shore in exchange for their own train fares to the beach. One doctor swore that Atlantic City possessed “three of the greatest health-giving elements known to science—sunshine, ozone, and recreation.” Another testified that the town offered “relief and cure to all cases of rheumatic fever and arthritis.” The town’s first resident doctor claimed that Atlantic City’s ozone-laden breezes could cure everything from asthma to consumption, colds, Bright’s disease, laryngitis, diabetes, digestive disorders, neurasthenia, and even insanity. The salt water, too, was said to be medicinal. Boosters urged not just the sick to come to the shore. According to contemporary thinking about nature and cities, nature— vaguely defined—served, in the words of one of Atlantic City’s founders, “as a perfect refuge from the debilitating atmosphere of the growing cities.”

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Everyone, therefore, stood to gain from a trip to the beach. Clerks and housekeepers, factory owners and tailors, the young and the old—they all needed the sun and the surf.6 The broad linkages between urban space, nature, and health anchored Atlantic City’s appeal.7 In the early part of the twentieth century, Aliza and Isidore Greenblatt, whose daughter Marjorie would later marry Woody Guthrie, moved from Philadelphia to the “Queen of Resorts” in search of better air. Just before World War I, Dorothy Weber’s family began to make yearly pilgrimages to Atlantic City. Her father, she recalled, “said coming to Atlantic City wasn’t a luxury—it was a necessity. He believed the ocean and the beach and all was very good for your health. It was all nice and relaxing, anyway.”8 Creating a health resort meant making enough nature, but not too much, accessible to the crowds. In the resort’s early years, sunbathing—or seabathing, as it was called—remained something of an adventure. A dip in the ocean required a quick dash through thick marshes full of mosquitoes and greenhorns. Hoping to make it easier to get to the beach, hotel owners cleared away bushes and briars and laid down thin strips of wood over pools of stagnant water. Eventually the paths became popular attractions in themselves. Visitors strolled out to look at the water and suck in sea breezes. This was the start of the Boardwalk. Built in 1870, the first boardwalk was a temporary line of wood planks laid over the sand, eight feet wide and a few blocks long. Like its predecessors, the first Boardwalk represented an attempt to manage nature. According to local legend: In the spring of 1870 two hotel owners got to talking about good carpets ruined by the sandy feet of customers. Jacob Keim, owner of the Chester County House, and Alexander Boardman, owner of the Ocean House, stuck upon the idea of a wooden walk, stretched along the beach front, that would preserve the feet from the dirty sand, thus their carpets from the dirty feet.9

The Boardwalk idea proved so popular, not so much for keeping sand away as for attracting visitors, that it was enlarged each year until 1879, when it was made permanent. After that, the raised structure ran parallel to the ocean for five miles. At first, local officials barred businesses from the walk. But they quickly rescinded the law. Over the next few years, beer gardens, dance halls, and bathhouses sprang up on the Boardwalk, in the words of one observer, “like dune grass.” By 1883, one hundred stores, arcades, restaurants, and hotels lined the walk within earshot of the ocean.10

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The Boardwalk gave the city a unique identity and made the beachfront both accessible and attractive to urban visitors who, in John Jakle’s clever phrasing, sought nature in “extreme moderation.”11 With the ocean and the beach at a safe, domesticated distance, Atlantic City took off. A second and more massive building boom transformed the resort from a town into a city, to a place marked, especially in the summer, by density, ceaseless activity, and constant motion. Monumental buildings—one looked like a French castle, another like a Moorish palace, and still another like the Empire State Building—rose up ten, fifteen, and twenty stories over the Boardwalk and made the skyline look like a rugged mountain range. Closer to the ground, electric signs the size of houses, theater marquees as wide as dump trucks, and skinny amusement piers stretching out half a mile into the ocean glowed at night like the lights of Times Square. On weekends, welldressed Boardwalk crowds as thick as a subway platform at rush hour strolled past a continuous line of linen shops, jewelry stores, auction houses, salt-water taffy stands, and picture shows. Like the buzzing amusement parks it resembled, Atlantic City, by the dawn of the Jazz Age, no longer offered a pastoral retreat from the city. It was not a place of quiet refuge but a place of constant noise, light, color, and stimulation. It was not a flight from urban life but a journey into an intensified version of it, where strangers mixed, “catching,” as one man commented, “the full live sense of humanity.” Another observer added, within “fifteen minutes you long for the comparative ease of rush hour on the Brooklyn Bridge.”12 “More and more,” wrote Ed Kahn, Jr., a New Yorker staff writer, in 1947, “there seems to be doubt in the minds of the people who run the resort as to whether the Atlantic Ocean, which, after all, was the boardwalk’s original raison d’être, constitutes as much of a spectacle as the boardwalk itself.” Boardwalk benches provided Kahn with a clue to the shifting relationship between nature and commerce. “The clusters of benches,” he wrote, “that have been thoughtfully placed at intervals along the ocean side of the boardwalk for tired pedestrians to rest upon, free of charge, face not the soothing expanse of water but the bustling promenade, with its stream of rolling wicker chairs propelled by Negroes, and the long row of hotels, penny arcades, Oriental-rug bazaars, neon signs, skeeball parlors, soda fountains, bars, bathhouses, hot-dog-and-cold-drink stands, handwriting analysis booths, restaurants, and shops of all kinds that flank its landward edge. A winded stroller who wishes simply to sit in the sun and gaze without distraction at the sea is obliged either to seek a vantage point on the upstairs sun porch of a boardwalk hotel or to descend to the beach itself and,

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for a small fee, engage a deck chair.”13 Clearly Kahn was on to something. By the 1940s, as Atlantic City reached the height of its popularity, the ocean did seem less and less relevant to the business of the city, but it was not, as Kahn suggests, irrelevant. Well into the postwar period, each summer day thousands of visitors flocked to the beach, slathered on tanning oil, and positioned their bodies like human sundials. They wanted to make sure they looked good at night on the Boardwalk. The local Chamber of Commerce’s brochures still bragged in the 1940s, “Atlantic City is situated on a sunny isle in the Atlantic Ocean—warmed by the Gulf Stream in Winter, cooled by refreshing sea breezes in Summer.”14 Every morning from Memorial Day to Labor Day, lifeguards led hundreds of visitors who, it was said, “never los[t] sight of the healthful benefits of an Atlantic City vacation,” through a routine of jumping jacks and deep knee bends.15 Another postwar booster called the Boardwalk the “the world’s most sensible gymnasium.”16 But the salt air and the ocean—nature—played a more important role in the resort’s twentieth-century development than even these advertisers recognized. The sea, as Atlantic City historian Charles Funnell pointed out, provided a “sanctifying backdrop” to the raucous urban life of the Boardwalk. To many visitors, the ocean embodied natural purity. This sense of purity, in turn, gave the whole city a much needed gloss of middle-class respectability. Well after the advent of mass tourism in the 1920s, many Americans remained conflicted about vacations.17 While more and more people defined themselves by what they consumed, including the leisure they consumed, some middle-class Americans, especially the self-made immigrants who flocked to the Boardwalk, could not shed all of their anxieties about spending time away from work.18 Leisure for leisure’s sake continued to stir unsettling feelings of guilt. Atlantic City, moreover, could not offer visitors the obvious educational benefits of Williamsburg, Virginia, or Washington, D.C., or the awesome physical wonders of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. What it had, instead, was the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean, as Funnell suggested, purified and legitimized pleasure along the Jersey shore. Certain of the essential goodness and virtue of nature, embodied in the sea, middle-class visitors justified their Atlantic City trips. They could tell themselves that they were going to the “world’s playground” for the wholesomeness of the ocean. Assured that at least one part of the city offered natural, and thus decent benefits, they could then turn to the other parts of the city—like its nightclub acts that had the rough, exotic edges of Midway attractions—without too much guilt.19

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Atlantic City’s power and allure stemmed from the presence—even characterization—of nature and the city playing against each other every moment on the Boardwalk. On the Boardwalk’s eastern side stood the ocean, Cronon’s “first nature,” or what Kahn, the New Yorker writer, called the city’s raison d’être. Even as the benches pointed toward the hotels and the theaters, the ocean hovered, creating a din of sound visitors could not escape and an illusion of infinity they could not fail to notice. Gray and mysterious, the sea nonetheless still conveyed an unshakable sense of order and predictability. All day long, day after day, year after year, oblivious to the crowds, cabanas, umbrellas, lifeguard stands, boats, and even Singing Sam the Ice Cream Man, a legendary local vendor who marched up and down the beach every summer selling Popsicles and Nutty Buddies while shouting out show tunes, the ocean inched toward the coast and then backed away again. No matter what happened on the Boardwalk or even in the larger world, it went about its ceaseless business, one wave after another hitting the surf over and over again. Just across the Boardwalk, within easy earshot of the ocean’s relentless rumble, stood another world, a teeming urban world of tall buildings, busy stores, long lines of rolling chairs, electric signs that moved back and forth, and typewriters the size of freight cars. In contrast to prehuman nature, Cronon writes about “second nature”—“the artificial nature that people erect atop first nature.” Second nature was a constructed world of buildings, railroad tracks, and boardwalks. Much of this infrastructure, as Cronon points out, was erected to make “first nature” close at hand. Roads and railway lines and Atlantic City’s piers and Boardwalk did just that—they made the ocean and the cool sea breezes easy to see and feel. But the city’s built environment of faux European castles and Byzantine temples was so clearly artificial, so clearly contrived that it created a kind of “third nature,” an utterly fantastic and unreal world that seemed to have absolutely no relationship to its surroundings and physical setting. In this sense, Atlantic City was, in some ways, postmodern before there was postmodernism.20 But even more important, the very public, ostentatious inauthenticity of the Boardwalk frontage highlighted and exaggerated the naturalness of the ocean. It was, in fact, this stark, ongoing juxtaposition, even clash, between the city and the sea, the fake and the real, that gave Atlantic City its fantasy feel and made it such a popular destination in the middle of the last century. “The Boardwalk,” wrote a Philadelphia journalist, “provides a combination of nature to the east and civilization (no matter how bizarre or banal) to the west that is quite suitable for relaxation.” Was this, he asks, a

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“poor compromise?” “I think not,” he answered. “Nature in large doses can be overwhelming. She is at her best when she catches you with your guard down.”21 Architect Robert Venturi, co-author of the path-breaking book, Learning from Las Vegas, grew up in Philadelphia and vacationed in Atlantic City. The juxtaposition between the city and nature captivated him. When, he explained in a 1982 interview, “you come to analyze the combination of the ocean, the beach, the Boardwalk, and the great hotels, you realize that the dramatic quality came because you had on one side the vast space of the ocean—purely a natural phenomenon, always the same, never touched—and on the other side you had this highly artificial, very urban, constantly changing place. . . . The drama of one side,” he added, “with one thing and the other side with the other was simply amazing.”22

The Queen’s Descent, 1950–75 Nature helped to make Atlantic City into one of the nation’s most popular destinations in the 1930s and 1940s, but through the postwar years, one by one the city lost its “natural advantages.” “They used to call Atlantic City ‘the lungs of Philadelphia,’ ” said Lou, the aging wiseguy played by Burt Lancaster in Louis Malle’s 1980 film, Atlantic City, to his young companion, who is seeing the Boardwalk for the first time. “Used to” is the key phrase here. As Lou knew, Philadelphians and others had flooded to the shore every summer for years to escape the city’s heat and humidity. But beginning in the late 1950s, the Boardwalk crowds started to shrink. The crooners went to Las Vegas and the conventioneers with fat expense accounts went to Miami Beach. The tourists and singers stopped coming, at least in part, because Atlantic City offered less of the right kind of nature.23 Two sets of factors eroded Atlantic City’s natural advantages. First several technological changes—and the ability of marketers to make them widely available—changed middle-class America’s relationship with the natural world. Second, people’s ideas and consciousness of nature changed in the late 1960s and onward. “It’s always been my contention,” a Philadelphia columnist explained in 1971, “that air-conditioning killed Atlantic City. After soft shore breezes lost their exclusive allure,” he asked, “what was left?” With window units pumping thousands of BTUs of icy air into newly built suburban homes, the beach’s cool breezes were less of a draw than before. Why drive to Atlantic City in an un-air-conditioned car, many thought, when you could remain comfortable right at home? Others must have asked themselves if it was

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worth making the trip to the shore, when many of the older, reasonably priced hotels and guesthouses themselves did not have air-conditioning.24 The widespread use of air-conditioning paralleled another postwar change in American life and environmental thinking: suburbanization. In one of the largest demographic shifts in the nation’s history, millions of families left the gritty sidewalks of the old neighborhood for the green lawns of Levittown and its many imitators. Among the untold consequences of this mass relocation, suburbanites renegotiated their relationship with the outdoors, moving much of their lives from the front porch to the backyard.25 And not surprisingly it was at this moment of relentless motion that the backyard swimming pool business took off. Before this time, only the richest Americans could afford their own pools. During the 1960s, however, rising wages, installment plans, falling prices, and the development of the above-ground pool allowed growing numbers of middle-class families to afford this luxury. Swimming pools offered suburbanites a privatized version of the fantasy city. Before this, families might have packed up and gone to Atlantic City on a hot summer day, but after 1960 they stayed home where the swimming pool with clean filtered water glistened in the sun just on the other side of the sliding glass door. With a pool close by, some families felt less compelled to leave home and the security of the suburbs to go to Atlantic City and mix with crowds—by this time increasingly integrated crowds—on the Boardwalk.26 Atlantic City had thrived in the railroad era and survived the first decades of the automobile revolution, but the jet age, many believed, created insurmountable problems for the resort. By the early 1960s, the nation’s major airlines slashed prices and helped to reconfigure people’s mental maps. Now a family from the blue-collar Philadelphia suburb of Keswick could get to a newer resort with modern hotels and flashy restaurants in about the same time it took to drive the clogged roads to Atlantic City.27 At the same time, travel merchants introduced package deals that made the cost of a long weekend trip to Florida or the Caribbean not much more than going to the shore. Perhaps nothing symbolized Atlantic City’s declining popularity more than the formation of an Atlantic City Club that met in Miami Beach.28 Obviously, middle-class Americans did on occasion venture away from the suburbs. Some, however, wanted nature to have the same predictability as their carefully plotted neighborhoods and chlorine-saturated pools. Yet providing “clean” outdoor leisure got harder and harder for city leaders, especially as some tourists elevated their standards for cleanliness.

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Throughout the 1960s, Atlantic City visitors complained about fearless seagulls swooping down and snatching their food right out of their hands. Beach erosion, meanwhile, caused by years of mismanagement and flawed policies, swept away patches of white sands. Spurred on by the emerging environmental movement, Philadelphia and New York journalists began printing stories about fecal counts and bacteria in the waters off Atlantic City. Having read about the populated “Queen of Resorts,” more people decided to stay home and do their swimming in chlorine-soaked pools. The winds provided two more blows to the city. In 1962 and 1971 raging storms swept over the area, bowling over houses and businesses.29 In a final blow to Atlantic City’s natural world, health officials started to question the wholesomeness of the sun and days spent tanning on the beach. Another shift in ideas about nature and vacations took an additional cross-section of visitors away from Atlantic City. During the resort’s heyday, men and women, who like Woody Allen were “two with nature,” flocked to the Boardwalk and the beaches.30 They wanted the sun and surf mixed with showers and room service. And they liked—or tolerated—the crowds. A summer afternoon on a beach packed so tight that towels covered every inch of sand and a night on the Boardwalk jammed with just as many people thrilled and invigorated them. The crowds told them they were someplace important and special. But to the children of the “two with nature” generation, the same people who had fled the public world of the cities for the private lives of the suburbs, Atlantic City by the 1960s seemed too crowded with cars, people, and Boardwalk hucksters. With its bright lights, noisy amusements, and garish, cartoonish backdrop, it was too urban, and it was, in the end, too unnatural for the legions of Americans now looking for purer forms of nature. Fleeing from the Boardwalk, some suburban tourists went to Disney’s Main Street in search of a public world, a literally and figuratively sanitized one they didn’t have at the end of the cul-de-sacs in their new neighborhoods. Others, following a trend started before the war, went in search of leisure that they thought was more authentic and more real. A vacation, for them, meant a trip away from the unnatural world of the city.31 It meant going to a national park or a ski resort or river rafting or to an underdeveloped beach town. Some, of course, went even further into the “wild.” Others thought, as Jennifer Price explains, “To appreciate Nature . . . [is] . . . to be a more Real person. It is to be a better person and the right sort of person.” Wherever these people went to get “one” with nature, it was far away from the buzz of cars, skyscrapers, and thick nighttime

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crowds. Again, the remarkably unnatural Boardwalk, with its tall buildings and throngs of strangers, hardly fit changing notions of leisure and leisure space.32

Remaking of the City on a Gamble As soon as tourist profits flagged, Atlantic City boosters did what they could to regain the city’s natural advantages. In the early 1960s, the Chamber of Commerce pressed Philadelphia radio stations to describe conditions at the shore as partly sunny rather than partly cloudy.33 A couple of years later, investors proposed turning the city dump into a ski hill covered during the winter with artificial snow. Beginning in the 1970s, city leaders lobbied state officials for funds to stop beach erosion, and clean up the shore and the ocean. The Chamber of Commerce launched its own “Earth Day” campaign to bring people back to town. “It’s official,” the executive committee broadcast, “we can shout it loud. There is no ‘measurable regular air pollution’ along the Boardwalk.”34 Trumpeting the findings, business leaders urged bikers and runners to use the walk as a great outdoor health spa. Others proposed enclosing the Boardwalk under a plastic bubble or seethrough glass. That way it too could become like the mall, a weatherless climate-controlled space. Like most of the ideas for rebuilding the city, this one never happened. But one idea wouldn’t go away: gambling.35 On the November night in 1976 that New Jersey voters approved the gambling referendum, Atlantic City bars gave away free drinks. Strangers danced down the Boardwalk as fireworks crackled in the distance. Investors schemed and laborers dreamed. “Everybody,” a local businessman remarked, “was a millionaire that night.”36 Of course not everyone in Atlantic City has gotten rich since the first casino opened in 1978. While gaming has certainly revived the city’s tourism industry, creating tens of thousands of jobs, millions of dollars in tax receipts, and billions of dollars in investment, it has not served as the promised “unique tool of urban renewal.” Over the past twenty years, Atlantic City has lost hundreds of restaurants and bars and a third of its population. Despite attracting 35 million visitors each year, the city does not have a single movie theater or fully equipped supermarket. Quite clearly, then, casino gambling has not returned Atlantic City to its glory days or even remade it, like Las Vegas, into a gleaming city of tomorrow. Nor have the casinos reestablished the links between nature and urbanity that gave the city its drama and appeal in the past; if anything, they have obliterated the connections between the two.37

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The casinos have turned Atlantic City into a gambling town and little more. When it comes to nature, the slot machines have nearly made the ocean and the beach irrelevant. On warm summer days, the coastline in front of the casinos is silent and empty. What is natural and what matters in Atlantic City remains a sense of geography, or more to the point demographics. Investors poured money and junk bonds into the city after 1978 for two simple reasons—first, because they could; for much of the 1980s, Atlantic City was the only place east of the Mississippi that allowed gambling; and second, bankers liked Atlantic City because it sat within a threehour car (or bus) drive of a third of the nation’s population and potential gamblers. At night, Atlantic City, with its twelve casinos, still sparkles like a mountain range strung with Christmas lights. Up close and inside, however, each casino functions like a self-contained island, so that while the towering structures share a piece of real estate with the old Atlantic City, they embrace little of its past relationship to the outdoors. Most casinos turn their backs on the world outside. With their flat, unadorned walls facing the Boardwalk, they say as loudly as they can that everything important about them is inside. And inside, the casinos are built like mazes, easy to get into, but hard to escape. Yet there are no accidents here. The architects of the first casinos deliberately laid out their buildings to make sure that no one accidently stumbled on the ocean.38 “[O]ne could live for days in most of the casinos,” a Time reporter cracked in 1981, “and think that the only water around was that coming out of the bathroom faucet.”39 One family checked into a casino hotel in 1980 not to gamble, but to go to the ocean. Yet they kept getting lost on their way to the beach. After several failed attempts to get out of the hotel, the father talked to a security guard. The uniformed official pointed across the casino. As soon as the family started in that direction, he stopped them, telling them that children under the age of twenty-one couldn’t walk on the casino floor. When they asked him again how to get to the beach, he shrugged and pointed to a door away from the ocean on Pacific Avenue.40 None of the 1980s-era hotel towers had a place to sit outside in the sun and have a drink and feel the sea breeze. Only one had a top-floor cocktail lounge, now closed, with an ocean view.41 Each casino, an official admits, was designed to “capture . . . customers . . . [and] . . . not let them go until they were ready to go.” Most lobbies were no bigger than suburban living rooms. Even fewer had comfortable chairs or conversation pits. Frank Sinatra, Cher, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other entertainers performed for

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an hour, an hour and fifteen minutes at the most, no more. Only a couple of casinos had swimming pools. In-room televisions picked up few stations and scarcely any movie channels. The dim lights by the beds made it almost impossible to read. All of this, of course, was part of a well-researched plan to get people out of their rooms onto the windowless, clockless casino floor, where the lighting and temperature never changed. Leaving nothing to chance, casino operators pumped oxygen-filled air onto the gaming floors at regular intervals to keep bettors awake. The climate-controlled environment was there to shut out everything and confuse players who might stop dropping quarters into video poker machines or tossing chips onto craps tables if they realized the time of day. Casino managers knew that the odds favored the house and that the longer players remained on the floor, the more they would lose. That’s why casinos gave away free food and drinks and closed their buildings off from the outdoors.42 Outside the island worlds of Atlantic City’s casinos, there is still the Boardwalk. While the pathway remains a sensational transition between the ocean and the skyscrapers, it increasingly seems like little more than a conveyor belt carting people from one casino to the next. Along its sides, there are still benches. Some point to the glass buildings and some point to the ocean, but mostly they just stand empty except in the late afternoon, when bus riders with no more quarters sit there and wait to go home.

Reclaiming Nature A few years ago Atlantic City slipped behind Las Vegas as the United States’ most visited place. Casino managers and local leaders launched an aggressive campaign to reclaim the advantage. They replaced the musty old bus terminal, created a grand entrance into town, and raised funds for a new convention center. But city leaders must know that buildings and roads alone will not lure people away from Las Vegas or even Foxwoods, the Pequot-owned casino in Connecticut. Atlantic City needs attractions; it needs something other than the casinos to bring people to town and keep them there for more than six hours. In the search for that something new, several gaming companies have rediscovered something old—nature. During the summer of 2000, the Atlantic City Hilton put up umbrellas on the beach in front of the hotel and encouraged its guests to go outside to swim and sunbathe. Down the boardwalk, Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal staged beach parties every weekend under gold-fringed sultan tents.43 Several other casinos now offer café seating at their Boardwalk restaurants and

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these places are packed on most warm, summer nights. A few years ago, a local businessman opened a miniature golf course across from the Convention Hall and players often wait in line as they make the turn from the front nine to the back nine. And in perhaps the most promising project, developers have launched “The Walk,” a promenade with sidewalks decorated with plaques commemorating past Miss America Pageant winners, outlet stores, a couple of restaurants, an Imax Theater, and Starbucks with deck seating connecting the Boardwalk with the new Convention Center. The return to nature, or at least the outdoors, is probably Atlantic City’s last best hope, but it might be too late. The city might not have enough of the right kind of nature to attract middle-class crowds anymore. Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

Neil Maher, Paul Sutter, and Hal Rothman pointed me in the right directions when I strayed from the path, and I thank them for that. “A Dowager’s Decline,” Newsweek, June 8, 1970, 86. Valerie Wilson Wesley, The Devil Riding (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2000), 30–31. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), xix. Vicki Gold Levi and Lee Eisenberg, Atlantic City: 125 Years of Ocean Madness (Berkeley, Ca.: Ten Speed Press, 1979), 1–9. Charles E. Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City (New York: Knopf, 1975), 127–30; and Earle L. Ovington, “The City of Robust Health,” n.d., “History of Atlantic City: Early History 1800s,” Heston Collection, Atlantic City Free Public Library. Martin Paulsson, The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 15; on the local doctor, Levi and Eisenberg, Atlantic City, 8; and Gay Talese, “One More Spin of the Wheel for Atlantic City,” New York Times, September 8, 1996. Paulsson, The Social Anxieties of Progressive Reform, 16; and Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea, 134–37. Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 231; Glenn Duffy, “She ‘Did Her Part’ for the Blenheim,” Atlantic City Free Press, August 20, 1978. Mark Tyrrell, “The Boardwalk,” Atlantic City Magazine (June 1992), 94–95. For more on the history of the Boardwalk see Frank Ward O’Malley, “The BoardWalkers,” Everybody’s Magazine (August 1908), 233–43; Sam Baol, “Eighty Years of ‘The Eighth Wonder,’ ” New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1960; and G. Patrick Pawling, “Boardwalk: The People’s Park Place,” American Legion Magazine (August 1998), 27–28. John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 64.

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12. Russel B. Nye, “Eight Ways of Looking at an Amusement Park,” Journal of Popular Culture (Summer 1981), 65–66. Second quote comes from James Huneker, New Cosmopolis: A Book of Images (New York: Scribner’s, 1915), 312. 13. See Kahn’s comments in Shore Chronicles: Diaries and Travelers’ Tales from the Jersey Shore, 1764–1955, ed. Margaret Thomas Buchholz, 335 (Harvey Cedars, N.J.: Down the Shore Publishing, 1999). For a similar observation about the benches, see Thomas Hine, “Atlantic City,” AIA Journal (November 1982), 40. This turning away from nature could, in part, be seen as a part of a larger trend in vacationing. As Cindy Aron notes, while advocates for vacations continued to emphasize their importance in restoring health and energy, they focused increasingly on using the time for personal growth and the recharging of one’s productive energies. See Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 254. 14. City Press Headquarters, “Atlantic City: World’s Premier All Year Health and Pleasure Resort,” n.d. (looks like the postwar era), vertical files, Atlantic City, General #9, Atlantic County Public Library. 15. Bill Kent, Robert E. Ruffolo, Jr., and Lauralee Dobbins, Atlantic City: America’s Playground (Encinitas, Ca.: Heritage Media, 1998), 142. 16. “Chamber Proposed Creating a Health Center Like the Mayo Clinic Here,” Atlantic City Press, November 15, 1958. 17. Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea, 137–41. 18. Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 178. For more on the ongoing anxiety, see Aron, Working at Play. 19. Jakle, The Tourist, 57–58. 20. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, xix. Hal Rothman in his study of Las Vegas uses the term “third nature” in a similar manner. See Rothman, “Shedding Skin and Shifting Shape: Tourism in the Modern West,” in Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West, ed. David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, 114, 118 (University Press of Kansas, 2001). 21. Michael Maattala, “What a People-Watcher Saw at Atlantic City,” Philadelphia Bulletin, June 1, 1975. 22. Thomas Hine interviews Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, “Learning from Las Vegas,” AIA Journal (November 1982), 45. See a similar observation by O’Malley, “The Board-Walkers,” 238, cited earlier. 23. Screenplay by John Guare, Atlantic City, U.S.A., for the Louis Malle film, 1980, 53, Heston Room, Atlantic City Free Public Library. 24. William Mandel, “Shore Lures Stars,” Philadelphia Bulletin, June 13, 1971. See also Susan Vandongen, “Nostalgic View of AC,” Atlantic City Press, n.d., vertical file, Hotel Chalfone-Haddon, Atlantic County Historical Society, Somers Point, New Jersey. For this larger trend, see Paul Goldberger, “The Rise of the Private City,” in Breaking Away: The Future of the City (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1996), 135–47. 25. For more on suburbanization, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the

26

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

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Rise of American Environmentalism (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the importance of air-conditioning and swimming pools to Atlantic City’s decline, see Peter B. Brophy, “A People Which No Longer Remembers Has Lost Its History and Soul,” Atlantic City Press, June 25, 1978. On air-conditioning and the retreat to the private, see Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 94–95. On pools, see also John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London: Routledge, 1998), 35. For a fascinating social history of airconditioning, see Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). On race and the demise of public amusements, see David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 241–56. On air travel and the decline of Atlantic City, Frank J. Prendergast, “Resort Hotels’ Outlook, Operations Changing,” Atlantic City Press, September 21, 1968; Bruce Boyle, “Technology, Racism, and Rolling Chairs May Revive Us Yet,” Philadelphia Bulletin, September 23, 1981; Michael Pollack, “The City in Shock,” Atlantic City Press, March 28, 1982; Daniel Heneghan, “Casinos’ Beginning Rooted in AC Decay,” Atlantic City Press, November 12, 1986; Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea, 153–54, 156. On the larger trend, see Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966–1999, (New York: Free Press, 1999), 106–7; and Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City, 67. Paul Learn, “They Sing Praises of AC—But in Miami,” Atlantic City Press, February 20, 1966, vertical file, “History of Atlantic City: Publicity and Promotional Materials,” Heston Collection, Atlantic City Free Public Library; Frank J. Prendergast, “Resort Hotels’ Outlook, Operations Changing,” Atlantic City Press, September 21, 1968; Daniel Heneghan, “Casinos’ Beginning Rooted in AC Decay,” Atlantic City Press, November 12, 1986. The same issues are discussed by the characters in Warren B. Murphy and Frank Stevens’ novel, Atlantic City (Los Angeles: Pinnacle Books, 1979), 221–22. “Letter to the Editor,” Atlantic City Press, June 29, 1963; and Greater Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce, Action, January 1966, March 1972, Heston Room, Atlantic City Free Public Library. Allen quoted by Peter A. Coclanis, “Urbs in Horto,” Reviews in American History 20 (September 1992), 16. For more on this, see Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), especially chapter 2. On the retreat to the private and vacations with reference to Atlantic City, see James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 229. See also Nasaw, Going Out; and Aron, Working at Play. On vacations in the West, see Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century West (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

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33. “Stressing the Positive: No ‘Partly Cloudy’ Skits in Resort, It’s ‘Partly Sunny’ from Today On,” Atlantic City Press, January 24, 1962. 34. Greater Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce, Action, April 1971, Heston Room, Atlantic City Free Public Library. 35. “Plastic Canopy Urged for Resort Boardwalk,” Philadelphia Bulletin, October 27, 1963; and Ellen Karasik, “A Stroll under Glass, by the Sea,” Atlantic City Press, January 13, 1979. 36. Quote from Resse Palley from Bill Moyers Reports, “Big Gamble in Atlantic City,” CBS Television, July 28, 1986. 37. For a few assessments, see Bob Drogin, “For Atlantic City, Casino Jackpot’s Still a Long Shot,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1989; and Mary Jo Patterson, Robin Gaby Fisher, and Christine Baird, “Atlantic City Shell Game,” Newark StarLedger, May 4, 1997. On the demise of local restaurants, see Victoria Foote, “Casinos’ Success Is Bad Luck for Other A.C. Spots,” Restaurant Exchange News 6 (November 1984), Misc. Files, Greater Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce; and Robert Goodman, The Luck Business: The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America’s Gambling Explosion (New York: Free Press, 1995), 21–23. 38. On Atlantic City’s casinos, see Paul Goldberger, “AC Architecture: The Odds Are All Against It,” New York Times, February 17, 1980; and Thomas Hine, “Atlantic City,” AIA Journal (November 1982), 36. See also Andrés Martinez, 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas (New York: Villard, 1999), 13. On the idea of “ageography,” see Michael Sorkin, “Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin, xi (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); and Karl B. Raitz and John Paul Jones III, “The City as Landscape Artifact and Community Symbol,” Journal of Cultural Geography 9 (Fall/Winter 1998), 32. 39. Gerald Clarke, “In Atlantic City: The View from the Porch,” Time (September 7, 1981), 4; interview with Murray Raphel by author, September 8, 1999. 40. Shulamite E. Kustanowitz, “Somewhere Beyond the Casinos Is the Ocean,” New York Times, September 28, 1980. 41. Hine, “Atlantic City,” 36. 42. David Margolick, “Under LV’s Neon Beats a Heart of Denim,” New York Times, February 16, 1984; and Jackie Spinner, “Atlantic City No Longer Lives by Casinos Alone,” International Herald Tribune, March 22, 2000. For more on casino design, see John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 90; Marc Cooper, “Searching for Sin City and Finding Disney in the Desert,” in Literary Las Vegas: The Best Writing about America’s Most Fabulous City, ed. Mike Tronnes, 325–50 (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); and Hannigan, Fantasy City, 161. 43. Spinner, “Atlantic City No Longer Lives by Casinos Alone.” See also Jeff Benedict, Without Reservation: How a Controversial Indian Tribe Rose to Power and Built the World’s Largest Casino (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

Chapter 2

Solid Waste Management in “The Garbage State” New Jersey’s Transformation from Landfilling to Incineration

a

Eileen McGurty

Introduction In July 1987 Essex County, New Jersey, braced for a potential public health disaster: piles of garbage rotting on the streets during the hot and humid summer. The landfill in the Hackensack Meadowlands development district, where the county had disposed of its garbage for decades, was scheduled to close on July 31. The County of Essex was in the midst of building a waste-to-energy incinerator to burn the county’s garbage, but the facility would not be completed for three more years.1 The proposed interim solution, a transfer station to consolidate and compact all of the county’s garbage and then transport it to landfills out of state would not be completed by August 1. The sense of panic reached into most of northeastern New Jersey, where the majority of the state’s people and garbage were located. The landfills in the Hackensack Meadowlands would eventually close to all of the one hundred municipalities in the region that had traditionally used this area as a dumping ground. This particular garbage calamity was avoided at the eleventh hour by the emergency rules set by the Department of Environmental Protection, and an emergency increase of the disposal rate by 300 percent to accommodate the extra costs involved in shipping waste out of state. However, the Essex County landfill closure and transfer station delay was only one among many developments during the two decades of the 1970s and 1980s that caused government officials in New Jersey to warn that a garbage crisis 28

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was imminent. In the late twentieth century, New Jersey was not alone in suffering from an obsolete garbage management system. Urban America was in the midst of major changes that made the standard approach to garbage management—sanitary landfills—inadequate.2 New Jersey’s Meadowlands, long a dumping ground for the industrial megalopolis of the northeast, thus illustrate the complexities of this garbage management crisis. Although the “out of sight, out of mind” approach to garbage management had been practiced for centuries, during the post World War II era the amount and types of materials entering the trash pile grew exponentially with the expanding population and the exploding disposal-based consumer economy.3 Simultaneously, land scarcity and development trends from the expanding suburbs caused land that had previously been unusable except as a repository of waste to be valuable because the investment in stabilizing the marshy soils became worthwhile. Moreover, while the suburbs were expanding, the manufacturing base of the industrial urban centers was crumbling. Cities were desperate to create a new economic foundation that would stabilize the tax base, provide much needed jobs, and halt the exodus of people. The mounds of garbage produced in the cities and their burgeoning suburbs became a potential solution to an urban problem. Rather than causing health hazards by rotting in the street, trash would become the foundation for economic renewal. The late twentieth century was marked also by an increased environmental sensitivity, and public outcry about the environmental effects of the old garbage management system made continued landfilling politically untenable. This essay will explore changes in garbage policies by examining two interrelated episodes in the development of trash management in New Jersey: the landfill closures in the Hackensack Meadowlands development district and the construction of the Essex County incinerator in Newark. These cases demonstrate that increasing concern about environmental problems was, surprisingly, a minor impetus for the shift away from traditional sanitary landfills for garbage disposal. Despite the strong environmental rhetoric and the genuine environmental problems caused by landfilling in the Meadowlands, the new garbage strategies were rooted instead in economic development policies that had long shaped the landscapes of the Hackensack Meadowlands and the Newark Bay. Continued landfilling clashed with development goals as the population expanded, per capita generation of waste increased, and the suburbs grew. Additionally, new technologies, such as incinerators that could burn garbage and produce enough heat to generate electricity, could not only provide an alternative to landfills, but

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also contribute to industrial development goals by providing cheap energy to the region. While the aggressive landfill closures in the Hackensack Meadowlands were driven by the need for open land for development in the most densely populated area of the country, the Newark Meadowlands garbage would provide the power for a new industrial landscape emerging from the marsh adjacent to the state’s largest city. As a result the Newark Bay and the Hackensack Meadowlands had fewer obvious signs of filth and contamination but were nevertheless shaped by garbage.

Wetlands and Garbage It is not a coincidence that both of these New Jersey case studies are situated in a vast area of tidal wetlands that dominates much of the landscape in the northeastern section of the state. The history of garbage and the history of wetlands in this area are intimately linked. The Atlantic seaboard is awash with these tidal wetlands where the coastal plain had been depressed by a series of glaciations and large rivers created vast areas of sediment accumulation. Upon first seeing these vast areas of marshes, Europeans were astonished by their expanse and their abundant fish and wildlife.4 Indeed, wetlands are among the most important biological systems, with high net primary productivity and key reproductive habitat for numerous fish, bird, and mammal species. Wetlands also contribute to many essential ecological functions, including flood control, water purification, and control of sediment movement. Despite the enthusiasm of early colonists for the abundant land they encountered along the Atlantic coast, the positive images associated with agriculture and animal husbandry gave way to a view of the marshes as a hindrance to economic development. The focus shifted from using these lands to harvest the abundance of nature to developing these “submerged lands” for a burgeoning manufacturing and commercial landscape. Since wetlands were no longer valuable unless filled in, the tidal marshes near the growing cities of the mid-Atlantic came to be viewed as wasted spaces. Wetlands were the quintessential waste, an idea with roots in the Latin word vastus, meaning unoccupied or desolate, because they could not easily be manipulated into development schemes and visions of the growing nation. The swampy land, however, could become an integral part of the industrializing landscape by serving as the major dumping ground for the growing piles of waste from residences, commercial establishments, and manufacturing facilities in the urban areas near the coast. The land was

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inexpensive and its topography allowed for easy disposal. Examples abound: the 3,000-acre Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, now famous as the repository of the debris from the World Trade Center, was built on a salt marsh near the small waterway that separates Staten Island from New Jersey; Boston’s Back Bay, now a prominent residential area, was once a wetland filled with garbage; and the stately Union Station in Washington, D.C., also sits on a former swamp turned garbage dump and, then, turned prime real estate. Garbage and swamps together created infamy for New Jersey: the landfill in Kearny that entombed the debris of the classical revival columns from the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City; the landfill in Jersey City, owned at one time by the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, that burned continually for a decade; and the rumor that the missing body of Jimmy Hoffa is lying under the end zone at Giants Stadium.5 New Jersey’s wetlands were particularly well suited for garbage dumping, with vast expanses of marshes easily accessed from major city centers. By 1967, when New Jersey began seriously to attempt regulation of landfills, there were more than four hundred landfills in the state, mostly situated in the northeastern estuaries. Much of the waste was put directly into waterways within tidal marshes. The garbage that landed on actual ground sat in piles over the meadow mat with the groundwater directly underneath, creating vast problems from leachate contamination. The odor was overwhelming to anyone who traveled through the area, and even nearby airports had difficulties with flights landing and departing due to huge scavenger bird populations. When the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission was formed in 1969, it estimated that nearly 15 million people relied on the wetlands within the district for the annual disposal of 9 million cubic yards of trash, an amount that could fill three hundred Washington Monuments.6 The Newark Meadowlands, the tidal marsh at the mouth of the Passaic River and the city’s eastern boundary, became the favored dumping ground during the nineteenth century for waste from the industrial development, burgeoning population, and consumer economy of Newark. By the 1970s most of the official dumps had closed, but the area was still plagued with illegal dumping as well as the ongoing effects from past dumping. Because these two locations—the Hackensack and Newark Meadowlands—exemplified the view of wetlands as useless, they were used as legal and illegal dumping grounds for decades. It had become impossible to think about the Jersey Meadowlands without thinking first and foremost about garbage.

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The Hackensack Meadowlands The effort to stop landfilling in the Hackensack Meadowlands started in earnest with the passage of the Hackensack Meadowlands Reclamation and Development Act of 1968. The purpose of the newly formed Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission (HMDC) was to “provide for urgent needs for more space for industry, commerce, residences and public recreation.” However, since the major feature of the landscape in 1969 was garbage, the HMDC was also required to plan for the region’s trash disposal in perpetuity. If the Commission was to reach its goal of orderly land development, it would have to close the landfills and develop an alternative disposal system. The HMDC was not the first attempt to harness the full economic potential of the land in the Meadowlands. That process began in 1929 with the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, which portrayed the Hackensack Meadowlands as prime for industrial development. The Regional Plan estimated that 63,000 acres of land in the entire New York region were suitable for industrial development, and proposed that half of the Hackensack Meadowlands (almost 14,000 acres) be used for this purpose. The other half of the Meadowlands was to be reserved for residential development to enable workers to live near industrial sites, and to lessen the potential air pollution effects of increased emissions from New Jersey on New York City due to prevailing wind patterns.7 The plan also proposed other wetlands for industrial development, including those along Newark Bay, the Raritan River, the bay near Bayonne, and the Arthur Kill in New Jersey, as well as Jamaica Bay, Flushing Meadows, and the East River in New York. However, none of these areas was as extensive as the Hackensack Meadowlands. Coming on the heels of the Regional Plan of New York and in keeping with the spirit of the regional planning movement, in 1929 New Jersey issued its own study and set of proposals under the auspices of the New Jersey Meadow Reclamation Commission. The state legislature had requested the study of the marshes of northeastern New Jersey a year earlier. The area included not only the estuary and tidal marshes of the Hackensack River, but also the Passaic River estuary, the Newark Bay, and the Arthur Kill. The purpose of the Commission was to study the potential for “the promotion of commerce, manufacturing and transportation” in this region.8 While the Regional Plan of New York called for coordinated development of the entire metropolitan area, the Commission argued that the New Jersey Meadowlands offered the best opportunities for development over

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the other potential areas covered by New York’s Regional Plan. One of the key aspects of the Commission’s vision was the development of a railroad hub directly in the center of the Hackensack Meadowlands to coordinate the movement of materials in and out of the Port area, followed by the creation of industrial sites in the Meadowlands with easy access to the railroad hub. The Commission hailed the geographic centrality of the Meadowlands to the Port and the many rail lines that crisscrossed the region as the key to industrial development. The most important characteristic of the New Jersey Meadows, according to the Commission, was their sheer size: “An outstanding feature is the expanse of the area, topographically suitable and advantageously located, furnishing plenty of elbowroom for expanding requirements of industry.”9 The major limitation, shallow water, was supposed to be rectified through the infrastructure improvements outlined in the plan. Unfortunately, the Commission’s plan met a similar fate to that of the Regional Plan of New York: the Great Depression halted implementation of most of the proposals. The post-World War II suburbanization phenomenon, however, renewed interest in a regionally based development approach. In 1956 there was a short-lived intermunicipal effort (Meadowlands Regional Planning Board), followed in 1963 by another state effort through the Governor’s Commission on the Meadowlands. A few projects from these plans did come to fruition, but the majority of the Meadows remained undeveloped in the mid-1960s.10 The development district created by the HMDC in 1969 was a 20,000-acre, four-by-eight-mile tract that included parts or all of fourteen municipalities from two counties. Sixty-five percent of the land was undeveloped: in the most densely populated area in the country, six miles from the largest city, only 7,000 acres of the Meadowlands district was in permanent use, dominated by transportation, freight storage, and low-grade warehousing. An additional 2,700 acres, or 20 percent of the remaining land, were either active or abandoned landfills.11 While the desire to develop the tidal marshes into land suitable for industry, transportation, and residences was a constant in all conversations about the Meadowlands in the twentieth century, an amazing transformation had occurred between the 1930 Report of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission and the 1969 establishment of the HMDC: the respective planners articulated very different reasons for limited development in the area. In 1930 northeastern New Jersey had “remained undeveloped due largely to the presence of unsightly tidal marshes and the lack of adequate transport

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facilities. These marsh lands, in addition to being an eye sore have presented more or less grave problems to the State, county and municipal governments and have been a barrier to the orderly development to northern New Jersey.”12 The HMDC was founded, in large part, to deal with the same problems. Blocking the tidal water and stabilizing the soil through regional engineering schemes was supposed to overcome the natural obstacles to development in the Meadowlands. The 1970 Comprehensive Plan called for the filling of over 2,000 acres of marshes. Yet the major cause of arrested development was no longer seen as the natural landscape of marshes, which could have easily been engineered away. In 1970 it was the human practice of dumping garbage into the wetlands that hindered development. According to the HMDC plan, waste was the central obstacle to developing the Hackensack Meadowlands. “The map, which summarizes a century of waste disposal, is as much a determinant of future land uses in the Meadowlands as the map of its geology, which summarizes ages of momentous natural history.”13 Garbage had been dumped in the Meadowlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet shifts in American’s relationship to waste during the postwar period propelled the garbage problem to new levels. As historian Susan Strasser aptly demonstrates, “trash and trashmaking became integral to the economy in a wholly new way: the growth of markets for new products came to depend in part on the continuous disposal of old things.”14 The data of waste generation in the United States bears this out. In 1960 the United States generated a total of 88.1 million tons of municipal solid waste, which amounted to 2.68 pounds per person, per day. Within only ten years, the total amount of municipal solid waste generated had increased by 37.5 percent to reach 121.1 million tons. While population growth accounted for some of the increase, the per capita waste generation had increased 21.3 percent to reach 3.25 pounds per person, per day.15 All projections predicted more and more waste because waste and wealth went hand in hand. As urban planner Kevin Lynch explained, in societies “where material shortage is the norm, discarding things is a notorious way of demonstrating power.”16 An expanding disposable income leads to an expanding pile of disposable materials. The bureaucrats charged with managing all this waste seemed to understand this phenomenon: in 1969 the director of New Jersey’s solid waste program in the Department of Health argued to the state legislature that more solid waste planning was necessary because rising affluence was leading to rising piles of garbage.17

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In postwar New Jersey a burgeoning population along with growing affluence were dominant factors in increasing amounts of garbage across the state. The Meadowlands development plans were actually established to promote and accommodate these trends. Hence the regional planners in the HMDC contributed to the need for ever more facilities to handle ever growing piles of garbage. From the start, the Commission understood the need to tackle the garbage issue immediately. The need for garbage disposal was a major focus in the formulation of the enabling legislation for the HMDC. Garbage disposal had become an overriding concern of the fourteen municipalities within the district as well as the eighty-six additional towns in New Jersey that depended on the Meadowlands for disposal of all their waste. The state wanted to grant the Commission control over land use decisions that overrode those made by local municipal governments in the district. In order to win enough support in the legislature to pass a bill that would supersede home rule, proponents of the Commission had to address garbage disposal issues, one of the most pressing concerns of the municipalities. As a result, the final bill that passed mandated that the Commission provide towns with disposal sites for the amount of waste accepted in the district at the time of passage. According to the first executive director of the HMDC, Clifford Goldman, “The Meadowlands plan was a prospectus for change. The first requirement was to undo the traditional patterns of garbage disposal.”18 Garbage from twentieth-century homes and businesses does not make for very sturdy fill material upon which to build new office buildings, apartment buildings, or industrial plants; it is not easily compacted nor does it stabilize well. The more garbage, the more difficult it would be to create the type of development envisioned by the Commission because it would necessitate removing the garbage from needed sites prior to stabilization of the soil and add considerably to the final costs. The possibility that unstable soil could hold up development was real: the cost for building the New Jersey Turnpike through the garbage-filled tidal marshes just a few years earlier had nearly killed that project. The easiest way for the Commission to stop trash from entering the district would have been to use its regulatory powers to close down the garbage facilities. Since “garbage dumping was incompatible with the planned use of the Meadowlands,” the Commission could easily argue that its interest prevailed over the interests of the present users.19 In their first two attempts at eliminating garbage from the Meadowlands, the Commission tried to halt established companies from expanding and developing

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new sites for waste disposal. The companies responded by arguing that their old sites would reach capacity shortly and that towns depending on them for disposal would have no other place to put garbage. The largest of these landfill operations, Municipal Sanitary Landfill Association (MSLA), was a conglomerate of four landfills in Kearny. Together these landfills accepted nearly half of the total waste in the district, almost 16,000 tons per week.20 At the time of their application for an extension into a new parcel of wetlands, the completed fill sites had exceeded their allowable height limitations by 100 to 200 percent.21 The only way for the company to grow would be to expand onto land that the Commission had designated as open space. The Commission had lost its case against another landfill just months earlier when owners successfully argued that landfill expansion was necessary to avoid a garbage crisis because there were no disposal alternatives. The Commission decided to compromise with MSLA; in exchange for not expanding into the new land, MSLA was allowed to extend the “remaining life” of the landfill by increasing the height limitations for a three-year extension. The agreement would require that no new customers be allowed to dump at the site.22 The garbage issue in the Hackensack Meadowlands quickly consumed the time and energy of the Commission staff. The strategy of containment, while successful in the MSLA case, was of limited value. If the Commission was going to move forward with the development agenda, then a long-term solution to the garbage problem must be put in place. The initial vision as put forth by Chairman Edmund Hume in June 1971 was comprehensive: “The Commission is preparing preliminary designs for a system of waste disposal, which will replace landfilling. The system will comprise recycling, sludge disposal, industrial waste treatment and incineration.”23 From the start, the Commission was predisposed to incineration as a favored method of dealing with the solid waste problem. Ideas for waste disposal that were more “in keeping with the principles of the ecology movement,” like composting, recycling, and waste reduction, were met with great skepticism at the time.24 Incineration would be the quickest and surest way of getting the desired result, namely development of the Meadowlands. The land use plan, which highlighted the solid waste problem as paramount and stated that the “Commission will provide for disposal through waste reduction processes,” only discussed one such reduction option: incineration. Incineration was a preferred method not only because it reduced the volume of waste but also because the “products are inert and

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can be used as fill under proper control.”25 Incineration would transform garbage, which had been the overriding obstacle to development, into stable fill for future development. With incineration, garbage was part of the solution, not the defining problem. The Commission contracted with Zurn Engineering in 1970 to produce the first comprehensive study of solid waste in the Meadowlands that would develop “alternative solid waste management systems . . . and provide information of factors related to their possible implementation.”26 Zurn examined alternative methods with the objective of “provid[ing] for compatibility between solid waste disposal activities and the planned development of the Meadowlands.”27 The report strongly favored incineration and argued that its associated problems, such as particulates from fly ash, could be eliminated with proper design. Despite high capital expenditure and possible political repercussions, the report argued in favor of two incinerators to accommodate current and future solid waste. Although the 1971 plan for incineration was eventually abandoned because the state administration favored compacting and baling waste and then shipping it out of state, the Commission continued its aggressive approach to landfill closures. For instance it denied landfill permits, continued yearly review of permits, increased inspection and citations for violations of permits, and established strict guidelines for final landfill closures. Yet the closure of these landfills was not driven predominately by environmental sensibilities, but instead by the need for an expeditious solution to a problem that had existed for seventy years: the orderly and planned reclamation of wasted land in the Meadowlands. The climate in the state changed after the passage of the Solid Waste Planning Act of 1976, which required counties and the HMDC to establish long-term plans for their waste disposal. The new administration favored incineration as the best method for achieving this goal.28 HMDC made another attempt, in collaboration with the Bergen County Utility Authority, to site and build an incinerator that would produce electricity, but was again unsuccessful. They did, however, prevail in closing all the landfills in the district; the last closure occurred in July 1987, when Essex County faced a public health disaster due to garbage piling up in city streets. By the late 1970s, then, landfill closure had become an important feature of New Jersey’s development. The baler facility that compacts the district’s trash now ships it out of state to far-off landfills. Thus while garbage is no longer dumped in the Hackensack wetlands, the land is still, in part, shaped by trash. Most of the

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old landfill sites are still not suitable for development without significant remediation to remove garbage. And the development of more suitable wetland properties is still predicated on the ability to dump garbage elsewhere. The landfill sites of West Virginia and Pennsylvania are thus now part of the landscape of the Hackensack Meadowlands. The Commission continued to create a landscape of garbage, despite the more pleasing appearance of the marshes.

The Newark Meadowlands While the 1987 garbage crisis in the Hackensack Meadowlands was directly tied to the HMDC’s decision to close all the landfills in the district, the slow progress in constructing the Essex County Resource Recovery Facility in the Newark Meadowlands also contributed to the potential for disaster. In 1976 New Jersey passed the Solid Waste Planning Act and created twenty-two solid waste districts that coincided with the twenty-one counties and one additional district in the Hackensack Meadowlands. The intention was for each district to manage their waste by making “maximum use of resource recovery.”29 The goal was to create environmentally sound waste management practices that also created opportunities for expanding economic activities through the construction of twenty-two waste-toenergy incinerators. The dream of continued economic expansion through garbage was once again at the center of the state’s economic development policies. Even the state’s Energy Plan centered on this idea. Empowered by both the energy crisis of the 1970s and the demand for initiatives to get the economy moving, the Department of Energy set out a plan for state-wide economic expansion based not on land development as in the Hackensack Meadowlands but rather on energy development through resource recovery in and around the Newark Meadowlands.30 Concurrently with the state-level promotion of waste-to-energy incinerators, federal support for developing waste-to-energy facilities grew throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with the result that resource recovery became an important element of federal solid waste policy, energy policy, and urban policy. The movement for resource recovery was initially focused on resources central to the economy—wood, metals, and to a certain extent fossil fuels. The Resource Recovery Act of 1970, which was itself an amendment to the Solid Waste Management Act of 1964, began by focusing on a range of materials and recovery options. And while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) extensively studied the various economic

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dynamics that encouraged continued use of virgin materials and discouraged use of recovered and recycled materials, energy production quickly became the focus of the agency’s efforts. While not abandoning interest in materials recycling, the EPA argued that energy recovery from solid waste was the most likely avenue for success. Several federal-level initiatives followed, including the passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, the Public Utilities Regulatory Act of 1978, and tax exemptions to assist public agencies to raise money for waste-to-energy facilities. By 1979 the Department of Housing and Urban Development was actively funding resource recovery in distressed cities as an avenue toward revitalization through the Urban Development Action Grant Program.31 With the support of state and federal incentives, Newark became a leader in the development of resource recovery policies intended to spur economic expansion. Prior to the agreement between Essex County and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to build an incinerator in the Newark Meadowlands, there had been a city effort to build a facility at the same location. Economic expansion through industrial development and increased tax revenues had always been the primary motivator. Harnessing the untapped economic potential of the vast expanse of undeveloped land in the Meadows had long occupied Newark politicians. At the end of World War II, 71 percent (1,942 acres) of the city’s vacant land was located in the Meadows and used primarily for dumping. How to pay for infrastructure needed to stabilize this marshland for development had always been the main stumbling block. Ironically, as the need for economic resurgence deepened in Newark and as the city generated more waste, politicians found their answer to the financing problem in the garbage itself. Cheap energy produced from incinerating garbage would entice private industry to invest in the Meadowlands and create a revitalized city built not on landfills, but on energy from trash that had previously piled up in landfills. The incinerator in Newark was thus initially born from the desire to create a viable industrial landscape on the edge of the city, not from a need for environmentally responsible waste disposal. In February 1971 Mayor Kenneth Gibson announced the city’s plan to construct and operate a “garbage recycling” facility. The garbage recycling plant would salvage glass, paper, and metals from an estimated 3,600 tons of garbage per day. The remainder of the material would be processed into fuel for burning to generate electricity. The expectation was that the large quantities of materials, combined with cheap energy, would entice both recycling industries and manufacturers using scrap for production in

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the adjacent area.32 Of course, these industries would first need to finance the creation of new land in the tidal wetland. In 1975 the city’s Solid Waste Plan argued that closing landfills and developing alternatives for trash were tied directly to the transformation of the Meadowlands for industrial expansion—specifically, “industries that will use the recovered resources as the input to their manufacturing processes,” explained the Plan. “In light of the energy crisis, Americans have finally come to realize that our energy and material resources are not infinite, and that steps should be taken now to end the waste of the past and to begin to conserve and better utilize what resources we still have.”33 The development objectives of the incinerator project resounded in both the Urban Development Policy statement of 1975, which originated from the Mayor’s office, and the Master Plan of 1978. These documents promoted the industrial development of the Meadowlands fueled by garbage as a means of halting the erosion of the region’s tax base. Technology coupled with federal and state incentives suggested to planners that necessary investments might be made to create an industrial resurgence in the wetland. The Newark Meadowlands was a perfect location for the project, according to city planners, because there would never be a shortage of garbage. “Newark has access to almost unlimited quantities of solid waste,” explained city planners, “which make such a program all the more tenable.”34 The economic development goals of the garbage facility were integral to the city’s urban renewal programs. Residential demolition and replacement was a necessary first step, but would be ineffective if the underlying economic structure of the city remained the same. This necessitated industrial expansion to close the gap between the labor force and estimated available jobs.35 The situation was complicated by plans to demolish nearly one thousand industrial structures located in officially designated urban renewal areas.36 City planners argued that development of vacant land in the Newark Meadowlands was the economically rational choice because it would cost less money to engineer the land for development than to acquire and rehabilitate existing land zoned as industrial. Much of this industrial land was scattered in small parcels throughout the city, leading to additional complications, since larger land areas were needed for modern industrial facilities. Studies also indicated that land stabilization could happen at prices below those for similar projects in the region. Newark’s waste plan moved closer to reality when Combustion Energy Associates (CEA) contracted with the city to invest $64 million to

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construct an incinerator on a 25-acre site in the midst of a 1,600-acre urban renewal project in Newark. Although planners anticipated that costs for developing the parcel would be below market for the region, there was no guarantee of funding for the initial estimated $27 million required to stabilize the soil in the area. The Newark Housing and Redevelopment Authority, which controlled the property, applied for federal assistance through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to stabilize the 25acre parcel. As planners presented the project to HUD: “The CEA refuse processing facility symbolizes the most unique and singularly important opportunity for Newark’s resurgence in industrial growth . . . attracting new industry vis-à-vis an industrial recycling park, and will provide property and payroll taxes to the city, as well as a $0.50 /ton fee for refuse collected outside of Newark and processed at the facility (thereby reversing the city’s negative tax syndrome created by population and industry out-migration).”37 Although CEA declared bankruptcy in October 1980 and the city lost its vendor, the concept of economic development through waste transformation in Newark reemerged under a different political jurisdiction and with a new emphasis. By 1980 county-level solid waste planning and incinerator construction was a well-established policy. Prior to CEA’s bankruptcy, Essex County (Newark is the county seat) had tried unsuccessfully to take control of the facility away from Newark by arguing in court that the Solid Waste Planning Act gave counties primary responsibility. While Newark prevailed in that case, when the city’s deal with CEA fell through, Essex County stepped in. Empowered through the 1976 state-enabling legislation, the county collaborated with planners at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who had begun their own work with resource recovery. Formed in 1919 to “promote and protect commerce” in the region, the Port Authority had worked exclusively on transportation projects until the 1960s and the development of the World Trade Center. By the 1970s industrial development became its new focus, with the Port Authority moving into the garbage business by promoting the development of resource recovery as the fuel for additional industrial development. The Port Authority had already conducted several preliminary studies for urban industrial parks and explored thirty-four potential sites for industrial development in the urban corridor of northeastern New Jersey— in Bayonne, Elizabeth, Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark. It settled on three sites as having the most potential: two in Jersey City and one in Newark. The only Essex County site examined was the Doremus Avenue area in Newark, located directly between Blanchard Street, where the city

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of Newark had first proposed the facility, and the Port of Newark. Doremus Avenue would be the spot for the new industrial park, and the energy would come from a garbage incinerator built on the Blanchard Street site. Two other features made the Blanchard Street site attractive to the Port Authority. First, it was adjacent to the Essex generating plant of the local utility, Public Service Electric and Gas, which would allow the incinerator to sell electricity directly to the utility. Also, since the city had acquired the land as part of its urban renewal goals, and the parcel had been slated for a similar facility for nearly a decade, acquisition by the new partners would be easy. Incinerating garbage was now the key to industrial resurgence in the Port region. The Blanchard Street location did have some unanticipated negative characteristics. Much of the land in the Meadowlands was used as dumping grounds, either legally or illegally, and Blanchard Street was no exception. The entire site was made land. Not only had the salt marsh ecosystem begun deteriorating after 1930, when the railroad and pipeline right-of-ways were built adjacent to the site, but illegal dumping also began soon after, so that by 1960 the entire area was covered with fill from 2 to 9 feet deep. The newly created land was also littered with junked automobiles and 55-gallon drums leaking liquid waste.38 The adjacent land was likewise filled with various forms of construction debris, industrial waste, and miscellaneous garbage.39 The site was also a marsh, and because the high water table and extremely mutable soils of the Meadowlands were more difficult to master than expected, engineers had to drive piles deeper than originally planned. During the entire history of Newark, and particularly in the twentieth century, the geology of the Meadowlands had limited its development. Now, once again, geology proved a formidable obstacle. Essex County and the Port Authority hoped to open the facility in 1985, but construction did not even begin until 1986. And while the facility was finally completed in February 1988, its opening was postponed until October 1990 because of a series of court challenges from citizen activists. In the meantime, the county had to build transfer stations and begin shipping waste to another state because, as we have already seen, the HMDC closed the region’s landfills in July 1987. The county initially estimated that the facility would cost a total of $200 million, a significant increase from the City of Newark’s estimate a few years earlier of $70 million. In the end, the project cost nearly $400 million due in part to more stringent environmental controls, delays from opposition, and increased interests on bonds from nervous investors.40

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Three days after the plant started burning trash in February of 1988, it was shut down for violation of air emission standards. Although it was back online within a week, this bumpy start was indicative of the facility’s impending financial and environmental woes. Constant emission problems were caused by low burn temperatures due to insufficient fuel: there was not enough garbage. The facility resolved the problem by contracting with towns outside Essex County.41 Moreover, the incinerator destroyed 70 percent of its garbage, not the 90 percent promised, leaving behind significantly larger quantities of ash for landfilling. The result was higher operating costs. During the 1990s, as many other incinerators came online, additional air emission issues also became controversial. Dioxin, it seemed, might be produced in the emission control equipment as flue gases cooled. Mercury, a highly volatile metal, was more ubiquitous in household trash than initially anticipated, and emission equipment was unable to meet legal standards.42 These issues continued to plague the Essex County plant. The financial concerns were just as overwhelming. First, because of cost overruns, the county had to borrow much more than initially anticipated. The debt situation for the county was so bad that by 1999 the Essex County Utility Authority was borrowing money to pay the debt service on the existing notes. The tipping fees also increased to nearly $100 a ton, causing fiscal shock in each of Essex County’s municipalities.43 Finally, due to the “put or pay” clause in the contract, the county had to negotiate contracts for garbage from elsewhere and make up the difference in the costs. As towns across the country began separating recyclables in their homes, these financial problems were exacerbated. The hope for transforming Newark’s ailing economy by using garbage to stabilize marshland was also unsuccessful. The recycling industrial park in the dreams of both the Port Authority and the city never materialized. Nor did the incentive for other industries to develop near the energy-producing plant. Further, the energy production and economic development polices driving the new solid waste practices obfuscated the potential for devastating environmental and fiscal consequences. These were borne out in Newark despite the best efforts to create environmentally friendly solid waste practices and to fuel economic growth. Even though this new industrial landscape was not built from garbage in the Newark Meadowlands, the landscape in Newark, just like that in the Hackensack Meadowlands, continued to be shaped by trash. Although the 2,500 tons per day of garbage trucked into the facility from New Jersey towns and New York City are not obvious to the passerby, the hazardous ash and dioxin and

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mercury emissions are still impacting the Newark Meadowlands and those living nearby.

Conclusion Several factors contributed to the eventual demise of New Jersey’s reliance on landfills in wetlands as the primary method for garbage disposal. The growing amount of garbage, due to population and per capita generation increases, cannot be understated. In addition, it was becoming more and more obvious that dumping garbage in wetlands-based landfills created significant environmental problems that made landfilling a political liability. However, the major impetus behind the shift toward incineration grew from economic development polices, in the form of land development and energy production, not from environmental concerns. The resulting practices— shipping garbage to landfills out of state and incineration—continue to have negative environmental impacts on the landscape. Using economic development goals as the primary motivator for environmental policy obfuscated these impacts, but did not make them any less real. Nurturing an economy predicated on continued abundance and the production of waste was unable to solve the garbage problem because that economic system was the very source of the problem to begin with. Notes Funding for this research was provided by the New Jersey Historical Commission. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference in Baltimore, Md., October 2002. Special thanks to Susan Schrepfer and Phil Scranton, who organized the New Jersey’s Environments: History and Policy Conference at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Thanks also to Chris Silver, Scott Campbell, Allison Isenberg, and Neil Maher for helpful comments on previous drafts. 1. A “waste-to-energy” incinerator burns garbage and uses the heat from this combustion to produce steam that will then generate electricity by turning a turbine. This type of facility has several labels. Industry and government most often use “resource recovery facility” and “waste-to-energy facility.” Environmentalists use the term incinerator to focus attention on the combustion and its environmental problems. I will use the term incinerator throughout the paper except when discussing a particular technology or specific law that uses a different term. 2. A sanitary landfill combined the disposal of garbage with soil, ashes, or street sweepings. Usually, a foot of garbage was covered with at least a foot of inert materials. The idea began to replace open dumping in the 1920s and became the dominant disposal technique after World War II. I use the term landfill throughout

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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the paper to mean this type of facility. Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 271–73. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999). Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997), 14. Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City (New York: Scribner’s, 1998). New Jersey Legislature, Public Hearing before the Special Legislative Commission to investigate certain problems relating to solid waste disposal, constituted under SCR 24 of 1969, 69. The Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission changed its name to the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission in 2001. Since this paper only addresses material prior to 2001, I will use HMDC throughout. Regional Planning Association, Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (New York: Regional Planning Association, 1929), 322–23. New Jersey Legislature, Report of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (Trenton, N.J., 1929), 5. Ibid., 31. Completed projects included additional Hudson River crossings (Regional Plan), several highways and parkways in New York (Regional Plan), several dredging projects in the Newark Bay (Commission), and several highways, including part of the New Jersey Turnpike (Commission). There were eleven known operating landfills in the district, accepting nearly 30,000 tons of waste per week, including household and commercial garbage (25,642 tons/week), industrial waste (9,690 tons/week), and demolition waste (6,711 tons/week). The Commission identified an additional twenty landfill operations that were no longer accepting waste, and it is highly probable that more locations had accepted waste without knowledge of the authorities. Zurn Environmental Engineers, Analysis of Alternative Solid Waste Management System for the Hackensack Meadowlands District, prepared for HMDC, May 1970, II:2–4, HMDC Solid Waste Files. Report of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (Trenton, N.J., 1930), 23. Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission, The Hackensack Meadowlands Comprehensive Land Use Plan (Lyndhurst, N.J., 1970), 23. Strasser, Waste and Want, 15 Franklin and Associates, Municipal Solid Waste in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1999), 2. Municipal solid waste includes discarded materials from homes and business and commercial establishments. It also includes some nonhazardous and nonliquid industrial wastes. Municipal solid waste is about 20 percent of the entire solid waste stream. Other components include mining wastes, agricultural wastes, and construction and demolition wastes. The EPA has contracted Franklin and Associates since 1975 to measure the amount of municipal solid waste generated in the United States. They use a materials flow methodology, which relies on data about materials and products, not on data from waste facilities. Criticism of

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

Eileen McGurty

this methodology includes the fact that the data is several steps away from the actual discards, the method cannot include yard waste (a full 20 percent of municipal solid waste), and it is filled with assumptions about use that may or may not be justified. The general consensus is that the Franklin estimates are low. Kevin Lynch, Wasting Away (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 31–32. New Jersey Legislature, Public Hearing, 7 (see note 6). Clifford Goldman, “The Hackensack Meadowlands: The Politics of Regional Planning and Development” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1975), 326. Ibid., 328. Application for Sanitary Landfill Permit, 17 December 1971, HMDC Solid Waste File: MSLA 71–175 Correspondence. The limit was 10 feet above the Belleville Turnpike. Parcel 1 was 21.62 feet higher; Parcel 2 was 32.70 feet higher; Parcel 3, 7.39 feet; and Parcel 4, 31.88 feet. Nglia Engineering Associates, “Report on Sanitary Landfill Operations, Town of Kearny, Hudson County, NJ” (Lyndhurst, N.J., 1 September 1970), 4, HMDC Solid Waste File: MSLA 71–175 Application. Goldman, “The Hackensack Meadowlands,” 341; George Cacino to Larry Masi, Memorandum, 16 January 1973, HMDC File: MSLA 71–175. Goldman, “The Hackensack Meadowlands,” 347. Ibid., 352. HMDC, Land Use Plan, 57. Zurn, Analysis of Alternative Solid Waste Management System, I:1. Ibid., I:5. County and Municipal Government Study Commission, Solid Waste Management in New Jersey (Trenton, N.J., 1987). Removal of metals (ferrous and nonferrous) improved the efficiency of the burn while removal of paper or plastics decreased the heat value. In the late 1970s, metals constituted about 6.85 percent of the municipal waste pile while paper made up about 53.46 percent of it. Ned Jackson, Recycling and Reclaiming of Municipal Solid Wastes (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes Data Corporation, 1975), 4. New Jersey Department of Energy, Energy Master Plan Final Policy Statement, Solid Waste: Its Energy Conservation and Production Potential (Trenton, 1977). US EPA, Office of Solid Waste Management Programs, First Report to Congress: Resource Recovery and Source Separation (Washington, D.C., 1973); US EPA, Office of Solid Waste Management Programs, Second Report to Congress: Resource Recovery and Source Separation (Washington, D.C., 1974); Martin Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880–1980 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1981); and Randall T. Curlee et al., Waste-to-Energy in the United States: A Social and Economic Assessment (Westport, Conn.: Quorum, 1994). Edward Higgins, “Incinerator Plan Studied,” Newark Star-Ledger, 21 February 1971, 1. Newark Department of Engineering, Solid Waste Plan (Newark, 1975), 5–6. Newark, N.J., Mayor’s Policy and Development Office, Newark’s Master Plan (Newark, 1978), 2–97.

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35. Bernard P. Norton, An Economic Blueprint for Newark (Newark: Newark Office of Economic Development, 1968). 36. Newark Central Planning Board, Re: New Newark: Urban Renewal Demonstration Grant Project Final Report (Newark, 1961). 37. Mayor’s Policy and Development Office, Urban Development Action Grant Application—Refuse Processing Facility (Newark, 1979), 5. 38. William A. Foy, Environmental Impact Statement: Refuse Processing Facility, Newark, NJ, for CEO-OXY (Matawan, N.J.: Reutter Anderson Schoor Associates, 1978). 39. SMC Environmental Services Group, Revised Final Remedial Investigation Report: Ottilio Landfill, Newark, NJ (Valley Forge, Pa., 1995). 40. Meg Nugent and Ted Sherman, “Essex Incinerator—County cuts ribbon on trashburning plant,” Newark Star-Ledger, 24 October 1990, 1, 19. 41. Ted Sherman, “Short on Trash,” Newark Star-Ledger, 6 December 1990), 1, 48. 42. Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: New Press, 1992); Ted Sherman, “Tossed batteries blamed as burner exceeds mercury levels in Essex,” Newark Star-Ledger 14 June 1991, 1, 36. 43. Lauren Marsh, interview by author, Verona, N.J., 2 October 1998.

Chapter 3

Oysters, Public Trust, and the Law in New Jersey

a

Bonnie J. McCay

Introduction Although known as “The Garden State,” New Jersey is a coastal state, very coastal: its boundaries are those of great rivers, the Hudson and the Delaware, and the large estuarine bays they feed into—the Raritan Bay, Delaware Bay; and the Atlantic Ocean itself, with over a hundred miles of “barrier beach” coastline, plus the extensive tidal or once-tidal wetlands, such as the area now known as the Hackensack Meadowlands. As such, New Jersey is deeply imbued with “the public trust doctrine,” a common law doctrine that, stricto sensu, says that the public has special rights to tidal and navigable waters, the soils under them, and the adjoining beaches and wetlands. The public trust doctrine expresses the radical idea that some things or places should not be owned by individuals but by the public. Not only is New Jersey one of the states that upholds the public trust doctrine; it can be interpreted as the historical source of the public trust doctrine in the United States. New Jersey’s bays and courts were the sites of conflicts and decisions, mostly about oysters, that led to the American adoption and adaptation of this doctrine. Application of the doctrine now plays a role in battles over public access to beaches and public rights to clean and productive waters. The early debates in courts about public and private rights to oystering grounds also raised important questions about New Jersey, questions that resonate with our situation today, i.e., whether New Jersey is simply a vast real estate development or whether those who settle and live here have rights to a civilized way of life, which includes access to public as well as private goods.

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The Public Trust Doctrine In the United States the public trust doctrine is usually interpreted to mean state ownership of navigable and tidal waters and subsoil up to high or low tide mark, accompanied by public use rights. This is held to derive from Roman law, English medieval law, later English common law, and the American Revolution. It is rooted in the principle of Roman law, as codified in the Institutes of Justinian, that certain things are incapable of private ownership, namely “the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.”1 It was extended to fisheries in the early medieval period: “by natural law, these are common to all: running water, the air, the sea, and the shores of the sea . . . hence the right of fishing in a port or in rivers is common.”2 Note the idea that “natural law” makes these things common— largely because of the “natural” difficulty of dividing them up or fencing them off. It also should be noted that the Magna Carta plays a role in this narrative; a section of the early-thirteenth-century charter for English liberties that calls for the taking down of fish weirs in the Thames and other navigable rivers is frequently cited in court cases about public trust. In a complicated way the notion of “common to all” became “sovereign ownership” of the shores of the sea and of tidal rivers. One reason given by legal historians is that when the doctrine was rewritten by English scholars, this had to happen because English legal theory (and cosmology) demanded that every thing and every place have an owner. The shift to sovereign ownership got a major boost in the seventeenth century, when Queen Elizabeth I was strapped for cash. John Digges, one of her advisors, came up with the idea of claiming her property rights to the shores of the sea and of tidal rivers as a way of raising money from the nobles and others who claimed private ownership of such places, for in fact, there was little truly public property along England’s coasts and rivers.3 The American public trust doctrine evolved from the premise of sovereign ownership, irrespective of the nefarious extortions of Elizabeth’s era. However, courts and commentators came to say that the sovereign’s property rights in such places were limited by what we now call the public trust: she held them on behalf of the needs of her subjects for free navigation and fishing. They were hers in her capacity as a public official accountable to the public, jus publicum, not as part of her private estate through her accession to the crown, jus privatum. She could not use them in a way that infringed upon these public rights nor could she grant them away to others in ways that infringed upon navigation and fishing rights.

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Which brings us to New Jersey, one of the “proprietary” colonies in the New World, and to the first major public trust case in America, Arnold v. Mundy, which was decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1821.4 The basic issue was whether the “Proprietors” of New Jersey, through their grants from the English sovereign, held the right to grant exclusive, private property in tidal lands and waters to individuals, jus privatum, or whether they were constrained by the public trust, jus publicum, to allow public uses of such lands and waters. The New Jersey court opted for the latter reading of the situation, and this was supported by the United States Supreme Court in a later, but closely related, case, Martin v. Waddell.5 Before going into the legal implications and consequences of these cases, let us revisit the situation “on the banks of the old Raritan” that led to these cases.

Oystering Commons and the Public Trust Oystering was big business in the New York and New Jersey area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Native oysters were good, cheap, nutritious, and delectable, and they were abundant, especially in places such as Newark Bay, the lower Raritan River, and the Shrewsbury and Navesink Rivers in the northeast, close to the burgeoning cities of the region.6 In the very late eighteenth century and certainly by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the practice of “oyster planting” became important to the trade. Large populations of local oysters had been fished out but urban market demand remained very high. Planting meant moving naturally grown oysters from one place to another, where they grew out to marketable size and condition. As native stock became scarce, oysters were moved to waters close to New York City—especially off Staten Island and Keyport— from other areas, such as the southern New Jersey bays and Long Island’s bays (and in later times, the bays and rivers of Virginia and Cape Cod). Remarkably, Raritan River and Newark Bay oysters remained important and often favored sources of “oyster plants”—some being taken by train to San Francisco Bay later in the nineteenth century. Oyster planting demanded investments of labor and capital, moving oysters from one place to another, and the planters expected some protection of the exclusive property that they expected to be created through those efforts (as John Locke would have argued). That was very difficult to get because of the strong and resilient claim of common or public rights of fishing, supported by courts of law that tended to focus on the peculiar fact that,

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although managed in some way, oysters were indeed wild creatures, and thus, like deer in a forest, once let go, were abandoned to the commons and thus open to public use. A basic principle was established in an 1808 Shrewsbury River case that an oyster planter could not claim exclusive property rights to oysters that he planted in a place where oysters naturally grew, only in places normally barren of oysters.7 That principle, which is found in other states as well and which remains in New Jersey state shellfish policy, applied to clams as well as oysters. It is one important way that common property rights have been secured against privatization.

The Lower Raritan River and Bay But what about oysters growing—naturally or planted—in places that have been titled as private property? Imagine the Raritan River flowing eastward, beyond the city of New Brunswick, as it meanders toward the Raritan Bay and the sea. Somewhere along that meander, in Amboy Township, was a 175-acre farm that was purchased by Robert Arnold in 1814, together with what he thought and claimed to be rights to the natural oyster bed that lay very close to the shoreline. The previous owner had had little luck in defending exclusive rights to this oyster bed; nonetheless the new owner decided to try—and to go beyond by planting oysters there, not just fencing off naturally growing oysters, and by clearly staking out his claim. Respecting the contentious history of the situation, he went to the Board of General Proprietors of East New Jersey, in Perth Amboy, to get a survey done and secure title, following the procedure used for property on land. Arnold’s action led to a raid by protesting oystermen and eventually to the first major statement about the public trust doctrine, which was also a statement about the role of English common law in the early Republic. On the other side of the Raritan River is the township of Woodbridge, which was then the home of quite a few people who relied on shellfish for a living. In 1818, led by one Benajah Mundy, a “fleet of skiffs” went across the river and took oysters from Arnold’s staked area with the intent of taking the matter to court. Their attorneys made a variety of claims to Arnold’s oyster beds, ranging from the general rule that oysters planted in places where oysters naturally grow revert to the commons, to the charter of their township, which secured to them the common right of fishing. However, the issues were more complex, and, as stated clearly in the case reports, more significant.8

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The Courts “It is a fact, as singular as it was unexpected in the jurisprudence of our state, that the taking [of] a few bushels of oysters . . . should involve in it questions momentous in their nature, as well as in their magnitude, calling forth the talents, learning, and industry of our bar; affecting the rights of all our citizens, and embracing, in their investigation, the laws of nations and of England, the relative rights of sovereign and subjects, as well as the municipal regulations of our own country”—so said Chief Justice Andrew Kirkpatrick, explaining why he took extra time to decide upon the case.9 Most directly: who owned the tidal and navigable waters and soil beneath and washed by them, and what was the scope of the common rights of fishery and, by implication, of navigation and commerce? The case report reads like a civics debate—or morality play—of early post-Independence America. What was the role of English common law in this land? How should one interpret the Magna Carta—as a tool of the “bold, turbulent, rapacious, and oppressive” Saxon barons, or as securing political and personal liberty and common rights on behalf of the common folk?10 Was New Jersey a real estate venture or a new society? In 1664 Charles II granted New Jersey to the Duke of York, who granted it to Berkeley and Carteret; ownership later resided in twenty-four absentee Proprietors, who surveyed and granted title to private property and retained title to whatever was not so conveyed. Did this mean that people who came to this new land had little protection for certain rights they had had as English subjects, including public trust rights of navigation and fishing? As one of the attorneys for Arnold argued, the early settlers had to have known and understood that this was a land of private property, even those among the colonists “who prate about the rights of the people, and common right, and other imposing terms.”11 Or was New Jersey settled as a civilized land where public as well as private rights mattered? Mundy’s attorney argued differently. To say that the early settlers “knew nothing of their birth right,” which included the right of fishery, was an insult to their memory; they had been attracted to the colony by letters and by advertisements of the Proprietors loudly and proudly celebrating the abundance of fish and oysters for the taking.12 Kirkpatrick weighed in on the side of New Jersey as less a real estate venture than a civilized land, a place where public rights remained inviolate besides private ones.13 Indeed, one requires the other. In dealing with

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the skirmish between Robert Arnold and the Woodbridge oystermen, he decided that (a) the “sovereign” owned the tidal and navigable waters and submerged lands, not the Proprietors, irrespective of the grants; (b) after the American Revolution, the “people” became sovereign, and thus the people’s representatives, state legislatures, owned them; and (c) these public rights are inalienable. Although the state legislature might consider itself the owner, it could not make “a direct and absolute grant of the waters of the state, divesting all the citizens of their common right. It would be a grievance which never could be long borne by a free people.”14 Hence the public trust doctrine. Whereupon the State of New Jersey began leasing rights to oyster planters in the Raritan Bay area between New Jersey and New York’s Staten Island, to facilitate this important industry and in recognition of its need for property protections. It did so, however, without granting private title to the submerged lands and waters. These first acts applied to what were known as the “Great Beds” of the lower Raritan River and Bay as far as Cheesequake Creek, in South Amboy Township.15 The oystering grounds were now construed as the property of the state, held in trust for the citizens, rather than the property of individuals who obtained title through the Proprietors. Not long after the 1821 ruling and the creation of leaseholds, there were riots at sea as oystermen from New Jersey and New York (Staten Island) competed for access to the oyster lands of Raritan Bay. Only state residents could lease the oyster lands, and the state claimed much of what Staten Islanders thought of as their traditional oystering land.16 At the same time, the “proprietors” began working to change the law. The Arnold v. Mundy ruling upset the Board of General Proprietors of East New Jersey—which by this time had little property left to grant away except the tidelands. It commissioned the expert opinion of leading jurists of New York and New Jersey, some of whom advised to make this a federal case, expecting that the Proprietors would get a better reading in federal than state courts.17 It took ten years for this to happen.18 Whether the wealth of oyster planting was the key issue or whether there were larger ones (such as access to waterfront and submerged tidal lands for transportation and industrial development) is difficult to tell, although the very high social stature of some of the participants makes one suspect the latter. In any case, a lawyer and businessman from New York City, William Coventry H. Waddell, arranged to get a survey of and title to the disputed oystering lands from the New Jersey Proprietors. The very same lands had been leased by the state to Merrit Martin and others. In

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1837 in federal district court for New Jersey Waddell and the Proprietors won against the state and Martin and the other state leaseholders.19 Enthused by their first court victory on riparian rights, the Proprietors immediately had the decision published by a Trenton printer. It reasserted their powers against those of the state. The federal district court ruling also called into question attempts on the part of the legislature to regulate not only fisheries but also wharf construction, reclamation, and other matters central to industrial development along the waterfront. The state and the New Jersey oyster planters, who were mainly from Perth Amboy, appealed the verdict to the U.S. Supreme Court, with Roger Taney then serving as Chief Justice. The case, known as Martin v. Waddell, was the first in which the U.S. Supreme Court recognized and affirmed the public trust doctrine for the states. Closely following Arnold v. Mundy, Taney reaffirmed that English common law was indeed applicable, as against the claims of the Proprietors that it was not, and that it preserved the right of common fishery in tidal, navigable waters. He agreed that the state, as representative of the sovereign people, was the only legal owner of tidal, navigable lands and resources, and that these were held “as a public trust.”20 Property claims through the Proprietors could not be used to threaten “the public common of piscary belonging to the common people of England.”21 And the people of New Jersey had rights to the same common law protections that the common people of England did: this was a civilized land, not just a settlement through the Proprietors. Martin v. Waddell gave Arnold v. Mundy’s view about state sovereignty the authority of the nation’s highest court.22 Conflicts over access to oystering lands of the Raritan River and Bay played a major role in the evolution of public trust doctrines throughout the United States. The “landmark” U.S. Supreme Court case came at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1869 the Illinois legislature granted to a railroad company title to almost all of Chicago’s waterfront on Lake Michigan; when a later legislature disputed this, the legal process led to the U.S. Supreme Court, which determined the right of the state to revoke the earlier grant because its magnitude severely diminished public trust lands available for commerce, navigation and fishing.23

The Meaning of State Ownership Public rights were recognized in the nineteenth-century court cases but “state ownership” could and would be interpreted in ways that abrogated

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public rights in favor of private opportunities. The public trust doctrine narrative for the rest of the nineteenth century is one of conflict, reinterpretation, and questionable behavior. The uncertainty that Arnold v. Mundy created about the validity of other titles to submarine land gained by the Proprietors led not only to the U.S. Supreme Court case of Martin v. Waddell, but also to attempts to use the state legislature to get secure title to ferry landings and piers. In other words, state ownership became proprietary, rather than a trusteeship. In New Jersey this was reflected and realized in a series of confused and confusing state and federal court cases about waterfront property. One hinged upon a woman’s claim to the right to cut grass on the side of Harsimus Cove in Jersey City.24 Another derived from the fact that a grant of trust lands to one of the railroad companies prevented a landowner from reaching the Hudson River.25 In these and other cases the New Jersey public trust doctrine became very clearly the “state ownership” doctrine, with barely a nod to public common rights of fishing and navigation, which were trumped by the needs and demands of railroad companies and industrialists. Fees from riparian grants went to a special fund for schools (they still do; money in the fund now is used to guarantee local school bond issues), but scandals abounded.26 And the Proprietors continued to survey and grant and sell tidewaters and tracts of submerged land, including what might be called insider trading, whereby members of this body were able to get title to valuable public trust lands—such as Shark River— for very low sums.27

Oyster Wars and the Public Trust States were slow to develop legislative and bureaucratic commitments to managing public trust waters and lands, although by the 1870s many states along the Atlantic seaboard, including New Jersey, had begun some degree of fisheries management, built upon county-level and other local systems of management. Oystering suffered from overexploitation, pollution, the failure to return shells (“cultch”) to the water for new sets of oysters, and other problems. Pressures built to address some of these problems by privatizing oyster lands. The strength of the cultural sentiment behind the public trust doctrine—the notion that some wild places and natural resources should remain forever public—was expressed in violent confrontation as well as political rhetoric and legal decision. Two notable “oyster wars” took place around the turn of the twentieth century, one in the Fortescue region of the Delaware Bay and another near

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the mouth of the Mullica River, which feeds into Great Bay near Atlantic City. On April 12, 1894, a large number of oyster schooners and other vessels sailed to an area of Delaware Bay known as “up the bay,” where two oystermen had claimed private rights, through riparian grant; they began dredging for oysters on these claims. One of the riparian owners shot at the “invaders,” and over thirty persons were arrested and held for court. Similarly, on October 1, 1907, hundreds of oystermen went up the Mullica River and tonged for oysters on a spot of ground claimed as a riparian grant by two oystermen, the Sooys. “[T]he result was a violent clash between the opposing elements. Some two hundred oystermen were practically placed under arrest upon the charge of trespassing upon this ground. There was considerable personal violence, and at one time great fear of serious consequences.”28 Both of these “wars” were outcomes of series of conflicts, court cases, and smaller skirmishes over rights to natural oyster beds as well as different visions of how oysters should be managed. One view was that privatizing the natural oyster beds was necessary to prevent their depletion and abuse, given what we might call “tragedies of the oystering commons.” For example, the annual opening of the oyster seed beds on the “graveling” area of the Mullica River, as described by Julius Nelson, the state (and Rutgers) biologist, saw nearly a thousand people in small boats waiting to tong the small “seed,” which would be planted in leased grounds; within a week the seed beds were so diminished that only a few tongers remained.29 More to the point, the oyster shells that provide the “cultch” or substrate for larval settlement and development were not returned to the beds; because no one owned these lands, no one had the incentive to do it. Hence the argument for privatization: “Private enterprise must do the work if it is done at all, and the individuals who undertake it should be given leases of plots to be cultivated by them.”30 The other view—the public trust view—was that the natural oyster beds must be managed by the state, on behalf of the public; privatizing rights to them was nothing short of what was yet another tragedy of the “commoners”: In the light of history it requires no exuberance of fancy to picture the dire results to the state if the public policy inspired by this [riparian] grant [of natural oyster beds] be adopted, as a result of which this great natural industry, the prolific toiling-place of generations of independent self-supporting citizens shall be aliened forever, and they themselves evicted as completely and as effectually, . . . as were

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the thrifty Highland crofters of Scotland under the great “Sutherland clearance” at Lochaber, when a whole people were swept into exile, to make way for sheep walks and pasture lands.31

The oyster wars can be interpreted as responses to the state’s betrayal of the public trust doctrine: a “riparian commission” created by the legislature allowed individuals to use riparian grants to obtain exclusive property rights in natural shellfish beds despite the long-standing common law rule that natural shellfish beds should remain common to all. The court cases and legislative hearings that followed the violent (and orchestrated) events led to much stronger enforcement of the rule against using riparian grants for oystering purposes. Moreover, in the Delaware Bay case—but not the Mullica River case—the state bought back the contested lands, on behalf of the public and despite much talk of the importance of rationalizing the oyster industry by privatizing the natural seed beds. Public trust prevailed, at least in the small world of oystering.

Oysters, Beaches, and Restoring the Waterways In the twentieth century, the history of oystering in New Jersey was one of sharp decline due to environmental degradation (the Raritan Bay and Newark Bay oyster beds were finished by 1917), environmental change (the Barnegat Bay oyster beds, especially after the opening of the Manasquan canal), oyster diseases (beginning in the 1950s, devastating the Delaware Bay and Mullica River oyster populations), and overharvesting and failure to return cultch ( just about everywhere). It is also a history of co-management institutions, involving scientists, oystermen, and the state, and a history of recurrent property rights issues, including very recent attempts to open up the natural beds of the Delaware Bay to leasing, again to provide incentives for personal enterprise in managing the seed beds.32 For the most part, these have failed, for complicated reasons that include the very strong sentiment about the public common of piscary on the natural shellfish beds. Although the public trust doctrine proved weak in preventing the privatization of much of New Jersey’s waterfront, especially in the industrialized Hudson-Raritan area, it has reemerged as a factor in public policy in New Jersey as well as in other states. It remains a state legal doctrine, not a federal one. Under the “equal footing” doctrine, which originated in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, each state entered the union with the ownership of all tidal and navigable waters and the lands beneath them, but

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from that point, states are apparently able to narrow or expand the public trust as they see fit.33 New Jersey was a leader in expanding the scope of the public trust doctrine to include public rights of access to the tidelands and upland beaches for recreation purposes, the “beach access” issue. Beach access rights do not depend entirely on the public trust doctrine; if a path to the beach has been long used by members of the public, it may be considered a public easement on private land under several common law doctrines (custom, implied dedication, or prescription).34 But this can be very difficult to prove or enforce, hence interest in the public trust doctrine among other devices to ensure public access. New Jersey and California stand out as states that have explicitly expanded the public trust doctrine to include the public right of beach access, whether over municipal or private lands.35 In several beach access cases of the 1970s and 1980s the New Jersey Supreme Court revived the original Arnold v. Mundy sense of the public trust doctrine, emphasizing the inalienability of public common rights, as against the view of the state as an owner that can sell off its property.36 In New Jersey the issue is mainly due to the expansion of “home rule” to the beaches: coastal municipalities long ago received from the state legislature the right to charge beach fees in exchange for managing the beaches. Beaches are also managed by quasi-public organizations, such as the Bay Head Improvement Association, whereby local property owners cooperate to manage the beaches they own. In addition, through the state’s “Riparian” and, later, “Tidelands” Commissions, the state has awarded riparian grants to property owners. Strong home rule has lent itself to exclusionary practices, even where “beach badges” are open to the public for purchase; exclusion of outsiders from the beaches can take place through differential fees, strange hours and obscure places for signing up, and restricted or absent public facilities such as lockers, toilets, and parking. The associations simply exclude nonmembers. In Neptune City v. Avon-by-the-Sea in 1972 the state Supreme Court—a notably liberal and activist one—was the first in the nation to extend the public’s right from navigation and fishing uses “to recreational uses, including bathing, swimming and other shore activities.”37 Matthews v. Bay Head Improvement Ass’n. extended the public trust doctrine to beaches that are owned privately, by individuals, corporations, or associations, and it also recognized that recreational uses depend on the use of the dry sand beach, not just the foreshore or tide-washed part of the beaches.38 Matthews thus recognized the public’s right to access privately owned dry

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sand beaches, not just to pass through to reach the sea but also “the right to sunbathe and generally enjoy recreational activities.”39 The New Jersey courts continue to see the exclusionary practices as contrary to the public trust doctrine.40 In a 2004 case involving a private condominium development in Cape May County that used its riparian grant to exclude the public from beaches, using very expensive beach fees among other techniques, the New Jersey Appellate Court also expressed the heart of the public trust doctrine, first technically: “[U]nder the public trust doctrine, beach use fees cannot limit those members of the public seeking access to, or use of, the ocean and foreshore nor can they limit, under the circumstances here, use of the upland sand for either passage or intermittent recreation connected with use of the ocean,” then, with reference to the amount of the beach fees charged, in the liberal spirit of Arnold v. Mundy: “The notion that lands are to be held in public trust, protected and regulated for the common use and benefit, is incompatible with the concept of profit.”41

Conclusion In the oyster fisheries, the public trust doctrine has functioned mainly as a tool to protect the common use rights of the relatively small-scale fishing families and firms, a tool for equity. As noted, the other meaning of the public trust doctrine in New Jersey came to be state proprietorship: the state became the equivalent of a property owner and could do what it liked with it; the doctrine, reinterpreted, became a tool in the development of industrial capitalism.42 The beach access cases represent a third reading or construction of the public trust doctrine, as an institution not only for equity—the public access issue—but also for environmental stewardship. Indeed, the state supreme courts of the early 1970s, ruling on the first of the beach access cases, were influenced by the work of Joseph Sax on the value of the public trust doctrine in newly emerging environmental law.43 A major environmental concern has been the rapid pace of coastal development, for the control of which the public trust doctrine is particularly suited.44 One of the core elements of the public trust doctrine as enunciated by Chief Justice Andrew Kirkpatrick in 1821 is that the citizens—not the states—are owners of public trust lands and waters, because after the American Revolution the citizens became sovereign. This idea has been taken up in campaigns to protect and restore tidal rivers, bays, and wetlands of New Jersey, as a way to motivate people to join and support such campaigns. Thus, the NY/NJ Baykeeper, a nongovernmental organization, has adopted

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the public trust doctrine as its intellectual and moral slogan, using the rhetoric of the early court cases such as Arnold v. Mundy to remind the public that the waterways and wetlands belong to the people, for their uses, and thus challenging the public to demand their clean-up and restoration. As quoted in a recent brochure, the leader of the group, Andrew Willner, says, “The Hudson-Raritan Estuary is the biggest thing we’ll ever own. Everyone has the right to use these resources, but no one should use them at the expense of anyone else.” The Baykeeper has taken a leading role in pressuring the state to enforce the use of Natural Resource Damages (NRDs) in environmental protection and restoration. The NRD is a regulatory tool that derives from a number of state and federal laws that, in effect, require polluters to finance studies to assess the damages of their activities and to pay for habitat restoration. According to the Baykeeper, the public trust doctrine is also a foundation of NRDs, one that places a particular responsibility on state and federal governments to enforce NRDs, because of their roles as trustees of the tidal lands and waters that belong to the people for traditional public trust uses of fishing, navigation, and swimming.45 It may, then, play a stronger role in the battle to restore New Jersey’s environments. The early debates in courts about public and private rights to oystering grounds raised important questions about New Jersey, questions that resonate with our situation today, for example, whether New Jersey is simply a vast real estate development or whether those who settle and live here have rights to a civilized way of life, which includes access to public as well as private goods. The public trust doctrine, adopted from English common law because of contests over oyster lands in the Raritan River and Bay, continues to serve as a tool in the never-ending struggle to keep alive the idea and reality of New Jersey as a place where people from all walks of life can hope for social equity and environmental sustainability. In a more theoretical vein, the history of the public trust doctrine in New Jersey suggests the need to avoid simplistic accounts of property rights and socioeconomic change. As in more recent cases—about property rights in the oil-rich bayous of Mississippi46 or the Hackensack Meadowlands of New Jersey47—the saga of public trust in New Jersey shows that when property rights come into competition, it is not inevitable that private property will come out on top. Sometimes public property and common rights will trump. That this happens at all is remarkable. As E. P. Thompson pointed out in reference to the long process of enclosure of the English agrarian commons, the rights more likely to become secondary and vulnerable are those based on impermanent, nonmonetary use rights that are the

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customary common rights of the manor and the freeholder.48 Common rights rarely had the documentary and legal backing that private rights did. In England, common rights to fishing, navigation, and submerged lands came to rely on very suspect interpretations of passages in the Magna Carta and a tiny body of case law; common rights did not do very well in English common law courts. Nor did customary rights, in general, do well in American courts.49 However, Thompson also observed that in order for a law to be effective as an ideological instrument of a ruling class, it must appear impartial and just. To do so, it must sometimes be impartial and just, and as such it can serve the interest of the powerless as well.50 The public trust doctrine may just be one of those laws, available to serve different masters, including, from time to time, the relatively powerless “general public” and natural environments. Notes

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

This chapter is based on a paper presented to the conference on “New Jersey’s Environments: History and Policy,” Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, New Brunswick, New Jersey, April 25–26, 2003. I am grateful to Neil Maher for his careful review. Support for this research has come from the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station and the New Jersey Sea Grant College Program. Institutes of Justinian 2.2.2, trans. and ed. T. Cooper (1841). H. Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. S. Thorne (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 39–40. American jurists tended to romanticize the English situation for the existence of public rights of fishing in rivers and along the seashores when in fact it is a “worst case” of private or very local “common property” ownership. Fuller treatment of the social/legal constructions of history in the evolution of the public trust doctrine may be found in Bonnie J. McCay, Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Leonard R. Jaffee, “State citizen rights respecting great-water resource allocation: From Rome to New Jersey,” Rutgers Law Review 25 (1971); Judith Jones Johnson and Charles Fremond Johnson III, “The Mississippi public trust doctrine: Public and private rights in the coastal zone,” Mississippi Law Journal 46 (1975); Glenn J. MacGrady, “The navigability concept in the civil and common law: Historical development, current importance, and some doctrines that don’t hold water,” Florida State University Law Review 3 (1974). Arnold v. Mundy 1821, 6 N.J.L. 1 [Sup. Ct.]. Martin et al. v. Waddell’s Lessee 1842, 41 U.S. [16 Pet.] 367. Oysters were also abundant in New Jersey’s coastal bays and in the Delaware Bay, which later became the center of oystering, linked by water and rail to Philadelphia. Today the Delaware Bay is the only remaining site of commercial oystering; overharvesting, environmental changes, and oyster diseases have ravaged the natural stocks.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

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Shepard and Layton v. Leverson 1808, 2 N.J.L. 391 [Sup. Ct.]. McCay, Oyster Wars, 45–57. Arnold v. Mundy, 78. McCay, Oyster Wars, 52–55. Arnold v. Mundy, 20. Arnold v. Mundy, 91–92. See also Peter O. Wacker, Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Preindustrial New Jersey; Origins and Settlement Patterns (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975). McCay, Oyster Wars, 55–56. Arnold v. Mundy, 78. For general description and maps see Clyde L. MacKenzie, Jr., The Fisheries of Raritan Bay (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991). McCay, Oyster Wars, 62–64. Board of General Proprietors of the Eastern Division of New Jersey, The Case of the Proprietors of East New-Jersey with the Opinions of Counsel on the Same (Newark, N.J.: Printed by W. Tuttle and Co., 1825), 16. McCay, Oyster Wars, 60–66. John Den ex dem. William C. H. Waddell v. Merrit Martin and Others 1837, 62. Martin v. Waddell, 263. Martin v. Waddell, 411. Jack H. Archer et al., The Public Trust Doctrine and the Management of America’s Coasts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 9 n. 24. Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387, 406 n. 1 (1892). Gough v. Bell 1850, 22 N.J.L. 441 (Sup. Ct. 1850), aff ’d, 23 N.J.L. 624 (E. and A. 1852), originally tried in 21 N.J.L. 156 (Sup. Ct. 1847); reappeared in federal district court as an ejectment case in 1853. Stevens v. Paterson and Newark Railroad Company 1870, 34 N.J.L. 532 (E. and A.). New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Tidelands Maps and the Coastal Property Owner: A Fact Sheet, Questions, Answers, and Where to Turn for Help (Trenton, N.J., 1982). McCay, Oyster Wars, 77–78. Ibid., 135; New Jersey Bureau of Shell Fisheries, Annual Report (Trenton, 1907), 16. McCay, Oyster Wars, 132; New Jersey Bureau of Shell Fisheries, Annual Report (Trenton, 1906), 67. McCay, Oyster Wars, 127; William Stainsby, “The Oyster Industry: A Historical Sketch,” Monographs on New Jersey’s Industries from the Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of New Jersey (Trenton, N.J., 1902), 47. Attorney-General v. Sooy Oyster Company 1909, 78 N.J.L., 49 Vroom (E. and A.), 438. McCay, Oyster Wars, chapter 12; Susan E. Ford, “History and present status of molluscan shellfisheries from Barnegat Bay to Delaware Bay,” in The History, Present Condition, and Future of the Mollusk Fisheries of North and Central America and Europe, Vol. 1, NOAA Technical Report 127, ed. C. MacKenzie, V. Berrell, A. Rosenfeld, and W. Hobart, 119–40 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1997).

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33. Archer et al., The Public Trust Doctrine, 12–13. The relationship between the equal footing doctrine and the public trust doctrine was made clear in the case of Pollard’s Lessee v. Hagan, 44 U.S. 212 (1845), concerning intertidal Alabama land. 34. Lew R. Delo, “The English doctrine of custom in Oregon property law: State ex rel. Thorn v. Hay,” Environmental Law 4 (1974): 383–417. 35. Archer et al., The Public Trust Doctrine, 105. 36. Here is how the precedents are portrayed in a recent New Jersey Appellate Court case, June 2004: “In Borough of Neptune City v. Borough of Avon-by-the-Sea, 61 N.J. 296, 303, 294 A.2d 47 (1972), Justice Hall alluded to the ancient principle ‘that land covered by tidal waters belonged to the sovereign, but for the common use of all the people.’ The genesis of this principle is found in Roman jurisprudence, which held that ‘[b]y the law of nature’ ‘the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea’ were ‘common to mankind.’ Justinian, Institutes 2.1.1 (T. Sandars trans. 1st Am. ed. 1876). No one was forbidden access to the sea, and everyone could use the seashore ‘to dry his nets there, and haul them from the sea . . . .’ Id., 2.1.5. The seashore was not private property, but ‘subject to the same law as the sea itself, and the sand or ground beneath it.’ Id. This underlying concept was applied in New Jersey in Arnold v. Mundy, 6 N.J.L. 1 (Sup. Ct. 1821).” 37. Neptune City v. Avon-by-the-Sea, 61 N.J. 296, 304, 294 A. 2d 47 (1972), 309. 38. Matthews v. Bay Head Improvement Ass’n., Inc., 95 N.J. 306, 471 A. 2d 355 (1984). 39. Matthews, 323. 40. Van Ness v. Borough of Deal, 78 N.J. 174, 393 A. 2d 571 (1978); Matthews v. Bay Head Improvement Ass’n., Inc. 95 N.J. 306, 471 A. 2d 355 (1984). 41. Raleigh Avenue Beach Association vs. Atlantic Beach Club, Docket No. A, a259002, Sup. Ct. Appellate Division, 2004, Argued May 19, 2004—Decided June 3, 2004. 42. Morton J. Horwitz, “The emergence of an instrumental conception of American law, 1780–1820,” in Law in American History, ed. D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, 287–326 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); Carol Rose, “The comedy of the commons: Custom, commerce, and inherently public property,” University of Chicago Law Review 53 (1986): 711–81. 43. Joseph L. Sax, “The public trust doctrine in natural resource law: Effective judicial intervention,” Michigan Law Review 68 (1970): 471–75; Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action (New York: Knopf, 1971); “Liberating the public trust doctrine from its historical shackles,” U.C. Davis Law Review 14 (1980): 185–94. 44. Archer et al., The Public Trust Doctrine; Coastal States Organization, Putting the Public Trust Doctrine to Work, 2nd ed. ([Washington, D.C.]: Coastal States Organization, 1997). 45. See www.nynjbaykeeper.org for more information. 46. Todd R. Burrowes, “Supreme court reinvigorates the public trust while settling its boundaries,” Territorial Sea 8 (1988): 1–10.

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47. Moya Keys, “The Hackensack Meadowlands—state or private interest: An analysis of the tidelands doctrine,” Rutgers Law Review 38 (1986): 377–401. 48. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975); “The grid of inheritance: A comment,” in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, ed. J. Goody, J. Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, 328–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1991). 49. Delo, “English doctrine”; Rose, “Comedy of the commons.” 50. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 266.

Chapter 4

Citizen Expertise and Citizen Action in the Creation of the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act

a

Heather Fenyk and David H. Guston

Introduction The 401 State Street, Trenton, address of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection shelters a small plaza with park benches and flowers. The plaza’s floor is paved in part with carved marble slabs depicting natural scenes in relief. Some of the slabs depict wildlife. Some of the slabs are labeled with environmental concerns: water quality, water resources, natural lands, and lakes management. There is no slab for wetlands. The story of how the state’s freshwater wetlands merited attention, and protection, is one of the most interesting and important chapters in New Jersey’s environmental history. It culminated with the passage of the state’s Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act (FWPA), which, on July 1, 1987, made New Jersey the first state in the nation to completely assume administration of the portion of the federal Clean Water Act that protects wetlands, giving New Jersey the nation’s strongest measures to protect these ecologically and environmentally valuable lands. Critical to this story of New Jersey’s achievement is the recognition of wetlands as an environment worthy of protection and an environmental issue worthy of pursuit, and the ability of a small group of citizens to synthesize substantive knowledge about wetlands with effective political action to preserve them. This chapter relates two intertwined paths. The first follows the emergence of wetlands protection as a critical environmental concern in the state. In this instance, four citizen-experts—all women—helped create and 68

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organize the knowledge base that demonstrated the value of wetlands beyond that of wastelands. The second path follows the activity of the coherent, statewide environmental advocacy movement that emerged from citizen action. In this instance, citizen-advocates engaged in a sophisticated grassroots lobbying effort that made freshwater wetlands protection a force to be reckoned with. Both paths are set in the context of inadequate and fragmented state and federal attempts to protect wetlands. In the last several decades, planners and policy makers throughout the United States have faced the challenges of understanding and balancing the biologic and economic impacts of anthropogenic environmental change. Within accounts of the interaction of the environmental and the social, examples of how citizen expertise interacts with environmental governance are in short supply. Through documenting the convergence of these paths in the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act, we trace the emergence in New Jersey of an environmental movement as both a well-informed and popular enterprise. This portrait of the technical and political competence of the environmental movement is important because traditional views usually depict expertise and advocacy as conflicting rather than cooperating endeavors, and because the synthesis of substantive knowledge with political power at the grassroots level is usually identified as a contemporary rather than historical phenomenon, when it is identified at all.

Making Wetlands Protection a Critical Concern Beginning in the 1950s, freshwater wetlands near urban centers in the United States were increasingly identified as lucrative sites for development.1 As suitable upland was exhausted, pressure intensified to develop wetlands for housing, manufacturing, office complexes, and similar uses. Developers throughout the United States found bargains in inland “wastelands”—swamps that were often the last large parcels of open space in a community. Before the 1960s and the shift in public consciousness prompted by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, no federal or state laws specifically addressed the protection of freshwater wetlands. To the contrary, longstanding federal land management policy encouraged draining such swampy wastelands, transforming them into more commercially productive land. In New Jersey, as in many other states, laws written primarily for engineering purposes were the proxy used for a wide range of environmental protection measures. For example, New Jersey’s Waterfront Development Law, passed

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in 1914, was designed to “limit problems that new development could cause for existing navigation channels, marinas, moorings, other existing uses, and the environment.”2 While residents of many New Jersey communities looked from their windows and witnessed tracts of open space disappearing rapidly, they also experienced more tangible troubles with rivers and streams that flooded main streets and basements. Feeling that something was drastically wrong, some citizens began tentatively to connect these phenomena, even while recognizing that they lacked a scientifically supported knowledge base to draw from in fashioning a coherent and powerful argument to preserve the wetlands. A quartet of women was indispensable in making wetlands protection the critical concern of New Jersey’s emerging environmental movement. All of these women started as backyard environmentalists and then expanded and organized their expertise through advocacy groups and political positions. For each of them, involvement in the campaign to protect New Jersey’s freshwater wetlands was a defining element in their career. Concern for the protection of freshwater wetlands gained steam through their efforts to gather substantive knowledge about wetlands and give it relevance and force in environmental advocacy groups. Viewing the evolution of freshwater wetlands protection through their experiences provides insight into unique configurations of governance generated by the conflation of knowledge and political power at the grassroots level. The first of the four women, Helen Fenske, launched a successful career in public service by synthesizing the pursuit of substantive knowledge with advocacy for wetlands protection. Her activism had developed largely in response to the 1959 proposal by the New York Port Authority (later, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) to bulldoze New Jersey’s largest wetland, the Great Swamp, and develop it into the world’s largest international jetport, with four 10,000-foot runways. Not only opposed to having an airport materialize in her backyard but also eager to demonstrate the ecological value of the area to justify halting development, Fenske and other community members enlisted the expertise of biologists and natural resource specialists at various New Jersey colleges.3 Having used the Great Swamp as a living laboratory for years, the academic experts were eager to provide baseline data documenting the diversity of the habitat and wildlife in the Great Swamp and other New Jersey wetlands. In addition, at Fenske’s behest, academic researchers documented the changes to the environment that community members were intuitively

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aware of, correlating these changes with the destruction of open space through urban growth and, in particular, the filling of wetlands. Buoyed in the courts by this expertise, the community won a nine-year battle that not only saved the Great Swamp from being paved over into an airport, but also established it in 1968 as the first wilderness area in the National Wildlife Refuge System.4 Fenske was also a force behind the creation of a way to institutionalize environmental knowledge and interests in New Jersey’s municipalities, although she calls her role an “absolute fluke.” She describes receiving a request from a female legislator in the state Assembly for an idea for legislation that “wouldn’t threaten the men.” The legislator was casting about for ideas because her male colleagues had offered her a bill in thanks for her gracious behavior at the lack of women’s toilet facilities in the legislature. Fenske offered up the creation of municipal environmental commissions, which she had been studying in their original implementation in Massachusetts. The legislator “took it down, had it adjusted, introduced it, and it passed in the blink of an eyelash—noncontroversial, harmless, motherhood. It was nothing.”5 Although their creation seems frivolous, the municipal-level commissions that the legislature authorized in 1968 were anything but. Not only did the law give the environmental commissions advisory-body status regarding natural resource planning and protection, but it also allowed municipalities to give environmental commissions legal status as official arms of local government. Environmental commissions could acquire property, develop and maintain environmental resource inventories, and “study and make recommendations concerning open space preservation, water resources management, air pollution control, solid waste management, noise control, soil and landscape protection, environmental appearance, marine resources and protection of flora and fauna.”6 The environmental commissions quickly established themselves as legitimate public actors that embodied both significant substantive expertise about the environment and the perspective of an environmental advocate. Candace Ashmun was a second active citizen-expert involved with the campaign to save the Great Swamp and, ultimately, the passage of the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act. Ashmun gained unique insight into the need to preserve New Jersey’s freshwater wetlands, and into the information necessary to shape a process of wetlands protection, soon after college. Following her graduation in the 1950s, she moved to New Jersey and worked two jobs, one as a stringer for a newspaper and another at the Upper

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Raritan Watershed Association (URWA). Ashmun’s newspaper job required that she attend meetings of the planning board and board of adjustment, and that she learn to read municipal law. She recalls: “I began to start putting these things together. It was obvious that I was going to see the problems with the wetlands. You couldn’t avoid it as you [conducted] water quality testing. It certainly was an education in the relationship of land use to water quality and therefore the relationship of wetlands to water quality and flooding and everything else.”7 With URWA, a nonprofit formed in 1959 to protect the natural resources of the Upper Raritan River in northern and central New Jersey, she helped develop New Jersey’s first environmental resource inventory by mapping the watershed by hand on fifteen 12-foot by 3-foot maps.8 These maps evaluated twenty-three environmental factors, such as geology, soils, aquifer yields, water quality, and open space. An example of Ashmun’s role at the vanguard of the young science of freshwater wetlands, these maps formed the basis for many of the planning and zoning decisions made over subsequent years throughout the Upper Raritan’s twenty-three watershed communities.9 Ashmun later became the human link between the watershed community and the environmental commissions when she served as the director of the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions (ANJEC) from 1975 to 1982. Her intimate understanding of the connection between land use and the degradation of freshwater wetlands shaped her commitment to educating the environmental commissions about wetlands science. It also contributed to her ability to organize the first state conference on wetlands protection at the Chauncey Center in 1982. A third environmental activist to recognize the benefit of long-range planning and substantive environmental knowledge was Millburn Township resident Maureen Ogden. Concerned that the development encroaching upon the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum and Bird Sanctuary in Millburn would compromise 16.5 square miles of this environmentally sensitive landscape of kettle moraines, hilly slopes, and a natural amphitheatre created by glaciers, Ogden began to collect environmental information. She worked to document and map the local aquifers, watersheds, and traffic patterns for her community, presenting a natural resources inventory to her township that informed a subsequent environmental impact statement (EIS) for the development. Although the inventory she developed was meticulously documented, the township committee and the planning board refused to enact the EIS. Ogden recalls: “And so that’s when I decided that I really had not

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spent a year of my life having our dining room table covered with maps and done all this work to see that nothing is going to come of it. So I decided I have to do one of two things, either get into politics, or else become a professional planner.”10 With reservations about the latter option because “you can have the best plans in the world, but if you don’t have people in political power who are going to support you, it’s going to be an incredibly frustrating experience,” Ogden entered into the local political arena. She served three years as deputy mayor and another three as mayor. Finishing her second term in 1981 and not interested in a third, Ogden opted to run for the legislature.11 She took her Assembly seat in 1982, as a Republican, and she soon started working on a statewide law to preserve freshwater wetlands. With her friend Candace Ashmun, who had left ANJEC to become state planning commissioner, Ogden helped shape the 1982 Chauncey Center conference that kicked off the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign, which later provided crucial grassroots support for her wetlands protection bill. The fourth activist who followed this pattern of synthesizing activism with expertise was Abigail Fair, who moved to an area near the Great Swamp in 1972 and gained an appointment to the local planning board. Frustrated with the lack of progress in protecting freshwater wetlands despite the passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1977, Fair founded the Great Swamp Watershed Association in 1981. Seeking additional allies and expertise, Fair reached out to the New Jersey Water Resource Coalition, and soon she became an active participant in the coalition’s organizing efforts and helped shift its agenda to a more dedicated effort on behalf of wetlands legislation. With the additional support of many other environmental organizations that agreed to make freshwater wetlands a priority, the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign was formed with Abigail Fair at its helm.12 The documentation of changes in the Great Swamp environment, conducted principally by university-based researchers but instigated and coordinated by Fenske’s Great Swamp Committee, was not unlike Maureen Ogden’s efforts to develop a natural resources inventory in her Short Hills community, Candace Ashmun’s painstaking mapping of the Upper Raritan Watershed, or Abigail Fair’s efforts on behalf of the Great Swamp Watershed Association. Each of these women understood the importance of developing a scientifically supported knowledge base as a first step in fashioning a coherent and powerful political argument to preserve the wetlands. In doing so, Fenske, Ogden, Ashmun, and Fair also helped create an agenda of policy relevance for this emergent field of freshwater wetlands science.

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New Jersey Learns to Love Wetlands The advocacy engaged in by Candace Ashmun, Helen Fenske, Maureen Ogden, and Abigail Fair was contingent on two contextual factors: a legal and cultural change in the status of wetlands in New Jersey, and a federal system of wetlands management that continued, despite ongoing efforts, to leave a great deal of freshwater wetlands in New Jersey at risk. The changing perception of wetlands in New Jersey and the gaps in federal law provided the windows of opportunity for advocates in New Jersey, led by Ashmun, Fenske, Ogden, and Fair, to pursue legislation to assume the authority of the federal law and establish the first broad-based protection for freshwater wetlands in any state. The environmental heart of New Jersey is a region of more than one million acres of forests, farms, and scenic towns now known as the Pinelands. Covering nearly one-fifth of the state’s land area—at the center of America’s most populous region—the Pinelands are the largest tract of forested open space between Richmond, Virginia, and Boston.13 Early settlers called the land the Pine Barrens because the acidity of the soil and water made it difficult to grow common agricultural crops, and for generations the region was considered not only barren, but haunted as well. The “Jersey Devil”— frequently described as a winged, cloven-hoofed beast that terrorized local towns—was supposedly born there in 1735, the thirteenth child of one Mrs. Leeds. The Jersey Devil tormented the area until 1740, when an exorcism banished it for one hundred years.14 When the timber, glass, and iron industries began to die out in the first half of the twentieth century, the Devil reappeared, and locals blamed it for their economic problems. Sightings were frequent up until the 1950s, at which point development began to encroach on the area. Through the 1950s, New Jersey had two alternative perspectives on wetlands like the Pinelands. If they were not economically productive, they were barren and even haunted and cursed. That dichotomy began to change through the efforts of environmental activists and a series of state laws that recognized the productive, ecological, and aesthetic value of even undeveloped wetlands. The awareness of wetlands degradation and gaps in New Jersey’s environmental protection measures generated by the campaign to save the Great Swamp soon led to a number of ad hoc approaches to wetlands protection in the state. In 1968, the Hackensack Meadowlands Reclamation and Development Act established a commission to oversee thirty-two square

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miles of environmentally sensitive land in northeastern New Jersey, the last large tract of open land near New York City, and to “protect the balance of nature in the Hackensack Meadowlands; provide for orderly development of district property; and provide facilities for the disposal of solid waste.”15 The Wetlands Act of 1970, passed to protect New Jersey’s coastal wetlands south of the Raritan River, soon followed. A set of other laws, including the Coastal Areas Facilities Review Act (CAFRA) of 1973, the engineering-focused Flood Hazard Control Act of 1972 and its Stream Encroachment Program, the Sewer Extension Program, and the Construction Grants Program, expanded the jurisdiction of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection over the state’s wetlands. Increasingly appreciative of the ecological value of wetlands, the scientists participating in these programs advocated for broader regulations that would include New Jersey’s hardwood and wetland forests.16 Meanwhile, the New York Port Authority—unable to complete its international jetport plan in the Great Swamp because of the efforts of activists like Helen Fenske—shifted its sights south to the Pinelands. The Pinelands forest—of stunted pitch (“pygmy”) pines mixed with oak and watered by tea-colored streams and rivers—is rich with flora and fauna. An area with considerable freshwater wetlands itself, it provides habitat to nearly one hundred threatened or endangered species. Faced with the demands of postwar urban sprawl, developers saw great potential for the Pine Barrens. In addition to the failed jetport, other proposed uses included recreating an extensive timber industry and constructing an oil pipeline from offshore wells. In 1977, New Jersey Congressman James Florio (Democrat, 1st District) sponsored legislation to establish a federal reserve in the Pinelands. In 1978, the U.S. Congress, concerned with burgeoning development pressures on this environmentally fragile area, established the Pinelands National Reserve and called upon New Jersey to create a planning agency to preserve and protect the area’s natural resources. Governor Brendan Byrne subsequently created the Pinelands Commission, issuing a moratorium on state permits for development in the Pinelands area and effectively halting all development there until a Comprehensive Management Plan was prepared. In June 1979, the legislature approved the Comprehensive Management Plan and passed the Pinelands Protection Act, which ultimately dispelled the connotation of freshwater wetlands as wastelands. In doing so, the Pinelands Protection Act dispelled another apparition—that of the Jersey Devil. With one notable exception, a 1993 episode of television’s

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The X-Files in which the Jersey Devil was blamed for upsetting tourism in nearby Atlantic City, the monster has not surfaced to wreak havoc since the Pinelands Protection Act of 1979 brought with it the recognition of the region as an environmental asset. Beyond this change in perspective, the protection of the Pinelands also introduced a number of concepts that became precedents for the treatment of other freshwater wetlands, such as the issuing of a moratorium by the governor on development; the idea of mitigation requirements (an improvement upon wetlands that is made in exchange for damage done to wetlands elsewhere); and the creation of wetland buffer areas to provide transitional zones between developed and preserved land.

Federal Law and the Context for Local Knowledge When Maureen Ogden and Helen Fenske met in the late 1970s, Fenske was coming off the heels of a stint in environmental consulting for the Ford Foundation. Her job had been identifying environmental projects for funding. Particularly interested in projects that could develop environmental case law, she worked closely with the nascent Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, charging them with developing a comprehensive method for managing the natural resources in the United States.17 One of the environmental groups’ first initiatives was the shaping of Section 404 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1977, otherwise known as the Clean Water Act, which provided the first national wetlands protection and a framework within which states could then develop their own more comprehensive programs.18 The Clean Water Act established standards, technical tools, and financial assistance to address many of the causes of pollution and poor water quality in the United States, including municipal and industrial wastewater discharges, polluted runoff from urban and rural areas, and habitat destruction. Ambiguity in the language of the law, however, led to considerable confusion over the responsibility for shaping standards and tools and for oversight. While the law ostensibly charged the Environmental Protection Agency with responsibility for the program, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers administered the permitting program, which granted permission under the law to develop wetlands. In addition, the act stipulated that the Army Corps receive environmental guidance regarding permits from the National Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. To further complicate matters, while the act

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provided that the federal government set the agenda and standards for pollution abatement, and that it regulate the nation’s waters in broad terms, it delegated many of the chores of street-level implementation and enforcement to the states, including decisions about wetlands smaller than 10 acres. Not only did it take time to work out the logistics of what the Clean Water Act meant by federalism, but it was also clear that a lack of knowledge about wetlands pervaded both federal and state agencies. For example, the Clean Water Act specifically addressed wetlands in tidal and brackish waters, but the language in the act was unclear regarding its application to inland freshwater wetlands. Staff of the federal agencies involved in implementing the Clean Water Act had established bureaucratic competencies seemingly at odds with the roles the act expected of them. Particularly problematic—given their new role in the permitting process—was the Army Corps of Engineers, which historically engaged in building dams and maintaining navigable waters, activities which often destroyed wetlands. The Corps’ only previous experience with permitting had been with the Rivers and Harbors Act, from which the Corps has authority to permit structures in or over navigable waters, and so the development of an ecological perspective necessary to implement the intent of the Clean Water legislation was slow. This steep learning curve was not unique to the Army Corps. An EPA staff member described a laborious and mistake-filled process of hiring qualified people in all of the agencies: “The agencies would hire somebody who was a microbiologist and think they were an ecologist. They would hire people that had a couple of biology courses and expect them to identify wetlands. Some of these people knew a lot about fish, some people knew a lot about certain aspects of science, but they really had to learn about what to regulate.”19 A limited federal mandate, no comprehensive state regulation, a lack of implementing expertise, and a history of public sentiment that considered wetlands as wastelands that could only be improved through development conspired to create a situation in which many hundreds of acres of New Jersey’s freshwater wetlands were filled even after the passage of the Clean Water Act. A host of inadequacies in the program precluded comprehensive wetland protection, including inconsistent jurisdictional determinations and the failure of the Army Corps to completely regulate ditching, draining, and clearing of wetlands. Meanwhile, insurance claims following floods mounted, and the state was in the middle of a severe water shortage.

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With awareness heightened by the Clean Water Act, the New Jersey press began to probe more deeply into the impact of development on flood problems. According to the Record’s July 11, 1983, article about the Passaic River’s Ebbing Wetlands, “[d]evelopment made flooding from this spring’s heavy rains worse than usual in many basin communities. . . . [F]lood experts warn further development of the wetlands would increase the severity of flooding even in a year of normal rainfall.” Just a few months later, another Record article explained on September 25, 1984, that “wetlands in the Passaic River Basin have been filled in for development at a rate of two to five times faster than the rest of the country. . . . [E]ach year the basin area suffers $50 million in flood damage to public and private property and has been declared a federal disaster area six times since the 1970’s.” While Section 404 focused national attention on the linkages between choices about land use and flooding, the degradation of public water supplies, habitat loss, and other consequences of the loss of wetlands, it did not prove the solution to the continued filling of freshwater wetlands in New Jersey.

Emergence of a Coherent Environmental Community The Great Swamp brought freshwater wetlands to the forefront of environmental protection discussions in the state. The early organizing around its preservation then reoriented to protect New Jersey’s Pinelands from development as well. Experiences with both regions built a general understanding throughout the state of the need for environmental protection by highlighting problems of freshwater wetlands degradation. Also critical to the development of an environmental movement in New Jersey were the energy and commitment of volunteers to the nascent watershed associations built during the 1960s and the role of municipal environmental commissions in generating local expertise and allying in ANJEC. Watershed associations’ ability to advocate for improved environmental planning at the local level was crucial, as was their ability to perform some technical tasks. Many, like Candace Ashmun’s Upper Raritan Watershed Association, were busy conducting water quality inventories and identifying surface and ground water pollution. By the time Congress passed the Clean Water Act, they were ready and organized to fulfill the Act’s promises by actively participating in the new planning opportunities created by federal law. When Ashmun took the executive directorship of ANJEC in 1976, she received access to site plan reviews and environmental

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databases through the association’s oversight of the environmental commissions. The pattern of environmental degradation she saw was undeniable. Ashmun recalls: “It was obvious that the wetlands were a really serious part of the problem, and that the existing system which was controlling land use—all land use at the municipal level—was not working.”20 With the research conducted by New Jersey’s watershed associations and municipal environmental commissions, evidence mounted by the early 1980s that the Clean Water Act was failing. A 1984 review by the State College Field Office of forty post–Clean Water Act wetland fill cases further documented approximately 800 acres of wetlands impacts resulting from illegal filling and permitting activities.21 And although regional regulation under the Pinelands Act, CAFRA, and the Meadowlands Act minimized wetland losses in their respective jurisdictions, they still did not provide for comprehensive, statewide wetland protection. Indeed, the host of contradictory programs and standards compromised the ability of the Department of Environmental Protection to regulate freshwater wetlands effectively. Freshwater wetlands protection became not just a critical environmental issue in New Jersey, but the primary focus of a wide array of environmental groups and an advocacy coalition with enough knowledge and grassroots strength to move legislation. The first orchestrating event, alluded to above, was a conference at the Chauncey Center in Princeton, which brought the wide array of interested parties together. The conference led to draft legislation but also to the creation of the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign to promote that legislation, and the knowledge base it built upon, at the grassroots. Helen Fenske describes the variety of activity around the environmental commissions as a growing groundswell, with in-roads made into New Jersey’s local government on the parts of those concerned about the environment. She believes that it was with many environmental commissions in place, and a growing coalition of people who understood what she was trying to do, that Assemblywoman Ogden decided the time was right to craft a freshwater wetlands law.22 Assemblywoman Ogden and Candace Ashmun organized the orchestrating event in 1982, a conference at the Chauncey Center in Princeton. Ashmun had recently hosted, under the auspices of the Great Swamp Watershed Association, a two-day wetlands conference at Drew University that gathered wetlands experts and advocates from across the country. She also received a grant to bring together a group of New Jersey politicians, experts, and advocates.23 Ogden and Ashmun designed the conference to bring

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everyone involved in the previous legislative campaigns together with everyone currently involved with the related statutes to discuss the potential for comprehensive freshwater wetlands protection. They intended it to be a brainstorming session and an opportunity to develop both tactics and strategy for a campaign. Ashmun explains, “We had one big huge round table and we all just dove into discussion. There was no question in anybody’s mind that a) something had to happen and b) something would happen. The question really was ‘What?’ and ‘How do you handle it in New Jersey in particular?’ ” The Chauncey conference yielded both the immediate impetus for legislation and a coordinated effort among the environmental community— the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign—that would advocate for it. Participants recall that the conference shifted the focus from beating up the “incompetent people failing to enforce the law” to getting a new freshwater wetlands law.24 Following the conference Assemblywoman Ogden asked the Office of Legislative Services to draft a bill. After Maureen Ogden introduced the first Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act bill in 1982, two distinct groups emerged around the proposed legislation. These groups were often perceived and referred to as diametric opposites: “the builders” and “the environmentalists.” The builders comprised primarily the community of interests that would be regulated by such an act. Lumped with the environmentalists were not only individuals and organizations interested in protecting the natural environment, but also individuals adversely affected by flooding and other consequences of wetlands degradation. A former state official described the two groups: “The environmentalists obviously felt that the wetlands should be preserved and that they were an important environmental resource. The building community felt that it was too much of a burden on them to worry about what they considered to be patches of wetlands in the areas that they wanted to develop. They felt that areas that got wet once a year and were otherwise dry shouldn’t be considered wetlands unless it was standing water or marsh, and they felt the hardwood swamps shouldn’t be eligible for preservation at all.”25 Coming off the heels of the passage of the Coastal Wetlands Act, which deemed hundreds of thousands of acres of saltwater and brackish marshlands inaccessible to development, developers saw stricter regulations on freshwater wetlands as an additional impediment to their livelihood. Although most agreed that the state’s coastal wetlands were worthy of preservation, there was little consensus over the inland freshwater wetlands.

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A state official recalls: “There really wasn’t an understanding even on the part of people who might be supportive of their importance or their need for preservation. And the builders thought they could engineer around anything. They couldn’t understand why we were going to put their developments on hold.”26 In addition to the draft legislation, which created the rift between the builders and the environmentalists, the Chauncey conference created the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign, through which the environmentalists acted in concert. With Abigail Fair, founder of the Great Swamp Watershed Association, at the helm, the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign attracted 140 environmental and civic organizations to its ranks within two years. The campaign had a two-pronged approach. It focused on constructing as bipartisan and broad-based a coalition as possible—inclusive of groups as diverse as hunters, environmentalists, garden clubs, and educators. It also focused on using this large and diverse coalition to provide substantive information to educate legislators and their constituents about wetlands.27 With state assumption of the federal 404 Program a central element of the legislation, members of the campaign became savvy, active participants in the policy-making process as well. But it was political muscle that gave environmental knowledge power. Abigail Fair recalls that traditional lobbying played a valuable role, especially the capacity for rapid response through networking. When Ogden’s legislation ran into roadblocks, Fair would call campaign members across the state to say: “Hey—your legislator is misbehaving, you need to have forty calls go in to him telling him to straighten up.” She feels that it was not just the fact that the campaign existed, but that it could call on people to write letters, and they wrote thousands of them.28 The campaign’s sophisticated organizing efforts drew on the community of knowledge generated earlier. They developed a number of fact sheets that defined wetlands, traced their losses, and described the ineffectiveness of the federal wetlands protection program. The campaign developed an editorial board committee to meet with the editors of local newspapers. Testifying at hearings, campaign representatives would begin by reading off their membership list, which eventually grew to two hundred groups, representing at least one hundred thousand people in the state.29 Legislators became increasingly aware of the votes tied to wetlands protection. The Freshwater Wetlands Campaign worked closely with organizations like the Conservation Foundation to raise awareness of the impact of

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wetlands degradation and losses in New Jersey. They developed programs to enhance the public understanding of the need for wetlands preservation, including bus tours showing examples of where the Army Corps of Engineers had issued permits to develop wetlands, and visits to homes and office complexes that routinely flooded because of adjacent development. They created slide shows for legislators, and campaign member groups hosted legislative breakfasts in Trenton to convince legislators of the environmental importance of wetlands.30 Involvement in the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign represented several years’ sacrifice of staff time, volunteer time, and financial and other resources for many of the member organizations. The sophistication and savvy of environmental advocacy that had developed with the Great Swamp and Pinelands legislation, however, helped foster the willingness to engage in such an effort. It was the combined efforts of a diverse cross-section of the public committed to the preservation of wetlands that ultimately affected the politicians’ view of wetlands protection. And for the diverse members of the campaign it was the belief that consensus on the issues, and particularly consensus on the definition of a wetland, was necessary for passage of the bill. The Freshwater Wetlands Campaign played a significant role in articulating the thresholds at which the legislation was or was not going to be an acceptable option for wetlands preservation. Most legislators, unqualified to discuss the environmental issues in technical terms, had no way of judging rationally what was required for adequate protection. In their decisionmaking, they relied not just on the support of their constituents to indicate policy preferences but also on such groups for substantive knowledge. The Freshwater Wetlands Campaign shaped a general consensus for both preferences and knowledge about wetlands. One person involved in the shaping of the freshwater wetlands legislation described the typical decision-making process as follows: “Legislators don’t make decisions on a technical basis. They’ve got a handful of letters from developers on one side of their desk, and one hundred letters from the environmentalists on the other side and they weigh what the impact of their decision might be on their next campaign.”31 One of the primary targets of the campaign was Assemblyman Jack Penn (Republican, 16th District), who had introduced a wetlands bill more favorable to the builders’ interests in opposition to Ogden’s bill. Among the campaign’s tactics were mass gatherings outside Penn’s office to read the list of New Jersey residents who supported Ogden’s bill. Ogden herself

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prepared a slide presentation and delivered it to the Somerset Hills Garden Club, in Assemblyman Penn’s home county. Club members were so enthusiastic about her presentation that they organized to staff a booth at the county fair to gather signatures and visited Penn’s office to push for Ogden’s version of the bill. Ogden does not “think that Jack Penn ever realized what he was getting into. He didn’t realize he had the tiger by the tail. . . . Not only did the vast . . . majority of the people who [attended field hearings on wetlands] support my legislation . . . , but we had the support of the Somerset Hills Garden Club.”32 Such mobilization was critical because, as Ogden recalls, the builders were relatively well bankrolled compared to the environmentalists, and the ability to get good legislation was “not based on . . . the value of the wetlands, or the importance of them. It’s a question of votes and money.”33 With the mobilization of potential votes by the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign, and increasing pressure from fellow legislators who saw the writing on the wall as well, Penn was ready to compromise. One element of the compromise included emphasis on the assumption of the federal 404 Program by New Jersey. Developers were frustrated with an Army Corps program that, prior to 1984, did not publish maps outlining its jurisdiction—thus making it difficult to determine which areas of wetlands were exempt from regulation through the nationwide permit provision. And even though permitting by the state was expected to be more strict than permitting by the Army Corps, the developers soon recognized that by filling out only one permit, they might move through the process more smoothly.34 A second element was the concept of buffers for the wetlands—a concept familiar from the Pinelands legislation and the New Jersey Coastal Management Program, both of which required 300-foot buffers to preserve the protected wetlands. The significance of citizen knowledge regarding the emerging science of freshwater wetlands was particularly salient in the treatment of this issue. Using research documented by backyard environmentalists/activists around the state, proponents set forth their own statement of the ecological values and functions of wetlands and argued that because development adjacent to wetlands can adversely affect wetlands through increased runoff, sedimentation, the introduction of pollutants, and changes in species composition, the provision of adequate buffers around wetlands is critical to preserving their ecological integrity. Not surprisingly, the builders were not interested in expanding the area off-limits to development by 300-foot buffers and were determined to

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fight the additional restrictions tooth and nail. John Sheridan, then president of the New Jersey Builders Association, argued: “Rather than arbitrary buffers, we need to understand the contributions each type of wetlands makes. All wetlands are not of equal value, and the state should regulate wetlands consistent with the benefits they provide.”35 At the heart of the compromise on the buffer provision was an agreement to classify the wetlands for the purposes of assessing buffer widths. The environmental community originally resisted a classification system, fearing that it would create a second class of wetlands.36 At an impasse with the developers and desperate to move the legislation, the environmental community conceded that certain wetlands warrant larger buffers and certain other wetlands warrant smaller ones.37 Three categories of wetlands emerged from the compromise: ordinary wetlands with no surface water connection, isolated from a larger system; intermediate wetlands somehow connected to the overall system; and exceptional wetlands on very pristine waters and adjacent to wetlands that provided habitat to threatened and endangered species. The policy issue of wetlands classification was, as a DEP regulator describes it, “contentious, but it ended up in a compromise that all could live with. The environmentalists argued that classification of wetlands was a slippery slope, and that anything considered ‘low quality’ wetlands would not be protected in the end. The developers argued that all wetlands are not created equal, that they have a variable habitat, water quality benefit, and flood storage, and that these components have to be taken into consideration. The result was a compromise in that a classification scheme couldn’t call them buffer zones anymore, they had to call them transition areas.”38 But the builders ended up with classifications, and the environmentalists ended up with de facto buffers. A third element was the definition of wetlands itself. Unlike other disputes over broad policy questions, the wetlands issue centered on narrow, technical judgments, such as the plant species characteristically found in wetland habitats, and the number of days that soil must remain saturated to constitute a wetland. Legislators recall that the environmental advocates demonstrated remarkable scientific expertise.39 This expertise both brought these issues to light and helped shape a definition of wetlands. But disputes among scientists about defining wetlands accentuated the rift between environmentalists and builders over the definition. The parties eventually resolved this fundamental dispute by agreeing to rely on the April 1, 1987, Wetland Identification and Delineation Manual

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developed by the EPA.40 A regulator involved in the policy-making process describes working with the federal definition of freshwater wetlands as “the one positive aspect of having to incorporate the federal stuff into the process.”41 While the developers were still not happy with the federal definition, they accepted it as the most credible definition and the one with the most science behind it. All parties involved recognized the lengthy process the federal agencies had gone through in developing the definition: “There were all these agencies that didn’t necessarily agree about how to regulate—the Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t agree with how the Army Corps of Engineers was doing its job, and the EPA was somewhere in between— but you had all these agencies agreeing on a definition, so that gave it credibility. It was public policy credibility beyond just hours and science invested.”42 In hindsight, once everyone was comfortable with the definition of freshwater wetlands, the battle was nearly over. With a definition in hand, Governor Thomas H. Kean (Republican) could step in, as he did on June 8, 1987, and, following Governor Byrne’s precedent in dealing with the Pinelands, issue a moratorium on all construction in wetlands until a protection law was passed. With Executive Order No. 175, Governor Kean declared a temporary halt to the issuance of all state approvals, including grants, permits, certifications, licenses, and applications for financial assistance, for projects involving freshwater wetlands. Kean’s executive order was an affirmation of a legislative mandate incorporated in the Pinelands Preservation Act, against disruptive developmental incursions on the state’s natural reserves. Although challenged on constitutional grounds involving the separation of powers doctrine, Kean’s decree was eventually upheld by the courts. It put on hold several hundred projects involving more than 5,000 acres of freshwater wetlands that had been filed with the DEP. Governor Kean’s moratorium was instrumental in bringing the builders’ interests to the table. In a video made after FWPA, Morton Goldfine, Vice President for Law and Public Affairs for the developer Hartz Mountain Industries, said of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP), a major lobbying group for the builders, that it was brought “kicking and scratching to the table, but once they got to the table we found there was widespread support for freshwater wetlands protection in New Jersey. We labored for a bill that was reflective of what NAIOP could live with. We wanted to find a bill for New Jersey and took the governor at his word that there was going to be a bill and we wanted to see to it that the bill was not more restrictive than there needed to be.”43

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Despite the settling of issues between Ogden and Penn and the precedent of the Pinelands moratorium, Governor Kean’s action was a courageous one. Ashmun believes it was “gutsy” and that “you need a gutsy governor in New Jersey because the governor has so much power. . . . And if you don’t have that, everything else underneath it kind of falls apart.”44 Indeed, final passage in the Assembly required some maneuvering to protect a few legislators who were only reluctant supporters of the bill, but the necessary last-minute deals were cut. The Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act emerged, and New Jersey assumed authority from the federal government for protection of its freshwater wetlands.

Conclusion When Helen Fenske began recruiting academic biologists to help her document the ecological value of the Great Swamp in response to the Port Authority’s plan to develop it into a jetport, she was mobilizing technical information for an ad hoc lobbying effort. When Candace Ashmun was laboring over resource maps, her efforts were dedicated to informing planning and zoning decisions for the Upper Raritan Watershed. When Maureen Ogden completed her natural resource inventory, she was fighting to preserve a local park. When Abigail Fair joined her local planning board, she too was fighting to preserve a local park—the Great Swamp. These women, both activists and environmental experts in their own right, had no foreknowledge that their activities would begin to lay the groundwork for a statewide advocacy campaign to preserve freshwater wetlands. The policy environment in which they participated was fragmented, like the mosaic courtyard floor outside DEP’s Trenton office. There was no tile unique to freshwater wetlands, let alone a comprehensive picture of how to protect them. These women’s experience with this fragmentation, however, suggested that the organization of knowledge and advocacy could be a successful long-term strategy for environmental protection. So Fenske helped instigate municipal environmental commissions. Ashmun led ANJEC, their local umbrella organization, and helped the commissions gain expertise. Ogden moved to electoral politics and orchestrated public and elite opinion through the Drew and Chauncey conferences. Fair spearheaded the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign, which lobbied for wetlands protection but emphasized the grassroots dissemination of environmental knowledge about the value of wetlands.

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These activities succeeded not only in establishing wetlands protection as a critical environmental concern in a state with many such concerns. But they also created a coherent, statewide environmental movement that mobilized knowledge for the purpose of advocating for comprehensive wetlands protection and resulted in the passage of the nation’s toughest wetlands law. There are surely other ways of telling the history of New Jersey’s Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act. Indeed, our initial impulse was to tell it as a story of the rivalrous relationship between political expedience and technical information. But the story that emerged as more compelling was the ability of activist-experts like Fenske, Ashmun, Ogden, and Fair to overcome the traditional rivalry between political action and technical knowledge and mobilize knowledge for the commonweal. Of course, the story is not over, as the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act has a history of implementation that is at least as curious and controversial as its history of creation. But the influence of this strategy of organizing around knowledge and advocacy continued to pay off even after FWPA passed. One of the law’s provisions required DEP to hold workshops and develop a manual describing the law and the importance of wetlands. DEP hired Abigail Fair to write the manual. Notes

1.

2.

3.

4.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SBR-9810390. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors also wish to thank the organizers of the New Jersey’s Environments: History and Policy conference, and New Jersey’s Environments: Past, Present, and Future volume editor Neil Maher, for comments and suggestions that strengthened the paper. Barnard, William D., and Christopher K. Ansell, Joan G. Harn, and Daniel Kevin, “Establishing Priorities for Wetland Management,” in American Water Resources Association Water Resource Bulletin, Vol. 21, No. 6, December 1985. New Jersey Statutes Annotated Title 12 (Commerce and Navigation), Chapter 5 (Waterfront and Harbor Facilities), Section 3 (Submission to board of plans for waterfront development), 1914. Fenske, Helen (former Commissioner of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection), interview by Heather Fenyk, 4-12-1999, transcript held by the authors. Fenske, Helen; accessed on-line 6-12-04, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge: http://greatswamp.fws.gov/.

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5. Fenske, Helen. 6. New Jersey Statutes Annotated Title 40 (Environmental Commissions Enabling Legislation), Chapter 56A, 1968. 7. Ashmun, Candace (former Executive Director and three-term President of the Association of New Jersey Environmental Coalitions), interview 9-24-1999 by Heather Fenyk and David Guston, transcript held by the authors. 8. Ashmun, Candace. 9. Accessed on-line May 2001: http://www.urwa.org/about_us/history.html. 10. Ogden, Maureen (former New Jersey Assemblywoman, R-Essex), interview by Heather Fenyk, 4-15-1999, transcript held by the authors. 11. Ogden, Maureen. 12. Fair, Abigail (founding trustee of the Great Swamp Watershed Association and environmental activist), interview by Heather Fenyk, 9-16-1999, transcript held by authors. 13. Accessed on-line May 2004: The New Jersey Pinelands Commission, http://www .state.nj.us/pinelands/. 14. Accessed on-line June 2002: Weird New Jersey, http://www.weirdnj.com/ _unexplained/jerseydevil.html. 15. New Jersey Statutes Annotated Title 13, The Hackensack Meadowlands Reclamation and Development Act, Chapter 17-1, 1968. 16. Confidential interview with N.J. Department of Environmental Protection official by Heather Fenyk and David Guston, 5-5-1999, transcript held by authors. 17. Fenske, Helen. 18. Ibid. 19. Confidential interview with Region 2 Environmental Protection Agency official by Heather Fenyk, August 2000, transcript held by authors. 20. Ashmun, Candace. 21. State College Field Office Report, “Clean Water Act Assessment,” 1984. 22. Ogden, Maureen. 23. Confidential interview with former N.J. Department of Environmental Protection official (#1) by Heather Fenyk and David Guston, April 21, 1999, transcript held by authors. 24. Ashmun, Candace. 25. Confidential interview with N.J. Department of Environmental Protection official (#2) by Heather Fenyk and David Guston, May 1999, transcript held by authors. 26. Ibid. 27. Fair, Abigail. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ogden, Maureen. 31. NJDEP official #2. 32. Ogden, Maureen. 33. Ibid. 34. Confidential interview with National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP) lawyer by Heather Fenyk, 7-1-2001, transcript held by authors.

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35. Star-Ledger “Real Estate Marketplace,” June 20, 1986. 36. Kane, Rich (former N.J. Audubon Society director), interview by Heather Fenyk, 3-30-1999, transcript held by authors. 37. Ibid. 38. Confidential interview with EPA Region 2 official. 39. Confidential interview with NJDEP official #1. 40. Confidential interview with EPA Region 2 official. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Goldfine, Morton, Vice President for Law and Public Affairs, speaking about the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, undated video footage. 44. Ashmun, Candace.

Chapter 5

The Free Fishing Controversy of Sussex County, New Jersey

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Robert W. Reynolds

Introduction The free fishing controversy was a turn-of-the-century showdown over public access to privately owned fishing destinations in Sussex County, New Jersey. By the 1890s the lovers of rod and reel were losing out to privatization as fishing and camping club organizers along with resort developers began to close or restrict lake access to the public. While there were examples of fishing, camping, and summer home resorts created and utilized by local residents, such locals tended to be elites similar to those flocking to this new vacation region from nearby cities. The average laborer or farmer from the county as well as working-class visitors from the city found their access to fishing significantly reduced with the onslaught of privatization. The rapid decline in the quantity of lakes open to the public led to efforts to enact legislation designed to remove the right to fish from a lake owner’s bundle of property rights, all in an effort to establish public fishing parks in Sussex County. The story of Lake Pochung illustrates this shift from public to private fishing sites in Sussex County, New Jersey. In the spring of 1893 a correspondent from the magazine American Angler arrived in Deckertown, New Jersey, to exercise a standing invitation to fish the nearby lake.1 After the two-hour train ride from Jersey City, the writer and a friend were met at the depot by the area’s most noted angler, Howard Little, and conveyed to a local hotel. That evening the men held forth on the hotel piazza “talking rod and reel” with the other guests, consisting of an “editor, doctor, lawyer, merchant, and gentlemen of leisure.” The next morning after an early breakfast, Little accompanied the two guests on the carriage ride to Lake Pochung, where they launched a rowboat and began fishing. After several hours 90

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passed with only four bass caught, the group’s luck changed as the wind picked up, the waters rippled, and a swarm of “double-winged brownish flies” appeared over the lake, causing the bass to jump. “I think we must have seen thirty or more bass in the air within thirty minutes,” remarked the reporter. A quick switch to flies for bait resulted in the landing of a fine bass just before the day’s fishing ended. The Lake Pochung fishing party saw in Sussex County’s lakes a recreational frontier offering escape from the city for tourists and sportsmen alike. Before returning to the hotel the group contemplated the potential of the “many lakes and streams among the mountains, almost wholly unknown and unfished except by the resident lover of rod and reel.” This landscape of mountains and lakes seemed ripe for development by city people “seeking recreation, pure, wholesome air and beautiful scenery.” The anglers contemplated securing Lake Pochung for their private use as a fishing club. Little advised the group that the lake’s owner, Mr. Truesdell, might sell for a moderate price, and with that thought hanging in the air, the men unjointed their rods and headed back to Deckertown. As the party headed downhill towards town with a view of high hills on each side, the reporter’s guest, Dr. George Ward, offered his prediction of the future of this area: “These are the Jersey Adirondacks; the time will come when these hills will be as popular summer resorts as the White Mountains, the North Woods or the lakes of Maine.”2 Dr. Ward’s 1893 prophecy was on the mark, both for Lake Pochung and for the wider recreational frontier of Sussex County. The subsequent development of Lake Pochung epitomizes a new pattern of recreational development that occurred repeatedly as the lakes and ponds of Sussex County, New Jersey, became prized for their recreational value. In 1896, for instance, a group of about twenty men leased Lake Pochung for fishing and outing purposes. The group planned to build a clubhouse and a boathouse, and picnic parties from Deckertown enjoyed the club’s grounds, with some visitors electing to rough it overnight in canvas tents.3 In 1907 club members formed the Lake Pochung Outing Association, a corporation “not formed for pecuniary profit, but for the purpose of hunting, fishing, boating, etc.”4 The move from tents to cottages came in the 1910s, with at least six summer houses built by 1924.5 What had once been a privately owned lake enjoyed by locals and an occasional city fisherman had been transformed first into a camping resort with some public access, and then into a residential lake resort of private summer homes. As a new resort region, Sussex County became part of a much larger tourist landscape originating with the development of mineral springs,

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where visitors drank and bathed in waters for medicinal purposes. Those early vacationers usually stayed in hotels, where formal social rituals defined the resort experience. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, American attitudes toward nature changed as industrialization encouraged city residents to see in wild nature the antithesis of the urban environment. Time spent hiking, boating, fishing, hunting, and observing nature shaped the activities occurring at American resort hotels. Camping proved quite popular and once the Adirondack region of New York opened in 1869, thousands went into the woods to vacation. Visitors sought simplicity by camping under canvas, traveling by Adirondack guide boats, fishing, hunting, and breathing pine-scented air, thought to cure pulmonary and lung ailments. As the Adirondacks became popular, hotels developed and summer houses rose along the lakes, providing a model for resort areas in the Maine woods, the White and Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, and the Berkshires of Massachusetts, among other regions.6 By the early twentieth century the summer vacation became a ritual of all classes, with the federal and state governments providing recreation by establishing public outdoor parks.7 Surprisingly, local resistance to such developments has gone unstudied. In the literature about American tourism, the action of people who fought back against such privatization has not been examined. In New Jersey this movement to resist lake privatization came to a head at Swartswood Lake in the late 1890s when owner Andrew Albright attempted to charge the public for the right to fish. The backlash to such actions culminated in the 1901 Lake and Park Bill, a last ditch effort by county residents to reassert local control over the new pattern of privatization spreading across the area’s lake landscape. And although this free fishing controversy ultimately favored private interests, it left open a pathway for free fishing to survive, albeit on a greatly reduced scale. Although local citizens tried to protect their traditional access to fishing, the desire of local elites and affluent city residents to gain control over the waters of Sussex County proved insurmountable. There are four distinct stages to the Sussex County free fishing controversy. Between the early 1870s and the late 1880s city visitors and locals of all classes shared the lakes in accordance with the tried and true tradition of free fishing. Under the terms of this custom local fishermen supplied urbanites with knowledge about local fishing spots and techniques, while city visitors bolstered the local economy by staying at nearby hotels and boardinghouses. Beginning in the mid to late 1880s, however, the free fishing tradition became more problematic as clubs began leasing and buying

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lakes, and as lots around the bodies of water were sold for summer houses. Although many fishing and camping resorts during this period continued to entertain the public, locals were beginning to lose control of this traditional practice. From 1898 to 1904 the free fishing controversy reached its peak, eventually making its way to the state assembly and courts. Finally, in 1915 a new arrangement arose that replaced the old free fishing practice with preserved public access through the creation of state parks.

The Free Fishing Tradition, 1870–1889 In 1873 the New Jersey Midland Railroad opened up Sussex County to development as a resort destination for city people interested in local fishing. At first visitors stayed in hotels situated in the towns along the rail lines or in boardinghouses operated by farm families, enjoying wagon rides up to the nearby lakes for fishing and picnicking excursions. Railroad and tourist guidebooks combined with press coverage in city papers informed the public of Sussex County’s offerings for the summer visitor. By the 1880s tourism development shifted to lakeshores, yielding a new tourist landscape featuring a mixture of camping, boardinghouses, hotels, and cottages. In this initial phase of Sussex County’s recreational development, fishing was the preeminent activity. The arrival of city sportsmen by rail to fish Sussex County’s lakes and ponds began at the same time that New Jersey introduced bass into the region’s waters. While previously fishermen had valued the brown brook trout inhabiting the cool waters of tree-canopied streams, with the stocking of bass in 1874 and 1875 fishermen migrated from creeks and streams to the bass-filled lakes.8 A fisherman remarking on this process recalled visiting Greenwood Lake a decade earlier in 1874, when “it was noted for the abundance of pickerel. Since that time it has been stocked with black bass of the small mouth species alone, and reports said that they had increased and the fishing for them was now good.”9 Sussex County’s excellent bass fishing attracted regional and national interest in the area’s lakes. Through sportsmen’s journals such as Forest and Stream and American Angler as well as newspapers published in Sussex County and in New Jersey’s eastern cities, accounts of successful fishing expeditions and how-to information designed to entice novices to try fishing lured thousands of outdoor enthusiasts to Sussex County for recreational vacations. For example, a correspondent from Forest and Stream who went fishing in Lake Wawayanda reported that “few are aware that the

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veritable lake bass of the north (Grystes nigricans) exists in New Jersey; yet I have found him in Sussex County, of this state, in all his gaminess, vaulting, diving, and resisting.” According to this writer, his fishing party rowed around the lake and pulled a number of heavy bass out of its waters, including one that leapt three feet into the air on the end of a line.10 The rapid growth and prolific nature of bass allowed the species to gain dominance over the indigenous perch, chain pickerel, and catfish. Most importantly, the “bronze backs,” with their propensity to dive when hooked and fight hard against capture, proved a mighty adversary for fishermen. An 1889 account of a fishing trip to Carpenter’s Pond published in Forest and Stream is typical of the experience city fishermen hoped to realize. Utilizing a lancewood rod “light as a feather, but supple as a lawyer’s conscience,” the correspondent headed out onto the lake in a birch canoe and tied on a crawfish as bait. “In ten minutes I felt a powerful pull,” wrote one visitor. “I paused one instant, then gave my wrist a twist, and as the reel whizzed frantically, and the line played out rapidly a hundred yards, I knew I had hooked the black bass of my piscatorial dreams.” Before landing the fish “the bronze back was off again, jumping high in the air, giving his head a shake to dislodge the hook.” After a fifteen-minute fight, the 41⁄2-pound bass lay panting in the bottom of the canoe. By the end of the day this fisherman had caught twenty bass, the smallest weighing two pounds, which he ate at his hotel that very evening.11 While local fishermen learned about fishing from family or friends, city fishermen first turned to newspapers and sporting journals for instruction on how to fish. In an 1881 newspaper article, for instance, nationally renowned fisherman Seth Green recommended minnows, suckers, chubs, shiners, crayfish, and the dobson, or hellgrammite, as bait. Green advised placing the hook just above the backbone of baitfish and then placing the minnow about one foot from the bottom, connected to a cork or bobber with a light sinker one foot above the bait. When the bass hits the minnow and carries it five or six feet before stopping to swallow the bait, “the angler should not jerk his line as soon as he sees that a fish has struck his bait. Instead, Green explained, one “should give him line until he comes to a stop.”12 The angler should then make short, quick strikes so the fish will seize the bait again after a miss. Detailed written instruction by fishing writers such as Seth Green taught novice city fishermen about technique, bait, equipment, and fish behavior. The city fishermen visiting lakes and ponds in Sussex County picked up traditional fishing techniques from locals as well. An 1887 article defined

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the method of skittering as “twitching the bait over the surface of the water by successions of short jerks which are imparted by a wrist motion at the end of the rod.” Popular bait among native anglers included pork rinds cut out in rough imitation of a fish, ripped canvas strips, the white underbelly of the pickerel, or a medium-sized frog with the hook through both its jaws. Other local fishing methods included trolling, bait casting, night setlines, and net drawers.13 Those inconsiderate individuals who dropped dynamite in ponds and lakes and harvested fish by the thousands practiced the most reviled form of “fishing,” according to locals. Although this practice was outlawed by the 1870s, local papers reported its practice into the 1880s. Both local and city fishermen appreciated a good fish story, and such tales also promoted fishing in Sussex County lakes. When a huge pickerel was pulled from Lake Pochung in 1899, locals who had fished the area since the 1850s and city sportsmen leasing the lake for a camping resort were on hand. Characterized as the most “gamey” fish ever seen in Sussex County, the 41⁄2-foot pickerel with “wrinkles all over him and scars from top to bottom, literally filled with fish hooks of older sports, all grown fast and sticking out on all sides,” was pulled from the lake. While hauling the fish into the boat, it slipped away to freedom. A number of fishermen claimed they saw specific tackle on the pickerel attributable to half a dozen men known for fishing that lake, and several claimed they had been after that fish for the past forty years.14 Media coverage of such enormous fish convinced many city sportsmen that Sussex County, New Jersey, was the place to go for excellent fishing.

The Erosion of Free Fishing, 1890–1898 As the surge of city sportsmen to Sussex County lakes intensified in the 1880s and 1890s, clubs and resorts were founded that began reducing or eliminating unfettered public access. Demand for more permanent arrangements for summer recreation drove the creation of clubs and resorts that leased and purchased lake properties. Middle- and upper-class people from inside and outside the county contributed to this process, making it increasingly difficult for the common citizen to continue fishing at the same locations season after season. The earliest fishing clubs often served as fishing advocates that worked hard through their membership to improve the quality of fishing at a particular lake. One of the earliest of these efforts was the Greenwood

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Lake Sportsman’s Club, which city residents organized in 1870 to improve the lake’s fishing through stocking with black bass and by enacting stringent fishing regulations. By 1876 the organization planned to build a twelve-thousand-dollar clubhouse for its members.15 Whereas on larger lakes such efforts often benefited the public, who continued to have access, during the 1880s and 1890s an increasing number of clubs sought complete control over small and medium-sized lakes as private fishing resorts. Similar private fishing clubs established during this time include Newark’s Sussex Anglers’ Club in 1886 and the Flat Brook Club, the most exclusive fishing club in Sussex County, in 1889.16 Although many of these clubs originally paid modest fees for tenting privileges, as more and more lakes closed to the public, urban members of these clubs began purchasing property outright to ensure the viability of their annual excursions. For instance in 1895 the Hawthorne Camping Club struck a deal with New York City Mayor Abraham Hewitt, who owned Little Round Pond near Sparta, New Jersey, to buy a 464-acre tract for twentyfive hundred dollars. Construction of a low dam increased the pond from about fifteen to thirty-five acres and the club renamed the pond Hawthorne Lake as its private fishing reserve.17 On the largest lakes in the region, prodigious development by the turn of the twentieth century resulted in nationally known summer resorts. At Lake Hopatcong more than forty hotels and boardinghouses as well as several hundred summer cottages sprouted along the fifty-mile shoreline of New Jersey’s largest lake, located nearby in neighboring Morris County. A visitor to the lake in 1896 described the landscape of summer houses from the deck of a steam-powered boat: “As you steam up its center on all sides beautiful cottages of varied shade, build and position meet the eye. They nestle in every nook, crown every hill, tower in the valley and seem in places to woo the water for a bed on which to rest, each jealous of its neighbor in challenging the admiration of the visitor.”18 Because of such construction, there was little room left for the modest local or city fisherman to visit for a low-cost holiday. By the early 1890s Sussex County was well on its way to becoming “New Jersey’s Adirondacks,” with the farms surrounding larger lakes being subdivided into lots often sold by the foot for summer houses and hotels, and the ponds and lakes once known only by locals gradually falling under the control of private fishing clubs. On most of the larger lakes this recreational waterfront development occurred over several decades, gradually reducing public access, but on smaller lakes and ponds and at the more

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remote lakes atop mountains leases and real estate transfers to clubs often immediately closed entire lakes to the public. Less affluent local fishermen and vacationers from cities seeking quiet fishing spots found it increasingly crowded and developed around Sussex County lakes by the turn of the century. Jersey City’s Kenneth Fowler, a longtime sportsman and camper, wrote in Forest and Stream that “a number of the largest lakes have been preempted as summer resorts and have lost, in part, that rugged simplicity of their original garb bestowed by nature. Large hotels and cottages on their banks, dancing pavilions, picnic grounds, small steamers plying in their waters and Sunday excursions have worked a material change.” The buying up of small lakes by men of wealth to create private preserves had also begun to push out the public, and Fowler observed that “many men of the cities have seen their favorite fishing haunts disappear and have had to look elsewhere for their pleasure.”19 One newspaperman consciously framed the issue in class terms, reporting that “wealth is given too great a license in depriving the masses of privileges and pleasures which, from their very nature, should be common to all.”20 By the turn of the twentieth century, then, control over Sussex County’s waters was shifting into the hands of local and urban elites who increasingly sought to limit public access to their chosen resort locales. For those reliant on the free fishing tradition, it seemed time to fight back and halt the privatization movement that was taking away public fishing access on the lakes of northwestern New Jersey.

Privatization and the Free Fishing Controversy, 1898–1904 In the late 1890s passions over public access to private lakes boiled over in a dispute between Andrew Albright of Newark, the new owner of Swartswood Lake, and trespassing locals and city fishermen. Although Albright’s claim to Swartswood Lake was vested in the title to the land under its water, the idea of owning such submerged lands had not occurred to many land speculators until fishing brought great numbers of people to the lakes. Traditionally this land held limited value, and was considered nearly worthless as an investment. Land titles in Sussex County descended from the Board of Proprietors of West Jersey, and individuals, firms, and corporations purchased “rights of location” that often excluded the submerged lands due to their perceived uselessness. Lakes that were “located” usually offered waterpower benefits for milling and iron furnaces, or served as reservoirs for canals. Swartswood Lake, Lake Grinnell, and Culver Lake all

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remained unlocated into the early 1880s. The perceived uselessness of many water bodies helped facilitate free fishing access for the public, for no one claimed ownership of many of the county’s lakes and ponds. Recognition of the recreational potential of these water bodies led to an appreciation for their development value, and investors such as Albright picked up submerged lands as investments. When Andrew Albright gained title to Swartswood Lake in the late 1890s he purchased an amenity that formed the basis of a community’s tourist industry, and his effort to charge a fee to the public for fishing access placed uncertainty over the continued success of lodging providers, resort owners, and small businesses benefiting from the public’s visitation. Albright’s problem was that he did not control the entire shoreline of Swartswood Lake. Instead he owned a farm adjoining the lake and held title to all the land under the water, but others owned the rest of the shoreline, and a number of them, along with residents of the nearby village of Swartswood, had developed businesses predicated on public access to Swartswood Lake for recreation. By the time Swartswood Lake emerged as the epicenter of the free fishing controversy, it was a popular resort with an excellent reputation established during twenty-five years of development. Located about six miles west of the Sussex County seat at Newton, Swartswood Lake served as a popular picnic, camping, and fishing destination first frequented by locals. During the 1870s the lake also appealed to visitors from adjoining counties able to travel by horse and wagon. An 1880 account described the central role of the lake in enticing visitors. “The lake, with its many coves and outlets, the little tree-covered island, the clearness of the water and excellent fishing, combined with the many pleasant grounds and good accommodations make it a great retreat for the lovers of nature.” Emman’s Grove attracted picnic parties, offered rowboats to fishermen, and featured “a neat little cottage for accommodation of guests, a refreshment building, dancing platform, seats, tables, etc. Refreshments of almost any kind may be had upon the grounds.”21 Dick Smith and Mr. and Mrs. J. R. Little ran Dove Island, another small resort about one hundred yards from shore, where accommodations included a selection of small summer rental cottages built around 1885.22 The 1882 extension of a New York Susquehanna and Western Railroad line opened Swartswood Lake to visitors from eastern New Jersey’s industrial cities, and stimulated hope among locals that increased visitation would boost the popularity of the resort and enrich the businesses built on

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the tourist traffic. During the summer of 1880 news of the impending rail line led to a flurry of anticipatory activity; ownership of the principal hotel in Swartswood village transferred from a man who ran it “in a rather backward manner” to George Howell of Newton, who made steady upgrades at the hotel. Improvements were noticeable throughout the village and in the surrounding vicinity as well. One reporter argued that Sussex County’s newest resort would soon “surpass Lake Hopatcong or Budd’s Lake in popularity.”23 During the 1880s and 1890s the popularity of Swartswood Lake continued to grow, with visitors arriving “as individuals, in family parties, in lodge and Sunday school picnic delegations, and twice a year, the farmers came for a big picnic and dance.” 24 Andrew Albright’s effort to charge the public to fish Swartswood Lake and to control access to his water “property” threatened the free fishing custom that had fueled the creation of an important New Jersey resort destination. After purchasing the lake rights in the late 1890s, Albright became frustrated with the hordes of fishermen that used his lake when they stayed in nearby farmers’ boardinghouses, lodged at the village hotel, camped along the shore, or visited waterfront picnic groves. The majority of Albright’s trespassing fishermen gained access to Swartswood Lake through Emman’s Grove, where they rented rowboats for fishing. Deciding to protect his lake investment, Albright established his property line by stakes and decreed that all who desired to fish must obtain permits from his caretaker at a cost of one dollar each. This effort threatened business at Emman’s Grove, where fishing access was critical for renting rowboats and attracting visitors. Guards hired to protect Albright’s claim patrolled the lake, arresting violators and taking them to the justice of the peace for prosecution. Violations became so numerous that the justice processed cases at the lake on weekends, when fishing was most popular.25 “Until Mr. Albright is beaten in court,” advised a reporter for the Register, “it would probably be safe to ask his permission before fishing on the pond.”26 In 1899 when James Cortright was charged with trespassing on Swartswood Lake, Andrew Albright’s right to charge a fee for fishing access wound up in the state courts. The defense argued that for sixty years the public had freely fished at Swartswood, and for the past twenty-five years the state stocked the lake with fish, actions that gave the public the right to fish without obstruction.27 Despite threats by locals to dynamite Albright’s lakeside cottage and scuffles between his caretaker and trespassers, the court decided unanimously on March 15, 1900, that people who trespass on lakes to fish were indeed violating the law.28 Regarding the defense’s

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argument of traditional free fishing, the court determined that the public could not profit from another’s land by custom. In response to the claim that stocking fish on private property permitted public access, the court held that stocking did not legalize trespassing in pursuit of private advantage. Albright had the right to refuse access to fish stocked by the state on his property.29 In effect, he could legally make Swartswood Lake private. The Cortright decision raised fears on the part of fishing advocates that other large Sussex County lakes might soon be posted with notrespassing signs. “From the earliest settlement of this county the people were always allowed to fish in all of the lakes, without hindrance and without charge, until about three years ago,” asserted Assemblyman Theodore M. Roe in 1901, and “no one can doubt that unless some measures are taken to procure a right to the people to fish in these lakes, within a very few years they will all be closed against the public.”30 One newspaper editorial called such privatization “gradual sequestration,” a process that slowly removed or withdrew lakes from public access.31 In response to the Swartswood Lake court decision Judge Henry Huston of Deckertown drew up a legislative solution designed to preserve free fishing. Huston’s “Lake and Park Bill” mandated the creation of a collection of public fishing parks from private lakes of one hundred acres or more. Public reservoirs and lakes straddling more than one county were excluded. The Lake and Park Bill was an effort to create a rural version of the urban public parks that had proven so popular in America’s larger cities, such as New York’s Central Park. By legalizing the right to fish on the large lakes of Sussex County, the Lake and Park law would open up lakes to the public for fishing. This unique twist on the urban park idea offered a permanent solution to the free fishing controversy by separating the right to fish from a lake owner’s property rights, all in the name of the public good. New Jersey Assemblyman Theodore Roe led the fight for the Lake and Park Bill, arguing that “now a few people own all of these lakes and are the only persons who have a legal right to fish in them.” If the right to fish was “acquired by the public under the provisions of the law, then every man, woman, and child will have the legal right to fish not only next year but for all time. And not only our people but also their children and their children’s children.”32 The bill called on each county to decide by referendum whether or not to create a funding and administrative mechanism for the creation of fishing parks. Each county could authorize a twenty-year bond issue of up to twenty-five thousand dollars for such purposes. A threemember county lake and park commission appointed by the county supreme

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court would secure the fishing rights and establish public parks no larger than ten acres adjoining each lake, and secure rights of way to public highways, through condemnation proceedings. By buying only the right to fish, as opposed to buying entire lakes outright, Sussex County could afford to preserve free fishing on several large lakes in varied locations. Forest and Field listed nine lakes targeted for free fishing parks, including Swartswood Lake.33 In the opinion of one critic, this radical new idea “differs from any park act heretofore passed by other states and has no parallel in legislation.” 34 The Lake and Park Bill offered a solution that appeased local fishermen and provided a means of preserving the lake access upon which the county’s tourist trade depended. In a lengthy open letter published in July 1901 in the Sussex Independent, Assemblyman Roe argued that passage of the Lake and Park Bill would help the county’s economy by increasing tourism. When Albright bought Swartswood Lake, Roe explained, “hundreds of boarders annually came there for health and recreation and thousands yearly visited the lake for the pleasure and profit of fishing.” Because of the actions of individuals like Albright “the profitable business of entertaining summer guests in and around Swartswood has practically ceased.”35 For Roe, the closing of Swartswood Lake would threaten an economy built on free public access to lakes. Although many Sussex County residents lamented the loss of their favorite fishing spots, a minority saw economic benefit in attracting wealthy patrons to the area’s lakes, even if such lakes were privately owned. For instance, in the town of Sussex a group of New Yorkers bought Lake Mashipacong to establish a private summer colony where the public was no longer welcome to fish. “Some of these people claim that the loss of this pond will be the death of our town,” argued one local observer. “Give us all the millionaires that we can crowd into the Shipykung [sic] tract. We’ll get more out of ’em than we will out of fish.”36 In the fall of 1901 Theodore Roe brought the Lake and Park Bill before the New Jersey Assembly, which enacted it conditionally upon ratification by the county’s voters. For the next several months, debate heated up over the law. Nonfishers in the county opposed the bill because they felt that free fishing benefited a minority of county residents, and that there was an inherently unequal distribution of lakes in Sussex County, which would result in a number of large townships paying for lake rights unavailable in their own municipalities. Other citizens expressed concern over the cost to taxpayers of buying public fishing access.37 Roe countered such criticisms

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by explaining that the farmer assessed on five thousand dollars of property would pay an average of seventy cents a year over the twenty-year bond issue, a bargain compared to the one-dollar fee charged by Albright for one day of fishing at Swartswood.38 In the end Roe’s arguments won out; in December of 1901 Forest and Stream reported the passage of the Lake and Park Bill referendum in Sussex County by a margin of 1,112 votes.39 As soon as the bill passed, however, Albright filed suit to stop condemnation proceedings on Swartswood Lake and challenged the appointment of the park commission by filing a writ of certiorari forbidding the commissioners to act before arguments concerning the constitutionality of the law could be heard. On November 10, 1902, the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Roe bill against the best efforts of Andrew Albright and his Jersey City attorneys. Albright quickly appealed to the Court of Errors and Appeals, the highest court in the state. Despite passage, the implementation of the Lake and Park Bill did not proceed smoothly. The three court-appointed park commissioners, who all opposed the bill from the very beginning, failed to implement the law, while a scheme in the state legislature to remove them from office stalled.40 Such delays gave Andrew Albright ample opportunity to appeal the court decision regarding the Lake and Park Bill. While waiting for his case to be heard in New Jersey’s Court of Errors and Appeals, Albright sought public support for his cause by crafting an argument against the bill that appealed specifically to the county’s rural, working-class voters. In a lengthy letter printed in the Sussex Independent, Albright compared his lake to a farm, arguing that the county levied taxes on the five hundred acres of land under Swartswood Lake much as it levied taxes on farmland. The difference, Albright explained, was that he could not farm his lake. “How am I going to plow, sow, reap, mow, and gather for revenue? The assessors do not explain. They may think I will live in a houseboat, fish for food and clothing and get money to pay the tax. What am I to do to protect my rights? How would Sussex County’s farmers feel if their right to protect their farms from trespassing thieves became unconstitutional?” he exclaimed. “What would a neighbor think of me if I entered upon his farm, pulled corn for my dinner, dug new potatoes, gathered strawberries, stole a chicken or killed a rabbit without a permit or pay? What is the difference between a chicken thief and a fish thief?”41 Albright similarly appealed to local interests. Why would the people of Sussex County agree to carry the indebtedness needed to implement the bill when sportsmen from outside the county would reap the greatest benefit

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at no personal cost? Albright also agreed to allow local working-class residents of Sussex County to fish in his lake free of charge if they sent him their names and places of residence. “I do not think I should be called upon to contribute to sportsmen coming from outside counties and from other states,” argued Albright. “If a person can afford to waste his time and pay car fare and board bills, he should be willing to pay a small fee for the pleasure to be found fishing in the lake.”42 By appealing to farmers and enlisting local pride, Albright succeeded in shifting the debate over free fishing in Sussex County. A week after his letter appeared in the Sussex Independent, the newspaper’s editor wrote, “It will be many a day before the Roe Lake and Park Bill is operative in this or any other county.”43 Forest and Stream contributor Kenneth Fowler also opposed the bill, arguing that its passage meant legalized trespass by the public. The Lake and Park Bill, as Fowler saw it, set a precedent of removing rights from freeholders. If the right to fish could be taken from a lake owner and that lake owner remained liable to pay the full cost of taxes, lakes open to the public would lose their intrinsic value for the owner. To Fowler this legislation seemed “not only novel, but vicious and ill-considered, and legislation that should be frowned upon, as paving the way for further assaults upon constitutional provisions.”44 As the final court decision neared in the winter of 1904, there was “much speculation as to the outcome, and even money is wagered in some places that the bill will be declared unconstitutional.”45 The Court of Errors and Appeals agreed with Andrew Albright, ruling that taking the right to fish from a lake owner’s bundle of rights by eminent domain was unconstitutional. Justice Dixon’s opinion found that “if the right to fish therein were exercised by persons sufficiently numerous to be deemed the public, the supply would soon come to an end.” In other words, fishing did not constitute a public use and therefore could not be taken by eminent domain; although fishing was popular, the interest in fishing appealed to a small subset of the county population. “The main object of the present statute is to furnish as a means of amusement or sport to the few persons who have the inclination and leisure for such pastime,” wrote Judge Dixon, thus “the public utility to be subserved by such indulgence is imperceptible.” By attempting to take the plaintiff’s property for other than public use, the Lake and Park Bill was illegal and, as a result, control of these recreational resources tipped toward private interests. The nine lakes specified as potential fishing parks in the 1901 Forest and Stream article all ultimately became residential lake resorts, with most closed to the public.

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Public Access Reconsidered, 1905–1914 Although Andrew Albright won his appeal and the Lake and Park law was overturned, the politics of public access to fishing reared its head once again in 1905 during the annual address of New Jersey Governor Edward Stokes. “We have 108 fresh water lakes distributed throughout the state, covering 14,000 acres,” the Governor explained. “Where practicable these should be set apart as public parks and carefully preserved for the use of the people of the state.” Stokes recommended purchasing lakes in their entirety through legislation allowing the creation of forest preserves in the state. “The state now owns no potable waters,” explained Stokes, “but it could acquire these lakes and through the ownership of forestry reservations, the sources of our potable waters.”46 The idea of public access to New Jersey’s lakes thus survived the defeat of the Lake and Park Bill and reentered the political arena attached to forest preserves and watershed protection, which, ironically, was the very approach utilized to protect public access twenty years earlier in New York’s Adirondack region.47 Public lake access gained political prominence in 1907 when the state of New Jersey authorized the purchase of land covered by water for inclusion in State Forest Reserves, and again in 1913 when the New Jersey legislature passed a bill written by Sussex County Assemblyman Henry T. Kays providing for the purchase of any lake by the State Forest Reserve Commission. By May of 1914 Swartswood Lake became the only body of water under consideration for purchase by the state when Andrew Albright’s heirs agreed to a sell the property to New Jersey for thirty thousand dollars, and when owners of lakefront property agreed to convey rights of way to ensure public access to the water.48 On June 30, 1915, the state took title to the Albright tract, making Swartswood Lake only the second public park in the state.49 Swartswood Lake and eight parcels of land used as “landing places and shore situations for picnic grounds and other pleasure purposes” now belonged to the public.50 In an ironic turn, the very place that spawned the free fishing controversy had become the first lake in the state of New Jersey with guaranteed public access.

Conclusion The free fishing controversy highlights a transformation in attitudes towards New Jersey’s lake landscape. In the last third of the nineteenth century awareness of the fishing and recreational potential of the lakes and

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ponds of Sussex County spread east, attracting urbanites from New Jersey’s large industrial cities and from New York. Out-of-county visitors and incounty residents formed two factions: wealthy people from inside and outside the county sought privatization and exclusivity, while a larger portion of the working-class public hoped to maintain free access to fishing sites. The popular belief that public access to fishing was a right, not a privilege, inspired the idea of creating fishing parks for the public. The effort to remove the right to fish from a lake owner’s bundle of property rights illustrates the desire by local governments to keep the gentle art of fishing open to local residents and visiting working-class vacationers. The purchase of Swartswood Lake by the state legislature for use as a public park settled the question of how the tradition of free fishing would survive the privatizing efforts spreading across Sussex County’s lakes at the turn of the century. Supporters of privatization may have won the court battle with the overturning of the Lake and Park Bill, but the state legislature ultimately won the war for the people, promoting public access to prized Sussex County fishing sites. Notes

1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

This material began as a dissertation chapter while I was at Lehigh University. I wish to thank Steve Cutcliffe, Roger Simon, and Bruce Thomas for their editorial suggestions and guidance. I also wish to acknowledge the financial assistance of the New Jersey Historic Commission for a research fellowship in 1999 and a mini-grant in 2001 that funded a chapter from which this work originated. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the New Jersey’s Environments: History and Policy conference sponsored by the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis in April of 2003. The town of Deckertown was renamed Sussex in 1901. Pochung was used interchangeably with Pochunk until the 1920s, when the name finally remained Lake Pochung. “The Hills of Sussex,” American Angler, May 1893, reprinted in Sussex Independent, 19 May 1893. “Decker Pond,” Sussex Independent, 24 July 1896. “Lake Pochung Club,” Sussex Independent, 14 June 1907; and Sussex Independent, 21 June 1907. “Lake Pochung,” Sussex Independent, 20 May 1910; “Lake Pochung,” Sussex Independent, 28 August 1914; and “Lake Pochung Activities,” Sussex Independent, 5 September 1924. Other eastern fishing resort areas include the Poconos and Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, the Blue Mountains of New Jersey, the Catskills of New York, the lake district of northwestern Connecticut, the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River, and the Muskoka region of Canada.

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7. On the topic of mineral springs see Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790–1860 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). Works examining a changing attitude toward nature include Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Studies of American vacations include Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Strauss, “Toward a Consumer Culture: ‘Adirondack Murray’ and the Wilderness Vacation,” American Quarterly 39 (Summer 1987): 270–86; W. Douglas McCombs, “Therapeutic Rusticity: Antimodernism, Health and the Wilderness Vacation, 1870–1915,” New York History 76 (October 1995): 409–28; Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880– 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 2001); and Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Studies of the Adirondack region include Paul Schneider, The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); Maitland De Sormo, The “Murray Rush” in Retrospect, or, With the Multitude in the Adirondacks (Saranac Lake, N.Y.: Adirondack Yesteryears, 1989); Harvey H. Kaiser, Great Camps of the Adirondacks (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982); and Craig Gilborn, Adirondack Camps: Homes Away from Home, 1850–1950 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). A wide range of works on specific destinations or tourism regions include John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Theodore Corbett, The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, Lake George (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology, and the Landscape of Niagara Falls, 1776–1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Roland Van Zandt, The Catskill Mountain House (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1966); Larry E. Burgess, Mohonk: Its People and Spirit, A History of One Hundred Years of Growth and Service (Fleischmanns, N.Y.: Purple Mountain Press, 1996); Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1995); Bryant F. Tolles, Jr., Summer Cottages in the White Mountains: The Architecture of Leisure and Recreation, 1870–1930 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000); Bryant F. Tolles, Jr., The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains: A Vanishing Architectural Legacy (Boston: David R. Godine, 1998); Eric Purchase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Louise B. Roomet, “Vermont as a Resort Area in the Nineteenth Century,” Vermont History 44 (Winter 1976): 1–13; Lawrence Squeri, Better in the Poconos: The Story of Pennsylvania’s Vacationland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); and Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 8. “Black Bass,” Sussex Independent, 11 July 1879.

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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“Black Bass in Lake Hopatcong,” Forest and Stream, 23 October 1884. “Bass Fishing in Lake Wawayanda,” Forest and Stream, 6 August 1874. J.M.S., “The Bronze Backs of Sussex,” Forest and Stream, 7 February 1889, 42. “Fishing for Black Bass,” Sussex Independent, 12 August 1881. For more on the origins of recreational fishing see Colleen J. Sheeny, “American Angling: The Rise of Urbanism and the Romance of the Rod and Reel,” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1940, ed. Kathryn Grover, 77-92 (Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). “Black Bass Fishing,” Sussex Independent, 3 June 1887. “Fish Stories,” Sussex Independent, 9 June 1899. “Greenwood Lake: Our Future Regatta Ground,” Forest and Stream, 7 September 1876, 72. For another early promotional article, featuring a series of sketches, see “Picturesque Views on Greenwood Lake,” Daily Graphic: New York, 17 June 1878, 760. “A New Angling Club,” Sussex Independent, 5 March 1886, and Forest and Stream, 11 March 1886; “State Buys Big Acreage in Flatbrook,” Sussex Independent, 8 April 1943; “Club Purchased Large Tract,” Sussex Independent, 24 February 1905; “State Buys Big Acreage in Flatbrook,” Sussex Independent, 8 April 1943; and “At the Flatbrook Club,” Sussex Independent, 4 May 1906. Harry Sauvain, “An Historical Sketch of the Hawthorne Park Club of Paterson New Jersey,” Bloomington, Ind., 1967 (typewritten). “Lake Hopatcong,” Sussex Independent, 11 July 1896. Kenneth Fowler, “Fishing Rights in Lakes,” Forest and Stream, 6 June 1903, 447. “Ownership of Lakes,” Sussex Independent, 1 March 1901. “Swartswood,” Sussex Independent, 20 August 1880. “Picnicking,” Sussex Independent, 14 July 1882; and “Ross Coursen at Dove Island,” Sussex Independent, 6 May 1910. “Swartswood,” Sussex Independent, 20 August 1880. “Old Days at Swartswood,” Sussex Independent, 4 August 1922. John T. Cunningham, “A Gem in the Kittatinny Foothills,” Newark News Magazine, 15 June 1958, 21. “The Fight Still On,” Sussex Independent, 7 October 1898. “Lake Titles Upheld,” Sussex Independent, 18 July 1919. Cunningham, “A Gem,” 21. “Lake Titles Upheld.” Also, see “Of Interest to Fishermen,” Sussex Independent, 13 April 1900. Theodore M. Roe, “For Free Lakes,” Sussex Independent, 12 July 1901. “Ownership of Lakes.” Roe, “For Free Lakes.” “Free Fishing in New Jersey,” Forest and Stream, 23 November 1901, 411. The other eight lakes were Culver’s Lake, Cranberry Lake, Long Pond (now Lake Owassa), Losey’s Pond (now Beaver Lake), Morris Lake, Puder’s Lake, the Stanhope Reservoir (now Lake Musconetcong), and Lake Wawayanda. Fowler, “Fishing Rights.” Roe, “For Free Lakes.”

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36. Moses, “Libertyville Moses,” Sussex Independent, 19 July 1901. 37. “For and Against the Roe Bill,” Sussex Independent, undated clipping from late summer 1901; and “About the Roe Bill,” Sussex Independent, 4 October 1901. 38. Roe, “For Free Lakes.” 39. “New Jersey Free Fishing,” Forest and Stream, 7 December 1901. 40. “To Render Lake and Park Act Effective,” Sussex Independent, 23 January 1903. 41. Andrew Albright, “A Lake Owner’s View of a Lake Owner’s Rights,” Sussex Independent, 13 November 1903. 42. Albright, “A Lake Owner’s View of a Lake Owner’s Rights.” 43. “Notes by a Rambler,” Sussex Independent, 20 November 1903. 44. Fowler, “Fishing Rights.” 45. “Notes by a Rambler,” Sussex Independent, 19 February 1904. 46. “Governor Stokes’ Annual Message,” Sussex Independent, 12 January 1905. 47. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 116–21. 48. “May Get Swartswood Lake,” Sussex Independent, 29 May 1914. 49. New Jersey established its first state park in 1912 to commemorate George Washington’s 1776 crossing of the Delaware before the Battle of Trenton. 50. “Swartswood Now a State Park,” Sussex Independent, 9 April 1915. Also, see “Swartswood Lake to Be Free,” New Jersey Herald, 10 December 1914.

Chapter 6

Tracking New Jersey’s Changing Landscape

a

Richard Lathrop and John Hasse

Introduction Sprawling urban growth has become one of the most important issues facing New Jersey at the onset of the new millennium. As befitting its reputation as the most densely populated state in the nation, New Jersey has the highest percentage of its land surface area in developed land, as well as among the highest rates of developed area growth.1 While the urbanization of New Jersey has been an ongoing process for much of the last century, the post–World War II years saw an acceleration of the conversion of farm and forest land to residential and commercial development. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the locus of urban growth moved from the densely settled bedroom communities immediately ringing the major metropolitan areas of New York and Philadelphia, expanding outward along the major commuting corridors. This trend has continued and even accelerated in terms of the “leapfrogging” of development out ahead of the urban/rural interface and the spawning of new growth centers. While present spatial patterns of development in some respects represent a continued evolutionary trend, what has appeared to change is the public’s realization and indignation at the associated downsides of urban sprawl. Changes to the landscape are occurring every day, with significant implications for taxation, quality of life, water quality, agricultural viability, wildlife habitat, and social equity.2 While changes to the landscape due to urbanization are evident to most, measuring these landscape changes is a significant challenge. Land use and land cover are two approaches for describing land. Land use is a description of the way humans are utilizing any particular piece of land for one or many purposes. Land cover is the bio-physical material 111

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covering the earth’s surface at any particular location. For example, an area that has a land cover of grass indicates that grass is the physical covering of the earth at that location. However, in a land use map, that same grass area could be labeled a recreational park or a cemetery or a corporate office park. Together, land use and land cover information provide a good indication of the landscape condition and processes that are occurring at a particular place. Time series of land use/land cover maps tell us how much of the landscape is changing, what changes have occurred, and where the changes are taking place, as well as provide some indication of where future change might occur. One of the most effective ways to map land use/land cover is through the use of remote sensing imagery collected from satellites and aircraft. Remote sensing satellites orbit at hundreds of miles above the earth, continually imaging the surface and transmitting the images back to ground stations for use by the research community. This technology is an excellent medium for monitoring the condition of land throughout the globe. Photography, both analog and digital, employed from airplanes is also useful, especially where greater detail of the land surface is needed. New satellite sensors are now approaching the detail once provided exclusively by aerial photography. Advanced computer processing techniques allow the images to be combined with other environmental datasets to classify and map land cover. Mapping land use requires visual interpretation by experienced image interpreters and though aided by digital image analysis techniques is still a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. The geographer D. Theobald states that most of the current discussions of urbanization and sprawl are limited by the use of coarse scale data aggregated at the state or county level.3 These aggregated data poorly capture the fine-grained pattern of land use change typical of rural and exurban areas. For example, while the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s National Resource Inventory provides information on the conversion of farm and forest lands, the data are based on a statistical sample aggregated to a statewide estimate.4 Theobald states that while the fine-scale mapping of developed land use from aerial photographs provides one of the best ways to measure change at the urban fringe, this type of data is rarely available for broader geographical extents, for example, areas larger than a county.5 However, in this respect, New Jersey is blessed to have one of the few comprehensive statewide land use/land cover datasets that go beyond one or two dates of mapping.6 To the best of our knowledge, only the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts have similar land use/land cover change datasets.7

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This paper explores statewide trends in urban growth and land use change occurring between 1986 and 1995 and between 1995 and 2000. Two primary data sources have been employed in this analysis: 1) the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) land use/land cover digital database, which contains detailed land use change information for the period of 1986 to 1995; and 2) the recently released Rutgers University Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis (CRSSA) 2000 developed land use change update. These datasets provide a synoptic perspective on the landscape changes occurring in the Garden State at the end of the twentieth century. Providing information on land use and land cover with the required categorical specificity and spatial detail is only one half of the equation. There is a great need for simplifying and synthesizing land use/land cover change data to provide information useful for land managers and policy makers. Within the environmental management literature, these simple metrics for analyzing, monitoring, and communicating information about change are often known as “environmental indicators.”8 For a period in the 1990s, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection adopted a statewide monitoring program that included several indicators dealing directly with land use/cover change (e.g., no net loss of wetlands).9 Hasse and Lathrop expanded this concept and developed a series of five “land resource impact indicators” for New Jersey to measure the “ecological footprint” of urban growth at a municipal scale.10 We continue this earlier work by employing a set of land use change indicators to examine the scope and location of natural resource losses. These indicators included: farmland conversion, forest conversion, and natural wetlands conversion. The geographic information system (GIS)–based analysis maps the spatial patterns of urban growth and identifies hotspots of natural resource lands conversion as a means of assessing the impacts of this urban growth on environmental quality.

Methods New Jersey’s need for detailed landscape data for environmental and land management purposes led to the development of a comprehensive statewide digital land use/land cover dataset. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection contracted the production of the digital land use/land cover data for the entire state utilizing multi-date digital orthophotographic imagery.11 The first date of imagery was 1986 and the second date was 1995. Imagery for some portions of the state were missed in 1995 and

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acquired in 1997. This statewide dataset contains land use/land cover information from 1986 and 1995/97 and includes over fifty categories of classes, utilizing a modified Anderson (1976) classification system. The 1986 land use/land cover dataset was delineated from color infrared aerial photos (1:58,000 scale) and compiled on 1:24,000 orthophotoquads. The dataset was updated to 1995/97 and enhanced in spatial accuracy through “headsup” on-screen digitizing and editing techniques. The 1995/97 digital imagery was color infrared USGS digital orthophoto quarter quads (DOQQs) (1:12,000 scale) with 1-meter grid cell resolution. A minimum mapping unit of 1 acre (0.4047 ha) was utilized for delineating features as well as a 60-foot (18.29 m) minimum width for mapping linear features. For more information on the analysis methods refer to Hasse and Lathrop.12 SPOTView 10 m PAN USA Select imagery acquired during the 1999–2000 time period was used as the primary data source to update the NJDEP land use/land cover dataset. The SPOTView imagery was a mosaic of multiple terrain-corrected scenes acquired over the 1999 to 2000 time period, with a majority of the imagery from 2000. While the SPOT 2000 imagery does not have the same high spatial and spectral resolution as the original 1995/97 digital orthophotography, its comparatively low cost and ready availability made a year 2000 land use/land cover update economically feasible. The 1995/97 NJDEP land use/land cover data were overlaid on the SPOTView imagery and areas of change (subsequent to 1995/97) were interpreted and digitized on-screen using the ESRI ArcView and ERDAS Imagine geographic information system (GIS) software. Areas of change include those areas that have gone from a natural land cover to urban or transitional land use or from transitional to urban. A minimum mapping unit of 1 acre (0.4047 ha) was utilized. The coarser spatial and spectral resolution of the Panchromatic SPOTView NJ imagery (10-meter scale and black and white) does not provide the same level of categorical and positional detail and accuracy in mapping land use/land cover as that possible with 1-meter scale color infrared digital orthophotography. However, comparison of the total area of new urban and transitional/barren land estimated from the SPOT interpreted imagery versus year 2000 1-meter scale panchromatic digital orthophotography used as an independent reference showed the land use change area estimates to be within +/− 5 percent. For more information on the year 2000 land use interpretation, mapping, and analysis methods refer to Lathrop.13 While the scope and impact of these various land use changes are potentially of interest, of particular concern to New Jersey’s public officials

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and citizenry alike are the multifaceted consequences of urban growth and sprawl. Thus a major objective of this paper is to quantify the amount and spatial distribution of lands converted to urban uses (i.e., residential, commercial/service/industrial, and recreational), redeveloped (i.e., changed urban land use type) or transitional to urban uses, or cleared as part of mining activities. Transitional lands are those that have been cleared, often with preliminary infrastructure (e.g., roadways and foundations) in place. To simplify the analysis, a generalized land use/land cover classification was employed using six main categories: urban, agriculture, forest, wetlands, barren, and water. Transitional and mining land uses were classified as barren in the land use/land cover classification scheme. Using GIS software, the total statewide area (in acres and as a percentage) by land use type was tabulated for the years 1986, 1995, and 2000. Individual tracts or polygonal areas of land use/land cover change (between 1986 and 1995 and between 1995 and 2000) were identified and the land use transitions (i.e., change from forest to urban) quantified.

Results Land Use Change and Urban Growth The 1986–1995–2000 land use GIS data show the steady growth of urban land use from approximately 24.5 percent to 28.7 percent of the overall state area (table 6.1). Similarly, the data chart the decline in the areas of agriculture, forest, and wetlands. Figure 6.1 displays the spatial distribution of land use change across the time period and highlights the suburban/exurban patterns of growth along the outer fringes of the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan regions. The northeastern counties of Bergen, Essex, Hudson, and Union, representing the inner ring of suburbs of New York City, are largely built-out and do not show much land use change activity. Likewise, Camden County in southwestern New Jersey, adjacent to Philadelphia, was largely built-out by 1985. Conversely, the outer ring counties are the locus of land use change activity. The overall spatial patterns of growth were reasonably consistent across the two time periods. The top five counties in areas of urban growth between 1986 and 1995 were Burlington, Monmouth, Hunterdon, Somerset, and Ocean and between 1995 and 2000 were Somerset, Morris, Monmouth, Ocean, and Sussex. A more detailed examination of the land use data shows the types of changes occurring in the development process. During the 1986 to 1995 time period, residential development was responsible for 65.6 percent of

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Table 6.1

Land Use

Urban Agriculture Forest Wetlands Barren Water Total

Richard Lathrop and John Hasse

Land use/land cover estimates for New Jersey for the years 1986, 1995, and 2000 and net changes between 1986 and 1995 and from 1995 to 2000 in both acres and percentage. 1986 Acres (Percentage of total land)

1995 Acres (Percentage of total land)

2000 Acres (Percentage of total land)

1986 to 1995 Change Acres (Percentage)

1995 to 2000 Change Acres (Percentage)

1,219,748 (24.5) 829,598 (16.6) 1,641,129 (32.9) 941,149 (18.9) 69,145 (1.4) 283,874 (5.7)

1,355,512 (27.2) 742,714 (14.9) 1,602,889 (32.2) 917,368 (18.4) 77,146 (1.5) 289,014 (5.8)

1,428,703 (28.7) 716,803* (14.4) 1,554,936* (31.2) 912,265 (18.3) 83,293 (1.7) 288,643 (5.8)

+135,764 (+11.1) −86,884 (−10.5) −38,240 (−2.3) −23,781 (−2.5) +8,001 (+11.6) +5,140 (+1.8)

+73,191 (+5.4) −25,911* (−3.5) −47,953* (−3.0) −5,103 (−0.6) +6,147 (+8.0) −371 (−0.1)

4,984,643

4,984,603

4,984,643

* Note: The 1995 to 2000 change for the Agriculture and Forest categories does not include the loss of farmland due to abandonment or the gain in Forest land due to natural regeneration of abandoned farmland.

urban growth whereas commercial/industrial and mixed urban land uses combined constituted only 24.9 percent of new growth. Similarly, 76 percent of the urban growth between 1995 and 2000 was accounted for by residential land use. A significant portion of this new residential land use is composed of rural single housing units on large, 1+ acre lots with septic and private wells. During the 1986 to 1995 time period, rural residential housing was responsible for nearly 46,800 acres (or 30 percent) of new development in New Jersey, occurring at twice the rate of land consumption as the next category of residential development.14 The previous description of land use/land cover change shows only the net total amounts of land remaining in each land category. This is only part of the story; the landscape change process is actually more complex, with some land being added and lost for each land use category. For example, during the 1986 to 1995 period of analysis, 254,955 acres of land changed in a discernible fashion throughout the state. Even as the majority

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Figure 6.1. Map of New Jersey showing urban land use changes between 1986 and 1995 and from 1995 to 2000. Source: Richard Lathrop, Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, Rutgers University.

of landscape change can be attributed to urbanization, all categories of land can potentially change to all other types. Examining these individual transitions from one land use category to another is helpful to unlocking the sometimes subtle dynamics of land use change around the state. For example,

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between 1986 and 1995, approximately 87,143 acres of forest land was converted to another use. During that same time period, 48,903 acres of land were converted to forest, leaving a net loss of 38,240 acres. A majority of this new forest land (31,551 acres or 65 percent) was due to the conversion of agricultural land to forest land through either abandonment and natural succession or active tree planting. While most of this change is real, some may be an artifact of changes in the interpretation and mapping methods used to create the dataset across the two different time periods. It must be noted that in the 2000 Land Use Update study, areas of new forest or wetlands (i.e., abandoned farmlands that may have regrown into forest or wetlands during the 1995/97 to 2000 time period) were not mapped.15 Thus the year 2000 area estimates for agriculture, forest, and wetlands land use categories (table 6.1) have not been adjusted to reflect these types of nonurban/ nonbarren land use category transitions. The annual change rate (in acres/year) was determined to allow for comparisons of the magnitude of land use change between 1986 and 1995/97 and 1999/2000 on a relative basis. However, determining the rate of new development as an acreage amount per year is not straightforward because there were not two simple Time 1 and Time 2 endpoints in time. Due to the geographic variation in the Time 1 and 2 endpoints in 1995/97 and 1999/2000 (i.e., the entire state was not imaged on one single day, but across several months), one must recognize the uncertainty in the rate estimates. The change rates for the most recent 1995 to 2000 time period were compared with change estimates made for the 1986 to 1995 time period. The urban land use growth rate appears to have decreased from the approximately 16,660 acres/year between 1986 and 1995 to the 14,640 acres/year change recorded between 1995 and 2000. Conversely, the rate of change of forest/farm/wetland to transitional or barren land appears to have increased from an estimated rate of approximately 3,160 acres/year between 1986 and 1995 to approximately 4,170 acres/year between 1995 and 2000. During the 1995 to 2000 time period, the rate of change of transitional to urban land was approximately 2,970 acres/year, a significant percentage of increase over the approximately 1,570 acres/year rate estimated between 1986 and 1995. Examination of the overall conversion of lands to new urban or barren land uses shows a slight decline from an estimated rate of approximately 19,810 acres/year between 1986 and 1995 to approximately 18,810 acres/year between 1995 and 2000, a 5 percent decline in conversion rate and within the estimated margin of error.

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Landscape Impacts of Urban Growth New Jersey’s robust urban growth is a result of many factors, including population growth and a vigorous economy. Indeed, many economic indicators designed to show the health of the local economy, such as new housing starts, are based on land development growth. However, urban growth can also have significant undesirable impacts on the health of the local landscape. Some of the most significant undesirable landscape impacts of urban growth include farmland loss, forest loss, and wetlands loss. The following section explores these impacts. Farmland Loss to Urban Growth. Agriculture is a major activity in the Garden State. Cash sales from agriculture are estimated at $829.5 million. When all farming and food-related activity is considered, agriculture is the third largest segment of the New Jersey economy, contributing $56 billion.16 Despite the fact that in some ways New Jersey farmers benefit from close proximity to a large and wealthy population, the conflicts caused by encroaching urban development make it difficult to continue farming over the long term. Soaring land values and operating costs coupled with multiple conflicts stemming from the incompatibility of farming with new residences make it difficult to farm successfully in New Jersey.17 The result is that many farms discontinue agricultural activities and are eventually sold for development. During the 1986 to 1995 study period, 99,327 acres of farmland were lost. To put this in context, this amount of farmland loss exceeds all the farmland currently remaining in Cumberland County. Fifty-eight percent of the farmland loss was attributed directly to new urban growth, 31 percent of the loss was attributed to reforestation, and 10 percent to farmland that became barren, possibly indicating transition to development. However, approximately 12,443 acres of new farmland were mapped, mostly from lands formerly classified as forested. The overall net loss of farmland between 1986 and 1995 was 86,884 acres. What is perhaps more significant is the loss of prime farmland. While prime farmland accounted for 53 percent of all farmland under the plow in 1986, it accounted for 60 percent of the development that occurred on farmland. This suggests that prime farmland is more vulnerable to urbanization than nonprime farmland. The loss of prime farmland will accelerate the loss of agricultural viability in New Jersey. In comparison, during the 1995 to 2000 study period, approximately 26,000 acres of farmland were converted to other nonagricultural uses. Of this loss,

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over 50 percent (approximately 14,000 acres) were converted to residential land use and another 25 percent (approximately 7,100 acres) converted to transitional. Looking across the entire time period from 1986 to 2000, New Jersey lost approximately 93,100 acres of farmland to urban and/or barren/transitional land uses. To put this in context, this amount of farmland converted to development exceeds all the farmland currently remaining in largely rural Hunterdon County. Compared with the 829,598 acres of agricultural land mapped in 1986, the year 2000 data represents a decrease of cultivated agricultural land of approximately 11.2 percent. The top six counties of agricultural land use conversion across both time periods were consistently Burlington, Gloucester, Hunterdon, Mercer, Monmouth, and Somerset. During the 1995 to 2000 study period, the estimated rate of agricultural conversion to developed land uses (i.e., urban or barren/transitional) was 25,911/5 years or approximately 5,180 acres/year. In comparison, an estimated 67,189 acres of agricultural land were converted to developed land uses (i.e., urban or barren/transitional) during the period between 1986 and 1995 at a rate of approximately 7,460 acres/year. While during the most recent study period there was a significant decrease in the amount of agricultural land converted to urban, there was a significant percentage of increase in the amount converted to transitional/barren land. Overall, the rate of agricultural land converted to urban growth over the 1995 to 2000 time period registered a 30 percent decrease over that experienced during the 1986 to 1995 time period, representing a significant change in trend. While the 2000 land use data shows that New Jersey is still losing farmland, the rate of loss appears to have slowed. In response to accelerating losses of farmland to development through the 1970s and into the 1980s, New Jersey established a Farmland Preservation Program in 1983. As of the year 2000, the development rights for over 65,000 acres of farmland had been purchased through New Jersey’s Farmland Preservation Program.18 Forest Loss to Urban Growth. The largest single type of landscape change that occurred in New Jersey over the last decade and a half was the urbanization of forested lands. Approximately 77,640 acres of forested land were converted to urban and/or barren land uses during the 1986 to 1995 time period, with an additional 47,950 acres of forest land converted during the 1995 to 2000 time period (table 6.1). This amount of forest loss is greater in size than Stokes State Forest, Worthington State Forest, High Point State Park, Wawayanda State Park, and the Delaware Water Gap

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National Recreation Area combined. Much of this forest loss is attributable to suburban and/or exurban residential growth, with approximately 47,600 and 27,700 acres of forest land converted to residential land uses during the 1986 to 1995 and 1995 to 2000 time periods, respectively. During the 1995 to 2000 time period, over 3,000 acres were cleared for recreational land uses, such as golf courses and ball fields. The rate of forest conversion to development (i.e., urban and barren/ transitional land uses) has increased slightly from approximately 8,630 acres/year during the 1986 to 1995 time period to approximately 9,590 acres/year between 1995 and 2000. While there was a slight decrease in the amount of forest converted to urban land, there was a substantial percentage of increase in the amount converted to transitional/barren land. Overall, the rate of forest conversion to urban growth over the 1995 to 2000 time period registered an 11 percent increase over that experienced during the 1986 to 1995 time period, representing a nonsignificant change in trend. The top four counties for forest conversion to development across both time periods were Ocean and Morris followed by Atlantic and Somerset. Rounding out the top five forest-loss counties were Monmouth during the 1986 to 1995 time period and Sussex from 1995 to 2000. The highest-ranking forest-loss counties include areas in the Coastal Plain (but outside of the core protection areas of the Pinelands National Reserve) and the Highlands/Skylands areas of Morris, Sussex, and northern Somerset Counties. Even while there was significant development pressure converting forest land to development, there where countervailing forces leading to reforestation of other lands. Approximately 48,900 acres became reforested during the 1986 to 1995/97 time period. The majority of reforested land (31,551 acres) consisted of former agricultural lands. Previously barren lands contributed 8,130 acres of new forest land; while areas formerly classified as urban received 9,075 acres of reforestation. Similar data on reforestation of land were not available for the 1995 to 2000 time period. As the perusal of any real estate section of a New Jersey newspaper during this time period will attest, residential home sites in wooded settings were clearly desirable. However, residential development in forested areas is not without environmental costs. The loss of forest lands due to land use conversion has implications for soil erosion, flooding, nonpoint source pollution, carbon sequestration, and air quality. The dispersed style of late-twentieth-century suburban subdivisions and single home exurban development can also lead to the extensive fragmentation of once contiguous forest tracts, which can have significant implications for wildlife habitat

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sustainability, reduced flexibility in forest land management, the potential for greater impacts due to natural hazards such as wildland fire, and increased human/wildlife conflicts (e.g., deer and bear).19 Wetland Loss Comprising one-fifth of the state’s land, wetlands are a vital component of the New Jersey landscape. Natural wetlands are defined as those wetlands that have comparatively intact natural wetland vegetation communities and have not been directly modified by urban, agricultural, or other altered land uses. Natural wetlands are important for wildlife habitat, flood mitigation, and water purification and are divided into two general categories: coastal wetlands (i.e., tidal salt marshes) and freshwater wetlands (i.e., emergent marshes or forested swamps). Ferrigno and others estimated that 25 percent of the state’s coastal wetlands were filled or diked between 1953 and 1973.20 With the passage of the state’s Wetlands Act of 1970 and the federal Clean Water Act, coastal wetlands received much greater protection from development and losses were greatly reduced.21 Freshwater wetlands were not explicitly protected until 1987 with the passage of New Jersey Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act. While these regulations have been successful in reducing the magnitude of wetlands loss compared to preregulatory days, wetlands can still be converted or altered through specially permitted development activities. A total of 19,200 acres of natural wetlands were converted to urban or barren during the years 1986 to 1995, and an additional 5,100 acres between 1995 and 2000. This amount of wetland loss equates to an area over three times the size of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. This areal amount of wetlands converted to development represents approximately 2.6 percent of the total area of natural wetland (941,149 acres) mapped in 1986. The rate of wetland conversion to development (i.e., urban and barren/transitional land uses) has decreased from approximately 2,130 acres/year during the 1986 to 1995 time period to approximately 1,020 acres/year between 1995 and 2000. Overall, the rate of natural wetland conversion to urban and transitional/barren land uses over the 1995 to 2000 time period registered a 52 percent decrease compared to the 1986 to 1995 time period, representing a significant decline in trend. It should also be noted that the amount of wetland converted to agricultural land uses declined significantly as well (i.e., 2,289 acres between 1986 and 1995 vs. 149 acres between 1995 and 2000). The top counties for wetland conversion to development across both time periods were Monmouth, followed by

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Middlesex, Ocean, and Somerset. Rounding out the top five wetlands-loss counties were Burlington during the 1986 to 1995 time period and Morris from 1995 to 2000. Coastal wetlands (i.e., tidal salt marshes) comprise 20 percent of New Jersey’s wetlands (approximately 192,050 acres in 1986) but were subjected to less loss and urbanization than noncoastal wetlands. Coastal wetlands composed only a comparatively insignificant percentage (128 acres or 1.2 percent) of the 10,979 acres of natural wetland converted to an urban land use during the 1986 to 1995 time period. Similarly, during the 1995 to 2000 time period, urban conversion of coastal wetlands represented less than 1 percent (approximately 33 acres) of the overall conversion of natural wetlands to urban land uses. New Jersey’s Coastal Wetlands Law of 1970 seems to have largely succeeded in halting the loss of tidal salt marshes due to human development. While the 1987 New Jersey Freshwater Protection Act appears to have been successful in reducing the overall magnitude of wetlands loss compared to preregulatory days, the year 2000 land use data suggest that there is still a nontrivial loss of wetlands.

Conclusions New Jersey’s landscape is constantly changing. While in many cases, landscape change is a natural process, human-induced landscape change is now the single most important factor influencing the state of New Jersey’s land. The changes occurring to New Jersey’s landscape are largely the result of human activities, namely residential, commercial, transportation, and to a lesser extent industrial development. Taken on an annual basis, between 1995 and 2000 New Jersey added approximately 14,640 acres of new urban land use and an additional 4,170 acres in transition to future development or mining per year. This annual rate of change is slightly less than the 16,660 acres of new urban and 3,160 acres of new barren land use recorded for the 1986 to 1995 time period. The overall urban/barren land conversion rate has remained relatively steady, with an estimated rate of approximately19,810 and 18,810 acres/year from 1986 to 1995 and 1995 to 2000, respectively. This 5 percent decline in conversion rate is within the estimated margin of error. Due to the geographic variation in the Time 1 and 2 endpoints, one must recognize the uncertainty in the annual rate estimates. While to some extent the present development trends represent continuation of earlier post–World War II development patterns, the post-1986

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land use/land cover change maps clearly show the impact of expanded interstate/state highway construction and resultant changes in commuting patterns, leading to sprawling residential development. Three major hotspots stand out: the Jersey Shore counties; the suburban fringe of the Philadelphia metro area in south Jersey; and the outer fringes of the New York metro area in central Jersey (fig. 6.1). Some areas do stand out as areas of minimal change. The minimal amount of land use change within the core Preservation Area of the Pinelands National Reserve is clearly evident. The Kittatinny Ridge and upper Delaware Valley region of northwestern New Jersey have also been spared large-scale land conversion and fragmentation under the jurisdiction of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in combination with a number of state forests, parks, and wildlife management areas. Other areas in the state, while still remaining largely rural, are not similarly protected. The Delaware Bayshore of Salem, Cumberland, and Cape May Counties and the Highlands region of Sussex, Warren, Passaic, and Morris Counties still remain as largely intact landscapes of farms, small villages and towns, forests, and wetlands. However, even in these more “exurban” areas, high levels of dispersed development (e.g., single, scattered home sites) are clearly evident and changing the character of these rural landscapes. Development is proceeding adjacent to major highway transportation corridors such as Interstate 78 and 80 and State Highways 15 and 23 crisscrossing the Highlands and State Highway 55 in South Jersey. If present trends continue, these areas will undergo radical changes in the next several decades, fueled by the combined forces of the steady demand for new residential construction and continued highway expansion. Land use change is a zero sum game. Gain in any one category must come at the loss of another. In the case of New Jersey’s landscape, new development between 1986 and 2000 came at the cost of approximately 125,600 acres of forest, 93,100 acres of agricultural land, and 24,300 acres of natural wetlands. The most recent data for the 1995 to 2000 time period suggests that the annual rate of forest loss has increased slightly (+11.2 percent), while the rate of agricultural land and wetland conversion has substantially decreased (–30.6 percent and–52.1 percent, respectively) as compared to the 1986 to 1995 time period. Over the same time period, this trend of larger forest land losses is also found in Massachusetts and Connecticut, other northeastern states for which similar land use/land cover data are available.22 The continued loss of forest land is of special concern due to the critical role these lands play in providing ecosystem services such as reducing soil erosion, maintaining water quality, sequestering carbon, and

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providing wildlife habitat. The declining rate of wetland loss suggests that New Jersey’s strict wetlands protection laws are having the intended effect, though continued diligence is clearly warranted given the critical ecosystem services that these lands provide. The large-scale conversion of New Jersey’s forests and potential impacts on water resources, wildlife habitat, and open space have spurred some of the most ambitious regional land use planning and conservation initiatives in New Jersey, if not the nation. Starting in the 1960s, housing development and plans for a jetport threatened to overwhelm the more than one-million-acre Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Great concern was expressed over the impacts to the Pine Barrens ecosystem, internationally recognized for its unique and exceptional natural vegetation communities, and the possible degradation of the underlying Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, one of the most significant and pristine groundwater aquifers in the northeastern United States.23 In response, the Pinelands National Reserve was created in 1978, leading to the development of a Comprehensive Management Plan that greatly restricted development in a core preservation area, while steering development to designated growth areas.24 Closer examination of the land use change data shows that the Pinelands National Reserve has been successful in limiting landscape change within its jurisdictional area.25 In northern New Jersey, growing development pressure has focused attention on the New Jersey Highlands, an 800,000-acre region of wooded uplands that serves as the source of high-quality drinking water to over three million New Jersey residents.26 In 2004, the New Jersey legislature passed the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act to institute similar regional planning and land preservation efforts in the Highlands. New Jersey is obviously at a critical juncture. If development continues at the above rates and if federal, state, and local governments as well as nongovernmental organizations continue their push to preserve an additional million acres of open space, New Jersey’s remaining available land will be the locus of increasing conflict between development and preservationist interests.27 Even if the exact date cannot be foreseen with certainty from this vantage point, it is likely that near total build-out (i.e., all vacant and not-already-developed or preserved lands will be developed) will be approached in New Jersey sometime within the middle of this century.28 The more important question is not when build-out will be reached but what will New Jersey’s built-out landscape look like and how will it function for both New Jersey’s human and natural communities? Will the built-out landscape be able to provide a high quality of life for New Jersey’s citizens?

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Will we be able to sustain viable agriculture, wildlife habitat, water quality, forests, coastal estuaries, and wetlands? What steps need to be taken now to ensure the healthiest possible landscape in the future? Planning from the perspective of impending build-out promotes a special urgency to prudent land management decisions in the present. Notes

1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

We gratefully acknowledge John Bognar for his assistance in the processing of the GIS datasets. This research was supported in part by the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, and the Rutgers University Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis. Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), 1997 National Resources Inventory: Summary Report (revised December 2000), http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/ technical/NRI/1997/summary_report/. Robert Burchell, “The Costs and Benefits of Alternate Growth Patterns: The Impact Assessment of the New Jersey State Plan,” Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., 2000. D. Theobald, “Land Use Dynamics beyond the American Urban Fringe,” Geographical Review 91, no. 3 (2001): 544–64. NRCS, 1997 National Resources Inventory (rev. 2000). D. Theobald, “Land Use Dynamics.” Richard G. Lathrop, “New Jersey Land Use/Land Cover Update: 2000–2001,” New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (Trenton, N.J., 2004); http:// crssa.rutgers.edu/projects/lc/download/reportsdata00_01/landuselandcov_web.pdf. Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR), “Connecticut’s Changing Landscape” (University of Connecticut, 2003), http://clear.uconn.edu/projects/ landscape/statewide/landcover.htm; and Mass Audubon, “Losing Ground: At What Cost?” downloaded from http://www.massaudubon.org/losingground (accessed July 9, 2004). K. B. Jones, K. H. Ritters, J. D. Wickham, R. D. Tankersley, R. V. O’Neill, D. J. Chaloud, E. R. Smith, and A. C. Neale, An Ecological Assessment of the United States Mid-Atlantic Region: A Landscape Atlas, EPA/600/R-97/130 (Washington, D.C., 1997). M. B. Kaplan and L. J. McGeorge, “Guest Perspectives: The Utility of Environmental Indicators for Policymaking and Evaluation from a State Perspective: The New Jersey Experience,” Inside EPA’s Risk Policy Report 8, no. 5 (2001): 39–41. J. E. Hasse and R. G. Lathrop, “Land Resource Impact Indicators of Urban Sprawl,” Applied Geography 23 (2003): 159–75; M. Wackernagel and W. E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 1996). L. Thornton, J. Tyrawski, M. Kaplan, J. Tash, E. Hahn, and L. Cotterman, “NJDEP Land Use Land Cover Update 1986 to 1995, Patterns of Change,” Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual ESRI International User Conference, July 9–13, 2001, San Diego, Calif. (Redlands, Calif.: 2001).

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12. J. Hasse and R. G. Lathrop, “Measuring Urban Growth in New Jersey,” Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001), http://crssa.rutgers.edu/projects/lc/urbangrowth/ index.html. 13. Lathrop, “New Jersey Land Use.” 14. Hasse and Lathrop, “Measuring Urban Growth.” 15. Lathrop, “New Jersey Land Use.” 16. N.J. Department of Agriculture, available at http://www.state.nj.us/agriculture (accessed Oct. 19, 2000). 17. A. O. Adelaja and B. J. Schilling, “Innovative Approaches to Farmland Preservation,” in Contested Countryside: The Rural Urban Fringe in North America, ed. O. Furuseth and M. Lapping, 113–36 (Brookfield, Vt.: Aldershot/Ashgate Publishing, 1999). 18. S. M. Hamill and C. Sturm, “Smart Conservation: The ‘Green Side’ of Smart Growth,” New Jersey Future (Trenton, N.J., 2002). 19. L. J. Niles, J. Myers, and M. Valent, “The Landscape Project for the Protection of Rare Species, Project Report,” New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife (Trenton, N.J., 1999). 20. D. Ferrigno, F. L. Widjeskog, and S. Toth, “Marsh Destruction,” N.J. Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife, PitmanRobertson Report Project W-53-R-1, Job 1-G (1973). 21. R. W. Tiner, “Wetlands of New Jersey,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Newton Corner, Mass., 1985). 22. CLEAR, “Connecticut’s Changing Landscape”; Mass Audubon, “Losing Ground.” 23. R. E. Good and N. F. Good, “The Pinelands National Reserve: An Ecosystem Approach to Management,” BioScience 34 (1984): 169–73. 24. B. R. Collins and W. B. Russell, eds., Protecting the New Jersey Pinelands: A New Direction in Land-Use Management (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 25. Hasse and Lathrop, “Measuring Urban Growth.” 26. M. G. Phelps and Martina C. Hoppe, “New York–New Jersey Highlands Regional Study: 2002 Update,” NA-TP-02-03, USDA Forest Service (Newtown Square, Pa., 2002). 27. Hamill and Sturm, “Smart Conservation.” 28. Hasse and Lathrop, “Measuring Urban Growth.”

Chapter 7

Evaluating the Effects of Historical Land Cover Change on Summertime Weather and Climate in New Jersey

a

Paul S. Wichansky, Christopher P. Weaver, Louis T. Steyaert, Robert L. Walko

Introduction Human activity, particularly over the last few centuries, has left a profound footprint on the landscape. With the clearing of native forests and wetlands, the expansion and shifts of agriculture, and the rise of urbanization, the human use of the land has produced a fragmented mosaic of seminatural and manmade surfaces.1 This modification of the landscape, by altering processes such as the reflectance and absorption of solar radiation, the exchanges of heat and moisture between the land and atmosphere, and the natural biogeochemical cycles of water and carbon, can in turn strongly impact weather and climate across a range of space and time scales.2 Land surface characteristics such as vegetation type and surface roughness influence atmospheric temperatures, winds, clouds, and rainfall. Feedbacks, for example with soil wetness and ecosystem processes, can, over time, cause significant changes in the mean climate of a given region. Land use and land cover changes are increasingly recognized as a principal driver of climate change, both regional and global, with effects possibly comparable to those associated with increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases.3 It is widely believed that human inputs of greenhouse gases and aerosols to the atmosphere may have already caused a change in global climate, and will continue to drive further, much more pronounced changes 128

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during the next century. However, predictions of future global change are recognized as inherently uncertain. For example, there is still much we need to learn about the interplay between this human modification of the atmosphere and other natural forcing factors (e.g., solar variability and volcanic eruptions), as well as with the natural internal variability of the climate system. These global-scale uncertainties are further magnified when attempts are made to make local- and regional-scale interpretations for human communities and ecosystems. Furthermore, there is additional uncertainty about the role of direct regional- and local-scale influences, including land use and land cover change, on the climate system. Reflecting the growing awareness of this issue, land use and land cover change, and its potential for profound regional and global environmental implications, has recently been gaining prominence as a central theme to the study of global climate change.4 The northeastern United States is among those regions of the world that have witnessed dramatic changes in land use patterns resulting from extensive agricultural, urban, and industrial development during the last century. For an individual state like New Jersey, the twentieth-century landscape has been profoundly altered by prevailing economic, social, and political trends that have resulted in pervasive urban and suburban sprawl, displacing prime agricultural land, forests, and wetland ecosystems. New Jersey is, however, only a microcosm of the changes that have been taking place throughout the country and world over the past century. We wish to understand in what ways, and to what extent, these land surface changes might have altered the climate of the region. In a broader sense, answering this question will help us to distinguish the effects of regional land cover change from the larger-scale signature of possible global warming. The landscape change that we have documented in New Jersey over historical time is expected to continue, and even accelerate, into the future, driven primarily by population growth and economic development. An evaluation of how land cover change may have already modified weather and climate is one prerequisite for understanding and predicting the impacts of future changes. Before we consider future trends, we must first identify how the New Jersey landscape has changed in the context of socioeconomic and technological advances from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. This will allow us to investigate, understand, and quantify the impacts and sensitivity of these land cover changes upon surface temperatures, winds, clouds, rainfall, and other variables that determine weather and climate. In a broader context, we must be able to understand,

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differentiate, and predict, and thus plan for, the combined impacts of global-scale climate change effects, as well as the effects of regional-scale landscape change, upon human sectors such as water quality and availability, air quality, agriculture and food production, energy supply and demand, wetlands and sensitive ecosystems, urban areas, and public health. This is a critical issue that lies at the intersection of the physical sciences and history, sociology, economics, and public policy. To make progress, scientists must connect with scholars in other disciplines. A “historical analysis,” to be comprehensive, must necessarily account for the processes and phenomena of the physical world around us, whose influence colors all that we do. Because historical records of daily observations of the upper atmosphere only go back about fifty years, scientists have relied upon sophisticated computer models to estimate how global and regional land cover changes may have affected weather and climate patterns over longer periods of time.5 Recent climate modeling studies, for example, have suggested that large-scale vegetation shifts from forests to croplands in the eastern United States may have slightly cooled surface air temperatures during the spring and summer months.6 Regional deforestation practices may also have affected climate on larger scales, in part because tropical deforestation has been shown to influence weather patterns thousands of kilometers from the original deforested region.7 Suburban sprawl, especially within a state like New Jersey (located between the two large metropolitan cities of Philadelphia and New York), is another human-driven land use process that changes land surface properties in ways that can alter temperature and rainfall patterns.8 In fact, many studies have shown that urban growth over the course of the twentieth century has led to a considerable warming of daytime and nighttime temperatures in developed areas, in contrast to rural areas. These temperature increases (especially at night) within developed areas are commonly referred to as the “urban heat island” effect. In addition, research has shown that similar temperature contrasts to those between urban and nonurban areas can be created between patches of different landscapes (e.g., forests versus farms, water versus land, desert versus grasslands). Furthermore, all of these natural and manmade landscape-driven temperature contrasts can induce the formation of local wind circulations that have been shown to affect cloud and rainfall patterns. Such local or mesoscale wind flows resemble the circulations of the summertime sea breeze that often develops along the New Jersey coast during the afternoon.9 For instance, different agricultural practices (e.g., harvested

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versus nonharvested areas) and other human-driven land use processes can create these circulations that enhance clouds and focus rainfall.10 Research such as that described above has identified ways in which regional land surface changes (e.g., urban sprawl, deforestation, agricultural practices) may potentially affect local and regional surface temperatures, clouds, rainfall, and possibly even global atmospheric circulation patterns. However, the accurate prediction of regional and global impacts upon climate, given a forecast of anticipated land use change, still remains a considerable scientific challenge. This challenge motivates our ongoing work and that of others in the field. Part of our intent in this chapter is to give the reader a sense of the data, tools, and methods scientists use to approach, understand, and quantify the effects of regional-scale land cover and land use change on regional weather and climate. It is only recently that researchers have begun answering these and related questions by using sophisticated new technologies in areas such as computing, including sophisticated numerical modeling simulations, and satellite remote sensing. We continue this approach—our strategy is to carry out “numerical experiments” by using representations of “historical” and “present-day” land cover in a state-of-the-art computer model of New Jersey’s weather and climate. Quantifying the differences between these experiments gives us insight into the possible impacts of the land cover changes. In addition, though, our goal is to blend these scienceand technology-based efforts with a more traditional historical analysis. In our opinion, this juxtaposition can be a blueprint for future work at the boundary between scientific inquiry and the study of history.

Reconstructing the Historical and Present-Day Land Cover Historical Land Cover The choice to study land cover change in New Jersey is fortuitous. To our knowledge, it is the first state in the country to have a spatially complete and thematically detailed topographical map series of documented latenineteenth-century land cover information that is comparable to the resolution of modern satellite imagery.11 We derived a digital historical land cover dataset for use in our computer experiments from a series of high-resolution maps of New Jersey.12 The base topographic maps were created during the 1880s by former New Jersey state geologist and Rutgers University professor Dr. George H. Cook. Dr. Cook also established the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station in

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Table 7.1

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The 1880s-era land cover types identified on the New Jersey map series created under the direction of Dr. George H. Cook.

bogs cedar swamp freshwater marsh tidewater marsh beach

moist swamp pine swamp tall grassland short grass water

deciduous forest mixed forest pine forest peat

Source: Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule, Atlas of New Jersey, Geological Survey of New Jersey, topographical atlas sheets 1–17, 34 × 24 inches, 1883–89 (New York: Julius Bien and Co., 1889).

1880 and served as its first director, providing New Jersey with a legislated research and outreach arm that focused efforts to improve agriculture by encouraging federal support of agricultural research programs.13 In this capacity, Dr. Cook was responsible for creating the first detailed topographical atlas of New Jersey, a project that took nearly a decade to complete. Assisting Dr. Cook in the creation of the map series was a young civil engineer, Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule. As a topographer and surveyor, he ensured that the seventeen maps produced in the series were accurate and consistent.14 For ten years, Vermeule worked with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and eventually became a consulting engineer to USGS and the state of New Jersey, serving in that capacity for the next thirty years. For the present study, the maps were manually digitized to create a high-resolution, 2.0-arcminute latitude-longitude gridded land cover database of New Jersey’s vegetation, wetlands, and built-up areas during the 1880s era. First, the fractional areal percentages of fourteen seminatural land cover types depicted on the Cook maps were manually estimated and aggregated, in increments of 10 percent, for every 2.0-arcminute latitudelongitude grid cell on each Cook map.15 We list these land cover types in table 7.1. Secondly, we used this detailed thematic information to infer the fractional coverage of other important, but unmapped, land cover classes (e.g., urban and agricultural areas) as a residual within each of the grid cells. It is easy to see from table 7.1 that the map series provides a particularly detailed identification of the forest and wetland types during this time period. A principal limitation of the land cover classification provided

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on these maps, however, is that neither urban areas nor agriculture are explicitly identified. Urban areas within New Jersey, and surrounding New York City and Philadelphia, were inferred based upon the coverage and density of the full road and rail network delineated on the maps. Given detailed mapping of the seminatural vegetation and inferred built-up areas, agricultural land was then assumed to be the remaining fractional percentages within each grid cell once all other types were identified, a reasonable assumption because agriculture was known to be a dominant land cover type in nineteenth-century New Jersey. Personal communications with various county historical commissions across the state have bolstered our confidence in these assumptions. Though the map legend was incomplete for some seminatural classes, we found clues that helped us interpret the meaning of individual symbols that were not explicitly labeled. For example, regions in southern New Jersey that were dotted by star-shaped symbols (i.e., closely resembling the shape of asterisks, “*”) were interpreted to be pine forest, since these same symbols within wetlands were clearly labeled as pine swamps. There were other, apparently forested areas with numerous cloud-shaped symbols, closely resembling the crown of a broadleaf deciduous tree, that were interpreted to be deciduous. Where these two symbols were numerous and, more or less, equally distributed, a mixed forest of evergreen and deciduous trees was assumed. The locations of these forests are also very consistent with more recent land cover maps of New Jersey. Other historical land cover categories were, however, more difficult to interpret, such as the symbol resembling what appears to be a few vertical blades of grass. We categorized this symbol as tall grassland. The distribution of present-day tall grassland (the present-day dataset is described below) bears a striking resemblance to the pattern of historical agriculture. While this is consistent with the idea that many New Jersey farms were abandoned in the twentieth century as agriculture declined, often leaving fallow fields to replace former farmland, we must use caution in extrapolating back from the patterns of present-day land cover. Doing so would likely introduce some degree of uncertainty when matching the physical properties specified in our computer model to the corresponding land cover type described on the historical maps. To minimize this uncertainty, thereby achieving the best possible accuracy, we decided to merge the agriculture and grassland (also referred to as pasture land) datasets together and average the physical properties of these two types in our computer model.16

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The borders of New Jersey do not encompass a regular, rectangularshaped region, but the constraints of our computer modeling system require such a domain that can be easily broken up into a regular grid. Therefore, we extended the boundaries of our region of interest to include portions of the surrounding states. Because the equivalent of the Cook historical maps is not available for these other states, we instead adapted countywide data from the 1880 U.S. Census to fill in the gaps around New Jersey. The census contains information on the percentages of four land cover categories within each county, including mixed crop, forested areas, pasture land, and “other” land cover types, such as urban areas.17 The county-level census data were gridded to be consistent with the resolution of the Cook-derived land cover. We then digitally merged the census-derived data with the mapderived New Jersey data, thereby producing a continuous 1880s-era landscape reconstruction for the whole region based on a geographic map projection with 2.0-arcminute grid cells.18 A number of adjustments and reconciliations were applied to render this reconstruction consistent with what we know about nineteenth-century urban land cover in the states surrounding New Jersey. For example, in the 1880 U.S. Census, the “other” category was assumed by default to primarily correspond to urban areas, since this generally identified those areas where known villages and cities were located. However, in some cases, we needed to assign a different land cover category where an urban classification did not make sense. For portions of Pennsylvania and southern New York State, residual “other” cells were converted to the mixed crop category, while a linear feature in northeastern Pennsylvania, apparently vegetated, was reclassified as deciduous forest. Similar adjustments were required in parts of Long Island, Delaware, and Connecticut. Present-Day Land Cover For all so-called “present-day” land cover in our numerical experiments, we used the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD).19 This dataset was developed from 1992 and 1993 satellite imagery collected by the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) instrument, which has a resolution of 30 meters for each pixel in each scene. The NLCD land cover classification consists of twenty-one individual land cover types, including thematic classes for various agricultural, forest, wetland, and urban areas.20 Since the NLCD 30 m data provided a more detailed picture of the landscape than the 1880s data, we aggregated the NLCD land cover data to a coarser 1.0 km grid and then assigned the dominant land cover

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type to that grid cell.21 The present-day land cover was further aggregated to a 2.0-arcminute grid in a geographic map projection. This enabled us to have similar grid resolutions between our present-day land cover and our historical land cover of New Jersey. Because the land cover and land use categories defined on the Cook maps (and in the 1880 U.S. Census) differ from those of the satellite-based classification, the historical and present-day datasets also needed to be reconciled with each other to form a common set of land cover classes before being used to drive our computer simulations. This is a necessary step, because we are concerned with minimizing the impact of spurious “changes” or other differences in land cover that may not represent actual historical changes to the land surface.22 To accomplish this, we matched the land cover classes from both the historical and NLCD data with each other and then remapped both datasets to a third, “neutral” land cover classification scheme. This simplified scheme corresponds to the land cover classes used in our computer climate model, to be described later. These eight simplified categories are as follows: (1) combined agricultural and pasture land, (2) deciduous broadleaf forest, (3) mixed forest, (4) evergreen needleleaf forest, (5) marshes and other treeless swamps, (6) forested wetlands, (7) urban areas, and (8) surface water. Table 7.2 provides a cross-reference that matches each of the historical and present-day classes with one of these eight simplified categories used as part of the computer simulations. Because of the different scales used for the historical and present-day datasets, along with their different map projections, we had to ensure that lakes and inland water bodies did not abruptly shift location between the past and present-day landscapes.23 For example, considering that the 1880 census does not have a representation of any inland water bodies, which are an important land cover class at the local scale, we chose to use the same information on the locations of all rivers and lakes in the NLCD dataset for both the historical and present-day landscapes. To accomplish this, all lakes, rivers, and water bodies present in our NLCD data, gridded to the final 2.0-arcminute map projection, were overlayed onto the gridded census data for those states that surrounded New Jersey. This adjustment made the 1880 census-derived and Landsat-derived water datasets virtually identical. Within New Jersey, however, the Cook water data was given priority for the 1880s data. Once we mapped both our historical reconstruction of the region’s landscape and the satellite-based representation of present-day conditions

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The historical and present-day land cover classes and their corresponding reclassification to one of the eight simplified classes of our “neutral” classification scheme. Each of the simplified classes is recognized by our computer model and used to initialize the surface boundary of the respective simulation.

Historical Land Cover Class

NLCD Present-day Land Cover Class

Simplified “Neutral” Class

agricultural and pasture land, beach

mixed crop, pasture land, shrubs, grassland, bare rock, sand, other grains

agricultural and pasture land

deciduous forest

deciduous broadleaf forest, orchards

deciduous broadleaf forest

mixed forest pine forest

mixed forest evergreen needleleaf forest

mixed forest evergreen needleleaf forest

bogs, tide and freshwater marshes, peat, moist swamps

nonforested wetlands

nonforested wetlands

pine swamp, cedar swamp

forested wetlands

forested wetlands

urban

residential / commercial / industrial area

urban

water

water

water

Sources: Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule, Atlas of New Jersey, Geological Survey of New Jersey, topographical atlas sheets 1–17, 34 × 24 inches, 1883–89 (New York: Julius Bien and Co., 1889); James Anderson et al., “A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data,” U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Professional Paper 964 (Washington, D.C.: 1976).

to a single, consistent mapping scheme, we were ready to begin assessing the effects of the land cover changes that have taken place since the time of George H. Cook and Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule. Land Cover Changes over the Last Century Significant differences between the 1880s and present-day landscapes are apparent from our reconstruction, and these differences accord reasonably well with our understanding of the historical evolution that has taken place within and around New Jersey. This evolution includes extensive

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urban and semiurban development, a progressive and accompanying loss of agricultural and forested land, and considerable changes in the areas covered by wetlands. Although we only include a map of the urban land cover data, we provide a detailed narrative description of historical landscape changes that were documented within these broad land cover themes. There is a complex pattern of changes in New Jersey’s deciduous, mixed, and pine forests that reflects a combination of regrowth, deforestation, and increasing fragmentation in different parts of the state over the approximate one-hundred-year time period bracketed by the datasets. In general, the overall distribution of the present-day forests has become more fragmented when compared with the coverage of historical forests. In addition, deforestation has occurred along the western edge of the Pine Barrens that cover much of southern New Jersey. From southeastern Pennsylvania into northern New Jersey and southern New York State, there appears to be a considerable increase in forested area (but also accompanied by an increase in fragmentation) between the historical and present-day datasets. In the areas outside of New Jersey, some of this trend could be an artifact of the different grid resolutions and data sources used to reconstruct the nineteenth-century regional landscape in comparison with the high-resolution present-day data. The effective resolution of the Cook data is roughly comparable with the higher resolution of the present-day Landsat data within New Jersey, so the increased fragmentation of present-day New Jersey forests is probably a very real transformation from the historical era. For the surrounding states, however, the potential for bias is much more pronounced when comparing present-day Landsat data against the extremely coarse 1880 census data collected at the county level. These data scaling inconsistencies may potentially exaggerate regional changes in land cover, and therefore we must use caution later when interpreting simulated meteorological changes beyond New Jersey’s borders. In addition, there are likely some discontinuities in the 1880s land cover data at the New Jersey state border. Nevertheless, within New Jersey, the trend is clear: the forested regions have indeed shifted and the fragmentation of these forests has also significantly increased. The distribution of agricultural and pasture land has also undergone profound changes. The historical areas once dominated by agriculture and pasture indicate an especially large uniform area in southeastern Pennsylvania that became much more fragmented by the 1990s. Dramatic losses of fertile agricultural and pasture land have also occurred throughout the entire region, particularly in western and southwestern New Jersey, along the New Jersey coastal plain, and around the major metropolitan areas.

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Agriculture was the predominant land cover type in nineteenthcentury New Jersey. Of all states, New Jersey was, at that time, first in farm income per acre. The exports of agricultural products such as white and sweet potatoes, peaches, apples, and tomatoes to other markets were big business during this era (e.g., 1,500 baskets of Jersey tomatoes were shipped daily to Boston). The economy of the state, historically based upon agricultural exports, began to witness a twentieth-century shift to professionally managed industrial and commercial enterprise.24 The location of New Jersey between the major market centers of New York City and Philadelphia helped to foster urban and suburban growth with the widespread use of the automobile and the desire of more people to build homes in the countryside. As a result, since 1880, the acreage of New Jersey farmland declined by over 60 percent, with the number of actual farms also decreasing by 75 percent by the early 1970s.25 Agricultural and pasture land within twentieth-century New Jersey has also succumbed to forces other than urban and suburban development. For example, mechanization and advances in plant science have dramatically increased the efficiency of the remaining farms, stimulating the expansion of crops in which New Jersey farmers had the biggest economic advantage. Intensive farming practices needed to raise agricultural productivity have, unfortunately, also accelerated soil erosion and general land degradation. Other demographic, economic, and social factors, for example the growing state population, the higher taxes placed upon farmland, technological advances in sectors outside agriculture, and a shifting socioeconomic climate, have also played a major role in transforming New Jersey’s once agricultural landscape.26 While New Jersey’s wetlands do not show quite as dramatic a change as agricultural and pasture land, there is evidence, throughout the state, of the loss of forested and nonforested wetlands. That the change was not more pronounced, as evidenced by the relative similarity of the wetlands patterns between the 1880s and 1990s maps, particularly within the immediate coastal sections of the southern part of the state, is probably the result of the pioneering environmental legislation that has protected prime New Jersey wetlands from extensive human settlement. The comparison of historical with present-day urban areas, shown in figure 7.1, is among the most visually striking physical land cover changes that have occurred within the region since the late nineteenth century. Most of present-day New Jersey is centrally located between the densely populated cities of Philadelphia and New York. Surfaces that were once

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predominantly agricultural and pasture land have been transformed into expansive metropolitan areas that include residential and commercial suburbs covering several counties in New Jersey and its bordering states. For instance, the explosive growth around New York City and Long Island, to the southeast of Philadelphia, and along the New Jersey coastline has historically led to losses of native wetlands and also significant declines in agricultural land and forests across the region. Thus, the changes documented in this figure are intimately linked to the observed changes in all the other land cover types that we have been describing. Given these dramatic changes, what are the corresponding changes in weather and climate variability that might have resulted? The datasets briefly discussed here are not only useful for tracking and estimating the land cover changes over the last century, but they also form the basis for computer modeling experiments to address this question.

Computer Modeling of New Jersey’s Climate Climate System Model Meteorologists and climate scientists use sophisticated computer programs to solve the many complicated equations that are required to predict the flow of air, the passage of weather systems, the formation of clouds and rain, and the transfer of heat and moisture into the atmosphere from vegetation, the soil, and the manmade surface. At the global scale, these tools are known as Global Climate Models (GCMs). The difficulty in using GCMs to study problems such as the impacts of landscape change on weather and climate in New Jersey is that the smallest areas these models can typically resolve are on the order of a few tens of thousands of square kilometers. In other words, an area the size of New Jersey would only appear as a single point, with no detail. This is the finest resolution that existing computing technology will permit, while still allowing researchers to consider the entire globe at once. Therefore, scientists who focus on more local scales use a related set of tools called Regional Climate Models (RCMs). RCMs are computer models that simulate only a small section of the planet at one time, but they can do so with much higher resolution in space and time. The specific RCM that we use is called the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System, or RAMS. RAMS is described in detail in a number of publications and is used by climate researchers and meteorologists throughout the world.27 This computer model is quite similar in principle to, for

a.

b.

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example, models used by the National Weather Service to produce tailored weather forecasts for U.S. cities and regions.28 Because the land surface can be so important to weather, a special software module has been engineered into RAMS that allows us to simulate the interactions between the land surface and the overlying atmosphere with a high degree of realism. This module is referred to as the Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Feedback model (LEAF-2).29 Each grid cell in LEAF-2 can be assigned one or more land cover types, such as forest, wetlands, cropland, tall grassland, water, and even bare ground.30 LEAF-2 accounts for a variety of land surface processes that, depending upon the land cover type, can cool or warm the lower atmosphere and add or remove moisture to or from the atmosphere and soil. For these reasons, LEAF-2 represents an innovative way to permit the interaction of atmospheric with land surface processes within our RAMS model configuration.31 It is through the assignment of surface conditions in LEAF-2 that we are able to set up our experiments to examine the possible impacts of land use and land cover changes—in turn swapping out present-day surface characteristics and replacing them with their historical counterparts, using the landscape datasets that we have already derived. Because land surface properties, for a given area, may have been dramatically altered over the time period due to historical land cover change, we can expect that there might also be significant concomitant changes to temperatures and landscapeforced processes like thunderstorms. In addition, on a regional scale, the transformation from a single, uniform land cover type to a fragmented pattern of several different land cover types can have a large impact upon local weather and climate. Design of the Numerical Experiments As with any scientific experiment, we have to define specifically the questions we are asking. Our particular question is as follows: If we pick a

Figure 7.1. The historical urban area (a) and the corresponding present-day urban area (b) for New Jersey and the surrounding region. The units are in fraction of urban area in each grid cell where the contour interval ranges from 0.0 to 1.0. The x and y axes represent the longitude and latitude coordinates for the geographic map projection. Sources: Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule, Atlas of New Jersey, Geological Survey of New Jersey, topographical atlas sheets 1–17, 34 × 24 inches, 1883–89 (New York: Julius Bien and Co., 1889); James Anderson et al., A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Professional Paper 964 (Washington, D.C.: 1976).

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specific time period—in our case we have chosen July and August 1999, how would the summertime weather over New Jersey be different if, instead of the current land use and land cover, the landscape resembled that of the 1880s? We use our computer climate model, RAMS, along with the surface datasets we have created, to answer this question. There are several reasons why we ask the question in this way. Why not compare July 1999 and July 1889? Why not look at other months and seasons? The answer to the first question is that we use the same presentday meteorological boundary conditions for all of our simulations so as to isolate the signal of the land-surface changes, as distinct from other changes over the century (e.g., global warming associated with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases). In other words, we follow one of the rules for designing scientific experiments, in that we change only one thing at a time, in this case the land surface state, to reveal an unambiguous causal link between land cover and climate in this region. In addition, as we will discuss below, we need meteorological boundary conditions to run our experiments, since we are only simulating a small fraction of the globe. These boundary conditions come from observations, and sufficient observational coverage did not exist in the 1880s to permit us to carry out a “true” regional climate simulation for that era. This is a problem that all users of RCMs face when carrying out experiments dealing with the climate of an era before the widespread and systematic gathering and archiving of meteorological observations. In this sense, all of our experiments are more properly considered “sensitivity experiments” rather than “climate change experiments”—that is, we are trying to understand the “sensitivity” of the climate in this region to changing the underlying land cover. In other words, we are trying to simulate what the climate of the summer of 1999 would have looked like if the land surface resembled that of the 1880s rather than the present day. The reason we only look at summertime, and only two specific months at that, is because the computer simulations we carry out are extremely computationally expensive—a month of “model time” takes nearly a month of real time. We are already significantly defraying this cost in computing time by running RAMS in parallel across multiple computers, each one sharing the load and increasing efficiency several-fold. However, moving beyond our test case of July and August 1999 would take substantial additional computer resources and time, and therefore will have to remain the subject of future experiments. An additional consideration is that we are not so much interested in larger-scale frontal activity but smaller-scale processes,

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including the sea breeze and thunderstorms, which tend to be more dominant and potentially subject to land cover change effects during the summer season. Configuring the Computer Model The atmosphere is a continuous system, and weather patterns that initiate in far-off locations can exert strong influences elsewhere in the world. For example, a winter storm over New Jersey could easily have originated in Ohio, while the larger-scale climatic pattern favoring the formation of this storm might involve the entire northern hemisphere. Since, as we mentioned above, RCMs, like RAMS, only allow us to simulate a fraction of the globe, we must have some way of specifying what is going on at, and outside, the boundaries of our model domain. In other words, when simulating more than a few hours of weather, the influence of the atmosphere from outside our region of interest must be accounted for; otherwise, the simulation will quickly become unrealistic. We cannot produce an accurate simulation of atmospheric processes in a given small region without capturing at least the basic elements of the atmosphere over a far larger area. To address this issue, we take advantage of the existence of a global network of meteorological observing systems, measuring winds, temperature, and humidity at many locations, and vertically in the atmosphere, several times per day. As part of the mission of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), these observations are collected, statistically smoothed, and stored as data points on a regular grid covering the globe.32 We run RAMS by “nesting” three grids, one inside the other, telescoping down to progressively smaller areas and progressively higher resolutions. Each grid is centered approximately on New Jersey, specifically at the point 40.1°N and 74.6°W. The coarsest and largest grid (grid 1) covers much of eastern North America and adjacent ocean, and each of its grid cells spans 32 km × 32 km. Grid 1 communicates with the above-mentioned global meteorological data. The next smaller grid (grid 2) downscales the model variables computed on grid 1 to a finer mesh, with 8 km × 8 km grid cells. Finally, the smallest grid (grid 3) is our domain of interest, upon which we simulate the coupled land-atmosphere processes in New Jersey and its immediate surroundings, and where our analysis is concentrated. Grid 3 has the highest resolution, with grid cells of 2 km × 2 km.33 This grid 3 is the same domain shown in figure 7.1. It is important to remember that RAMS does not just model a horizontal plane, but a 3-D volume.34

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It is reasonable to ask why we must resort to this seemingly complicated setup, with grids nested inside other grids and gradually increasing resolution. The simple reason is again that current limitations on computing power require us to step from the global scale to the very high resolution required to accurately model a small region like New Jersey. Of course it would be much more convenient and desirable to simply carry out a global simulation with the fine mesh that we need, but such a simulation would take years of computer time, given existing technology. In fact, with the high resolution we are using on grid 3 (2 km × 2 km grid cells, covering all of New Jersey and surroundings), running the model over monthly time scales, as we do, is still considered unusual because of this computational expense. We are willing to make this tradeoff, because we feel that we need this high resolution to capture the atmospheric processes we are interested in with maximum realism.35 Our “experiment” in this case consists of two separate simulations, each based on July/August 1999 meteorological forcing, but one having the lower boundary of the grid 3 domain specified from our 1880s historical land cover reconstruction, and one having the lower boundary of the grid 3 domain specified from the 1992/93 satellite-based, present-day land cover dataset. Again, all other conditions, such as initial atmospheric state, meteorological conditions at the outer boundaries, and atmospheric composition (e.g., we use modern-day levels of greenhouse gases), are held constant. In addition, we use the present-day land cover as the lower boundary on grids 1 and 2 in both simulations—we limit the specification of our historical dataset to New Jersey and its immediate vicinity, only on grid 3. The purpose of all of these constraints is to allow us to easily attribute any meteorological differences we observe in our simulations to the landscape change in our region of interest only. To obtain reasonably accurate results for our experiments, we must also ensure that the simulated atmosphere reaches a consistent and steady equilibrium with the underlying surface, both in temperature and moisture. We have initialized soil moisture at 50 percent volumetric capacity in every grid cell and every soil layer. This could imply the occurrence of uniform amounts of antecedent rainfall within every grid cell, or it could imply other land surface processes. Of course, this is highly unrealistic, since one of the main characteristics of rainfall is that it is randomly distributed, and soil moisture is also determined by variations in soil and land cover properties. Since the atmosphere-land surface interaction is quite sensitive to the distribution of soil wetness, both horizontally and within each vertical soil

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layer, accurate soil moisture initial conditions are important for producing realistic simulations. Therefore, we use the combined RAMS/LEAF-2 simulation for the thirty-one days of July as a kind of “spin-up” to allow a sufficient period of time (one full month) to generate a reasonable summertime distribution of soil temperature and soil moisture patterns, and to further allow land surface processes time to reach equilibrium with the simulated atmosphere. This helped ensure the development of a realistic, finer-scale horizontal (and vertical) representation of soil temperature and soil moisture for August. For this reason, the temperature results we show later (in fig. 7.2) are only for the month of August. This initialization and “spin up” of the land surface condition is a major source of uncertainty in all modelbased studies of this type. Before we look at some of the results of this experiment, it is important to once again emphasize that we are not attempting to simulate the actual climate over New Jersey in the 1880s and during present times. New Jersey’s climate was different in the past, not only because of differences in its landscape, but also because of differences in global climate in general due to natural variability or anthropogenic factors (e.g., that era was prior to any significant global warming). That sort of comparison is a far more complicated problem, and in fact, is not yet possible at the kind of high spatial resolution within our New Jersey study area. Again, what we are presenting here is the sensitivity of meteorological conditions in summertime New Jersey to one change: present-day versus historical land cover.

Sensitivity of the Weather and Climate to Landscape Changes To investigate how the New Jersey summertime climate may have responded to the transformation of the late-nineteenth-century landscape, we compared simulated differences in temperature, rainfall, and many other quantities between the historical and present-day runs. We mainly consider the sensitivity of temperature and precipitation patterns because their daily extremes can often disrupt the way we live, work, and recreate. We have also selected a day when weather conditions promoted the formation of a sea breeze along the New Jersey coast, allowing us to observe the types of changes in local wind circulations that can result from the landscape change. Before we compare these differences, it is important to recognize that the northeastern United States experienced an intensifying drought and heat wave during the summer of 1999. Record or near-record high temperatures

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were reached for many locations during the heat waves of July, with New Jersey experiencing the second driest four-month period (April to July 1999) in the state’s 105-year historical record. Rainfall deficits became so severe that, by mid-August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared nine states, including New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, as agricultural drought disaster areas. Towards the end of August, however, tropical moisture from the remnants of former Hurricane Bret affected the state, alleviating the drought conditions somewhat, and initiating what would become a prolonged wet period during September with the passage of several cold fronts and tropical systems, such as Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd, which brought substantial rainfall and flooding to the region. These unusual conditions formed part of the motivation for our selection of the summer 1999 period for study, allowing us to examine the ways in which historical land cover change might affect the severity of prolonged seasonal droughts. Temperatures and Rainfall Every time we tune into weather segments on television news broadcasts, we notice that the temperature maps typically show warmer temperatures in urban, built-up areas, and cooler temperatures in the more outlying, “rural” suburbs. Daytime temperatures, for instance, over a forested region, will warm at a different rate than those observed within an urban metropolitan area. This can frequently occur on a daily basis regardless of season, suggesting that the character of the underlying surface contributes to an overall warming (or cooling) that, over time, noticeably influences the cycle of daily high and low temperatures. We investigate these extremes by examining near-surface air temperatures in our computer model, averaged within the lowest 50 meters of the atmosphere. Figure 7.2 shows the mean differences in daily maximum temperatures between the model simulations with historical and present-day landscapes for August. We created this figure by finding the daily maximum temperature corresponding to each grid cell of the historical run, and then subtracting this value from the respective maximum temperature computed from the present-day run for that same grid cell. Repeating this procedure for each day during the month, we then averaged the maximum temperature differences over all thirty-one days to obtain the mean monthly maximum temperature at each grid location. Likewise, we used the same technique to compare the mean differences in daily minimum temperatures between the model runs.

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Figure 7.2. The RAMS model–simulated mean monthly maximum surface temperature differences (present-day land cover − historical land cover) resulting from the historical landscape change for the region. The temperature changes are in degrees Celsius. Source: Robert Walko et al., “Coupled Atmosphere-Biophysics-Hydrology Models for Environmental Modeling,” Journal of Applied Meteorology 39 (2000): 931– 44.

The modeling results suggest the greatest change in daily maximum temperatures occurs in northeastern New Jersey, southeastern New York State, and Long Island, where present-day maximum temperatures are at least 0.7°C warmer than the corresponding temperatures over the historical landscape. In fact, within New York City and portions of western Long Island, daily maximums can average as much as 1.0°C warmer with presentday land cover. The warming is also evident in western New Jersey, to the north and east of Philadelphia, with a present-day increase of 0.3°C to 0.4°C. These simulated temperature increases are associated with increased urbanization. However, the model results suggest that maximum temperature

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increases are not consistent throughout the region. Simulated maximum temperatures over portions of present-day northern New Jersey, and along coastal areas within the southern part of the state, for example, have shown a slight cooling trend. Analogous to the modeling results for daytime maximum temperatures, the largest increase in mean overnight minimum temperatures (not shown) also surrounds the New York City metropolitan area and Long Island, and includes coastal New Jersey, with present-day minimum temperatures as much as 0.3°C to 0.4°C warmer than at the same locations with the late nineteenth-century land cover. The present-day landscape is associated with increased minimum temperatures by as much as 0.5°C within central New Jersey and the highly urban corridor linking Philadelphia with New York City. Conversely, the modeling results suggest that daily minimum temperatures have cooled slightly within portions of northwestern New Jersey and across much of eastern Pennsylvania. Therefore, the modeling simulation results suggest quite distinct temperature distributions for the 1880s and 1990s landscapes. We find that these differences can be attributed to a complex combination of direct and indirect factors between the historical and present-day runs: (i) the physical change in land cover type, creating a tendency for considerably warmer temperatures over present-day urban areas; (ii) changes in cloudiness; (iii) changes in cumulative rainfall totals; and (iv) changes in sea breeze strength, inland penetration, and/or duration, which can modify temperatures through the transport of cooler ocean air inland. Let us consider each one of these factors individually. The urban transformation of the land surface can intrinsically produce large temperature differences between the runs. In the region surrounding New York City, Long Island, Philadelphia, and along coastal sections of New Jersey, for example, the land cover has been extensively altered, primarily to accommodate the growing population. Since these are regions that have experienced tremendous population growth since the late nineteenth century, we would expect to see a pattern of enhanced temperatures consistent with the dramatic expansion of urban land cover. The temperature pattern shown in figure 7.2 matches, to some degree, the urban landscape changes that we have observed in figure 7.1. The manmade surfaces that replaced the original vegetation of New Jersey have given the landscape a new set of physical characteristics. In contrast to the formerly vegetated regions, the thermal properties of urban land surfaces (buildings, roads, parking lots) of industrialized cities like

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Newark and Elizabeth allow rapid heating during a summer day, which increases the ground temperature as well as the temperature of the overlying urban air. These paved surfaces and buildings, with their higher daytime temperatures, eventually radiate this energy to their immediate surroundings during the night, increasing overnight low temperatures as well. This warming creates the aforementioned “urban heat island” effect within builtup regions. The heat island effect is enhanced and accelerated by the loss of vegetative cover. Because trees and plants have a natural cooling ability that enables them to transpire large amounts of water from their leaves, evaporation of this water can effectively cool surrounding air temperatures. As the land is developed, and farms abandoned and replaced by buildings and pavement, there are fewer trees and shrubs within urban areas to block incoming sunlight and shade the ground. As a result, the powerful cooling mechanism that vegetation naturally provides is dramatically reduced. In addition, dark-colored roof and paving materials absorb more of the sun’s rays, contributing to additional increases in surface and overall ambient air temperatures. These effects are further influenced by the regional summertime drought. Where the urban land cover is quite dense, as in northeastern New Jersey, New York City, and western Long Island, we see the largest increase in high temperatures. In these regions, urban land cover has almost entirely replaced the former agricultural and pasture land and forests. With very little rainfall, virtually all of the sun’s energy is efficiently absorbed by the ground, significantly increasing these temperatures. Further to the south and west, near Philadelphia, there is a smaller but still substantial increase in daily highs. The urban landscape is also more fragmented here and interspersed with forests, compared to the northeastern part of the state. For this reason, we do not see quite the same dramatic increase in daytime high temperatures. Many studies that have investigated long-term daily temperature trends due to urbanization across a large region have found that overnight lows have generally increased more than daytime highs. The likely reason why this effect does not generally apply to our study is the summertime drought that was prevalent across the region during the time period on which we focused. Even with more vegetation in the historical run, without significant rainfall, forests would be under extreme stress, and agriculture would likely be dead. After all, the region was declared an agricultural disaster area. The effects of the drought in our simulation were to minimize

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some of the contrasts between vegetated and built-up surfaces that we would probably have observed given climatologically normal rainfall. During the two months of our simulation, we found that sunny days occurred only about 30 percent of the time, while nights under clear skies accounted for a mere 20 percent of the period. Clouds can be a natural daytime cooling mechanism, blocking much of the sun’s energy and reflecting a significant portion back to space before it can be absorbed by the surface. The evaporation of moisture from vegetation is often a strong factor in inducing near-surface clouds and moderating temperatures. Since more vegetation (like agricultural and pasture land) covered New Jersey and its surrounding states in the nineteenth century, we might expect more clouds to form in the historical run. This is indeed the case. If we examine the map of mean daytime high temperatures, it is interesting to observe the apparent warming over the immediate coastal waters to the north of Long Island. In the historical run, mean near-surface winds help to transport moisture from vegetation over these offshore waters, inducing low clouds to form as moist air is cooled from below. The atmosphere in our present-day New Jersey simulation is generally warmer and drier, due to an increase in urban land surfaces, which warm the air over the present-day landscape more so than the historical landscape. As a result, mean near-surface winds transport the warmed air from the land to the ocean, over which there may be inadequate moisture available to form present-day clouds offshore under the same coastal cooling. This produces a net daytime warming over the offshore waters that, in our runs, can be considered to be an extension over the ocean of the landbased urban heat island effect. These types of differences in cloudiness do not occur just over New Jersey’s coastal waters. On many days in our simulations, low clouds form in the historical but not the present-day runs over the New York City region shortly before dawn. While the present-day surface rapidly heats during the morning, the sun’s energy must be first used to evaporate these low clouds before surface temperatures can warm in the historical run. In other words, the clouds exaggerate the landscape-change-induced present-day warming. The temperature changes we see within the New York City vicinity in figure 7.2 result from both the direct land use change and the further interaction between the atmosphere and the surface. Cloud cover changes also play an important role in nighttime temperatures. When we consider the influences of clouds at night, we must also consider another form of heat energy that is transmitted upwards by the

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ground surface at all times, i.e., thermal or infrared radiation—heat. Unlike sunlight, heat energy is not visible to our eyes, but we can feel it every time we stand in front of an active floor-mounted baseboard heater in older homes. In much the same way that hot water flowing through the coils radiates heat to the room, the land surface (and everything on it) radiates this energy into space. This is why, under clear skies, ground and air temperatures quickly cool after the sun sets below the horizon. Clouds can act like a blanket, preventing this thermal infrared radiation from escaping and reemitting it back towards the ground. This effect keeps surface temperatures warmer on cloudy nights than they otherwise would be on clear nights. We can see this effect in the differences in simulated overnight low temperatures on clear nights between the present-day and historical runs. In the present-day runs, nighttime temperatures tend to be cooler over New Jersey’s coastal waters; again, this is due to the nearsurface winds advecting moisture offshore and producing more clouds in the historical run, warming the nighttime temperatures. Clouds induced by the underlying surface are not the only mechanism that can influence surface temperatures. Under clear skies, a wet ground from recent summertime rainfall can also result in cooler daytime highs and warmer nighttime lows. Thus, we need to consider the rainfall distribution as an additional factor that can influence these temperature extremes. Rainfall generally exhibits a more or less random structure across the mid-Atlantic region during summer. In localized areas, however, differences between our two runs can be significant. In northwestern New Jersey, for example, the differences in rainfall totals can exceed 100 mm in some locations that are only 75 km apart. As mentioned earlier, the land cover changes can, directly or indirectly, lead to changes in the development, intensity, and movement of thunderstorms, which, in turn, produce localized heavy rain in one run, but precipitation-free conditions in the other run for that same location. These rainfall differences have a dramatic effect on surface temperatures. A slight shift in the precise location of these thunderstorms can often result in distinct temperature contrasts only tens of kilometers apart. For example, thunderstorms that develop in the historical run over northwestern New Jersey (not shown) saturate the soil and, on subsequent days, most of the sun’s energy evaporates the moisture within the wet surface layer. Similar storms in the present-day run are, however, displaced about 75 km further north and east, saturating the soil in a different location. The result is a pronounced cooling (centered about longitude 75°W) in the historical run,

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visible in the temperature difference plot shown in figure 7.2, that is virtually nonexistent in the present-day run for that location. Likewise, there is a substantial cooling evident in the present-day run that is centered in northern New Jersey, about longitude 74.6°W. Even though New Jersey was in the midst of a summertime drought, the topmost soil layers remain wet for a period of several days to a few weeks following heavy rainstorms. A single storm during the evening of July 2 produced significant surface cooling for the next five weeks. The landscape changes in our simulations also produced large differences in cumulative rainfall amounts across the entire region. In the historical run, various portions of New Jersey received, on average, between 30 mm and 270 mm of rain during the month of July, with the above-mentioned evening thunderstorms on July 2 accounting for about 80 percent of the state’s monthly rainfall. By comparison, July rainfall amounts in the presentday simulation were about 30 percent lighter in general across the state. During the following month, some northwestern portions of the state received as little as 20 mm to 30 mm total. The modeling results show lighter rainfall totals in the present day compared to the historical simulation, generally concentrated within, and generally downstream of, the major urban centers. With the overall reduction in vegetation in the present-day landscape, we find that the upward vertical motion of individual thunderstorms that develop in the historical run is typically more intense than the corresponding thunderstorms in the present-day run. Atmospheric water vapor is a powerful energy source for thunderstorm development, because as moist air rises, huge amounts of energy are released as the water vapor condenses to form clouds. Because more urban land cover characterizes the present-day run, less water vapor exists within its drier atmosphere to fuel thunderstorms. It is important to emphasize that these explanations are highly simplified. Rainfall is produced by a complex series of interactions between dynamic and thermodynamic processes occurring at a variety of time and space scales, making it extremely difficult to isolate specific land surface– atmosphere mechanisms that are responsible for the distribution of rainfall amounts. That is why the differences in rainfall amounts between the runs seem to be randomly distributed and, in general, less easily matched with the landscape changes than temperature differences.36 As we have seen, it is the direct effects of historical land cover change on the exchanges of heat and water between the surface and atmosphere, combined with indirect interactions involving wind patterns and

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the shifting locations of clouds and thunderstorms, that control the differences in climate variables (like temperature) between our two simulations. Before concluding, we briefly consider one more mechanism involved in these complex, interlinked changes: i.e., how the historical land cover change within New Jersey may have influenced the sea breeze along the coast. The Sea-Breeze Along coastal areas, especially during the warm season, the temperature contrast between land and ocean is often strong. Under sunny skies, the land-ocean temperature difference generally peaks during the midafternoon hours, following maximum surface heating of the land. Since the marine air does not warm as much as the adjacent land surfaces, the differential heating induces an atmospheric flow of cooler ocean air onto the land. By late afternoon, this flow helps to cool the warmer landscape and therefore reduce the surface temperature contrast. This is the sea breeze, and its most apparent meteorological effects also include local changes in humidity, wind speed and direction, cloud cover, and occasionally rainfall.37 Figure 7.3 shows the mature stages of a sea breeze that developed during the afternoon hours of July 7, 1999. The large-scale conditions (i.e., winds, temperatures) on this day were ideal to promote the evolution, development, and inland movement of a sea breeze. The historical (left) and present-day (right) panels illustrate the noticeable effect of the land surface changes on the structure of this sea breeze. For example, the top two panels of figure 7.3 illustrate the differences in the intensity of upward and downward vertical motion in the sea breeze circulation (at 800 m altitude). As we have seen earlier, the present-day land surface heats the air more vigorously than the historical land surface, and therefore an enhanced temperature difference forms between land and ocean. This strengthens the speeds of the horizontal sea breeze winds as the moist marine air near the surface begins to move inland in both runs. By 4:00 pm local time, the leading edge of the sea breeze is much better defined in the present-day run, and the upward motion along the coast can be about 1.0 m/s stronger. In the top two panels of figure 7.3, note also the alternating and elongated vertical wind fields of rising and sinking air that are oriented approximately perpendicular to the sea breeze. These are land-based circulations, similar to the sea breeze, but created instead by inland contrasts between different land surface types. The circulations that develop in the present-day

Figure 7.3. A comparison of the RAMS-simulated intensity of the New Jersey sea breeze that developed during the afternoon of July 7, 1999. The results on the left panels are from the historical land cover, and on the right panels from present-day land cover, with all model results corresponding to 4:00 pm local time. The two top panels represent the vertical motion of the air, in m/s, at 800 m above the surface. The bottom two panels represent a cross-section of the same sea breeze at 74.6°W longitude, showing the differences in intensity of the circulation from the surface to 2250 m above the ground. Differences between the two simulated sea breezes, likely related to the land use change, are evident. Source: Robert Walko et al., “Coupled Atmosphere-Biophysics-Hydrology Models for Environmental Modeling,” Journal of Applied Meteorology 39 (2000): 931–44.

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run are generally more intense due to enhanced land surface contrasts resulting from the greater fragmentation of the land surface. The lower two panels of figure 7.3 show a cross-section of the same vertical motion field, at longitude 74.6°W. This cross-section shows both the sea breeze and the inland circulations we have just mentioned. Once again, this plot illustrates the more vigorous upward (and downward) circulations, extending through a slightly deeper atmospheric layer, in the present-day run. By early evening, these meteorological differences between the historical and present-day runs manifest themselves in other changes. For example, in the present-day run, the more intense rising air of both the sea breeze and the inland circulations enhances the formation of cumulus clouds at about 2500 m in altitude. These clouds, which are less numerous in the historical run, are aligned with the ascending portion of the mesoscale circulations and with the leading edge of the sea breeze. The shading of the surface due to these clouds amounts to about 0.5°C to 1°C. Overall, after the passage of the stronger sea breeze on this particular day in the present-day simulation, the entire New Jersey coastal plain was about 0.5°C cooler.

Conclusions Over the past century, the landscape of New Jersey and its surrounding region has been dramatically altered to fit human land use needs. We have cut down native forests and replaced them with agriculture and pasture land to feed us and our livestock. We have seriously degraded the wetland ecology that once protected our local communities from flooding and filtered dangerous pollutants from our drinking water. We have built roads and cities sprawled across miles of what was once fertile farmland and open space, including in coastal regions. Despite all of these changes, we still do not yet have a firm understanding of what happens to our weather once we alter the land surface–atmosphere boundary that is a principal determinant of regional climate. Our results have shown that land cover change is an important influence on, for example, the daily maximum and minimum temperatures. In those regions where the vegetated land surface has been converted to urban cover, the historical landscape changes have, in general, led to a warmer and drier atmosphere. In other words, although, globally, urban surfaces cover a very small fraction of the planet’s total land surface, urban sprawl is certainly significant when considered from the perspective of regional and

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local scales (i.e., the scales of direct human experience). Some consequences of these “urban heat islands” include increased energy costs and consumption, exacerbation of air pollution episodes, and increased heatrelated illnesses among the sick and elderly populations. Besides impacts on temperature, landscape properties within urban areas are altered in ways that can also induce severe changes to local surface and subsurface hydrology. Buildings, roads, and acres of parking lots cannot absorb summertime rainfall as efficiently as vegetation and soil, increasing the potential for severe flooding. Rainfall that once was intercepted by vegetation and gradually infiltrated into the topmost soil layers now quickly pools over pavement and is dumped into storm sewers. In addition, the urban environment can no longer be effectively cooled by natural evaporation from moist soil and transpiration from vegetated land, so it warms more than the unperturbed landscape. Finally, the urban land cover itself modifies the intensity and distribution of rainfall-producing storms around major urban areas. Beyond its direct effects on temperature, evaporation, and runoff, land use and land cover change interacts in complex ways with other meteorological and climate system processes, leading to additional impacts. Clouds that are formed by the interaction of the land surface with the lower atmosphere can have a considerable moderating effect on the amount of surface heating or cooling. Likewise, heavy rainfall that moistens the topmost soil layers can become a powerful cooling mechanism on local temperatures that can persist for several days to a few weeks. In addition, the surface warming introduced by urbanization near coastal regions can noticeably enhance the strength of the summertime sea breeze. This enhanced sea breeze can more effectively cool afternoon temperatures over land, thereby mitigating some of the effects of the surface-induced heating. Increased fragmentation of the land cover also impacts this sea breeze circulation, while at the same time leading to additional, inland mesoscale circulations. Together, both of these types of circulation systems can influence the triggering of late afternoon thunderstorms, as well as affect air quality and the rates of atmospheric pollutant transport and dispersal. Land cover change—and its unintended consequences—is becoming an important national policy issue in the face of accelerating development worldwide and as questions associated with carbon budgets and carbon credits move to the forefront in the post-Kyoto era. A concerted effort to quantify current and projected future rates of land surface change is just beginning. Fundamental questions that must still be answered include: (1) what are the

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overall rates of land cover change around the world, and what are the rates of change by sector (i.e., what are the rates of conversion from agricultural to urban land cover); (2) how do the rates of change vary locally, regionally, and temporally; and (3) how are these changes related to factors such as population growth, economic development, social structure, and the use of technology? While recent research has increased our fundamental understanding of interactions between land-surface processes and atmospheric dynamics and thermodynamics at smaller scales, we hope that these additional insights gained into the range of possible impacts of land cover change on regional climate will eventually be useful for decision-making related to mitigation of, and the adaptation to, the consequences of land use. Such informed decision-making is potentially relevant for many diverse concerns, such as preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, management of water resources, development of energy and transportation policy, and prediction of agricultural yields. As just one example, projection of changes in heating degree days and air quality as a result of local changes in near-surface air temperature and low-level wind patterns could be expected to have implications for public health policy in New Jersey and around the world. On an international level, land cover change, and its climatic impacts, have the potential to seriously affect food availability, and, by altering important biogeochemical cycles, threaten the sustainability of global agricultural and forest product supply systems. Because of these far-reaching implications, it is imperative that we work toward an even greater understanding of the degree to which land use and land cover change, at the scales of a small region such as New Jersey, or that of the entire globe, may affect the well-being and health of our present society and its future generations. This study is one step toward this goal. Notes This research was sponsored by a grant from the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES), as part of the 2001 NJAES Graduate Scholar Program, of which the lead author was the first recipient of this award. The research and preparation of this chapter has also been supported by a grant from NASA, through their Landsat Data Continuity Mission. The views expressed within do not necessarily reflect those of NJAES or NASA. We thank David Robinson and Peter Wacker for their valuable insights, and Roni Avissar and Roger Pielke for their contagious enthusiasm. We also thank James Irons for his support. Finally, we humbly extend an appreciation to George H. Cook and Cornelius C. Vermeule,

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because without their true commitment and dedication to mapping New Jersey at the time, our historical land cover change project would likely have proved much more difficult, if not impossible. For examples of reconstructions of global changes in historical land cover, see Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan Foley, “Estimating Historical Changes in Global Land Cover: Croplands from 1700 to 1992,” Global Biochemical Cycles 13 (1999): 997–1027, and Kees Klein Goldewijk, “Estimating Global Land Use Change over the Past 300 Years: The HYDE Database,” Global Biochemical Cycles 15 (2001): 415–33. These are global land cover datasets that approximate seminatural vegetation during the last three hundred years, and emphasize the growing dominance of human land use on global and regional land cover patterns. A review of the principal dynamic links between the land surface and the atmosphere can be found in Roger Pielke Sr., “Influence of the Spatial Distribution of Vegetation and Soils on the Prediction of Cumulus Convective Rainfall,” Reviews of Geophysics 39 (2001): 151–77. Thomas Chase et al., “The Relative Climatic Effects of Landcover Change and Elevated Carbon Dioxide Combined with Aerosols: A Comparison of Model Results and Observations,” Journal of Geophysical Research 106 (2001): 31685–91. Comprehensive overviews of the human dimension of land use dynamics have been described by the National Research Council, Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), and by Thomas Loveland et al., Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2003), especially in the chapter titled “Land Use/Land Cover Change.” Daily surface weather observations, however, do exist for over a century in only a few populated locations, such as New York City. These surface weather observations cannot be used to describe global wind and temperature patterns in the upper atmosphere, where such dynamic factors as the jet stream, troughs, and ridges principally control our surface weather and climate. The replacement of the original forests of the eastern United States with cropland and other modern vegetation may have resulted in cooler mean surface air temperatures during the spring season, and a moistening of the air during spring and summer, as suggested by Gordon Bonan, “Effects of Land Use on the Climate of the United States,” Climatic Change 37 (1997): 449–86. Large-scale deforestation occurring in the tropics is believed to lead to profound regional climate shifts, as proposed by Carlos Nobre et al., “Amazonian Deforestation and Regional Climate Change,” Journal of Climate 4 (1991): 957–88, and Shinjiro Kanae et al., “Impact of Deforestation on Regional Precipitation over the Indochina Peninsula,” Journal of Hydrometeorology 2 (2001): 51–70, among many others. Once the forests are removed through logging and development, the resulting changes in temperature and rainfall rates may prevent them from regrowing and naturally taking hold again, even if the human destruction were discontinued. Because tropical forest regions are critical sources of heat and moisture for the entire global atmosphere, the effects of tropical deforestation could eventually influence, or may even now already be influencing, global atmospheric circulation patterns.

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8. Observational studies reporting increases in both the mean maximum and minimum temperatures in urban areas, and decreases in the diurnal temperature range, include Thomas Karl et al., “A New Perspective on Recent Global Warming: Asymmetric Trends of Daily Maximum and Minimum Temperature,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 74 (1993): 1007–23; Kevin Gallo et al., “Notes and Correspondence: The Influence of Land Use/Land Cover on Climatological Values of the Diurnal Temperature Range,” Journal of Climate 9 (1996): 2941–44; and Stanley Gedzelman et al., “Mesoscale Aspects of the Urban Heat Island around New York City,” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 75 (2003): 29–42. For material on other related impacts of urbanization, including changes in rainfall around major cities, see Robert Bornstein and Qinglu Lin, “Urban Heat Islands and Summertime Convective Thunderstorms in Atlanta: Three Case Studies,” Atmospheric Environment 34 (2000): 507–16; J. Marshall Shepherd et al., “Rainfall Modification by Major Urban Areas: Observations from Spaceborne Rain Radar on the TRMM Satellite,” Journal of Applied Meteorology 41 (2002): 689–701; and J. Marshall Shepherd and Steven Burian, “Detection of Urban-Induced Rainfall Anomalies in a Major Coastal City,” Earth Interactions 7 (2003): 1–17. 9. Land surface contrasts due to landscape patches on the order of 5–100 km (e.g., water versus land, forested versus bare ground, paved versus vegetated) create horizontal temperature and pressure contrasts, as reported by Roni Avissar and Tatyana Schmidt, “An Evaluation of the Scale at Which Ground-Surface Heat Flux Patchiness Affects the Convective Boundary Layer Using Large-Eddy Simulations,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 55 (1998): 2666–89, and Somnath Baidya Roy and Roni Avissar, “Scales of Response of the Convective Boundary Layer to Land Surface Heterogeneity,” Geophysical Research Letters 27 (2000): 533–36. These temperature contrasts produce mesoscale wind circulations in the lower atmosphere, modifying cloud and rainfall patterns (that may then also drive changes in surface temperatures), as shown in many studies, including Moti Segal et al., “Evaluation of Vegetation Effects on the Generation and Modification of Mesoscale Circulations,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 45 (1988): 2268–92, and Christopher Weaver and Roni Avissar, “Atmospheric Disturbances Caused by Human Modification of the Landscape,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 82 (2001): 269–81. Because these localized or mesoscale circulations are superimposed on the mean wind field, their subtle presence is difficult to discern from traditional large-scale weather observation networks. Therefore, most studies of these phenomena have been computer modeling investigations similar to those described in the present chapter. 10. Overgrazing in the Sonoran desert has been shown to result in cooler surface air temperatures in the days immediately following summertime thunderstorms, due to increased surface evaporation, as described by Robert Balling, “The Climatic Impact of a Sonoran Vegetation Discontinuity,” Climatic Change 13 (1988): 99–109, and Nevin Bryant et al., “Measuring the Effect of Overgrazing in the Sonoran Desert,” Climatic Change 17 (1990): 243–64. 11. Jean Sidar, George Hammell Cook: A Life in Agriculture and Geology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976).

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12. Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule, Atlas of New Jersey, Geological Survey of New Jersey, topographical atlas sheets 1–17, 34 × 24 inches, 1883–89 (New York: Julius Bien and Co., 1889). Available from Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. 13. Sidar, Cook, 106. 14. The seventeen individual maps were already fitted to a polyconic map projection with 2.0-arcminute grid spacing, which translated the state of New Jersey into a gridded domain of 51 × 74 cells. The effective map resolution is about 10.5 km2, or 2,580 acres. 15. The full digitization of the George H. Cook topographical atlas sheets was completed by Paul Stuart Wichansky, the lead author of this chapter, whose historical land cover change project was featured in a recent New York Times article by Kirk Johnson, “Mostly Sprawling and Warmer: Scientists Factor Land Use into New Jersey’s Climate,” New York Times, October 24, 2002, Metro section, New York City edition. 16. The physical properties that were averaged include surface albedo, roughness length, displacement height, leaf area index, and vegetation fraction. 17. The census included acreage data on improved and unimproved farmland in each county, where improved farmland was further delineated as either tilled land (i.e., cropland) or meadow-pasture land. The unimproved farmland mainly represents forest and woodlots. These land use types were then interpreted into fractional area coverages of four broad land cover categories—mixed crop, deciduous forest, pasture land, and an “other” category for land cover types such as developed land, urban areas, or various tracts of nonagricultural lands within each county. 18. Although the relatively coarse county-level resolution of the census data, and its smaller number of land cover categories, limited the detail relative to the significantly finer resolution of the Cook map series, the 1880 census represents the best existing regional land cover dataset available to reconstruct the surrounding landscape of this era. The spatial extent of our historical land cover reconstruction with the 1880 census data covers the full domain of two of our figures, 7.1 and 7.2 (to be shown later). 19. The U.S. Geological Survey NLCD dataset is described by James Vogelmann et al., “Completion of the 1990s National Land Cover Dataset for the Conterminous United States from Landsat Thematic Mapper Data and Ancillary Data Sources,” Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 67 (2001): 650–62. 20. This NLCD land cover classification consists of twenty-one hierarchical land cover classes in a modified Anderson Level II scheme, which was originally defined with less detail by James Anderson et al., “A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data,” U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Professional Paper 964 (Washington, D.C., 1976). The USGS NLCD land cover classification scheme was specifically designed for use in environmental, land management, and modeling applications to include national-scale analysis. 21. This is a strategy used in land use and land cover change sensitivity experiments by Louis Steyaert and Roger Pielke Sr., “Using Landsat-Derived Land Cover, Reconstructed Vegetation, and Atmospheric Mesoscale Modeling in Environmental

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and Global Change Research,” paper presented at the 53rd International Astronautical Congress, World Space Congress, Houston, Texas, October 10–19, 2002. Incorporating a common set of land cover classes between the landscapes minimizes the impact, on the simulated weather and climate, of differences between the reconstructed and NLCD datasets that might be related only to the variations in classification schemes, rather than representing the actual historical changes to the land surface. This would help minimize the development of apparent mesoscale circulations that may develop due to the presence of these water bodies in the present-day dataset that the gridded census data could not resolve at the same location. John Cunningham, New Jersey’s Rich Harvest: A Brief History of Agriculture in New Jersey Published in Commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the New Jersey Agricultural Society (Trenton: New Jersey State Agricultural Society, 1981). U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part I (S. K-28) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975). Donald Agthe, “A Study of the Effect of Urbanization on Agriculture in New Jersey” (M.S. thesis, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 1964). Available from the Library of Science and Medicine, Rutgers University, 165 Bevier Road, Piscataway, N.J. 08854. A detailed overview of RAMS can be found in both William Cotton et al., “RAMS 2001: Current Status and Future Directions,” Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics 82 (2003): 5–29, and Roger Pielke Sr. et al., “A Comprehensive Meteorological Modeling System—RAMS,” Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics 49 (1992): 69–91. Besides estimating the full set of equations required to simulate and predict atmospheric motion, RAMS includes an assortment of specialized software modules that correspond to other physical processes in the atmosphere; for example, to calculate the formation of clouds and precipitation and the transfer of shortwave (solar) and longwave (thermal) radiation throughout the system. LEAF-2 is described in detail in Robert Walko et al., “Coupled AtmosphereBiophysics-Hydrology Models for Environmental Modeling,” Journal of Applied Meteorology 39 (2000): 931–44. This ability is crucial because, under similar synoptic-scale meteorological conditions, the weather (for example, temperature, energy exchanges, winds, clouds, or precipitation) that develops over a large forest or a large agricultural area of several kilometers in size can be very different from the respective weather that develops over a similar-sized urban area or bare ground area. The importance of the land surface to atmospheric processes is the foundation for the idea that historical landscape transformations can significantly impact climate. At the start of each of our computer simulations, each grid cell in the experimental domain (i.e., covering New Jersey and surroundings) is assigned its own terrain slope and soil textural class. In addition, we specify a maximum of six land cover types (including water) for each grid cell. A set of surface characteristics, such as albedo and surface roughness, is also prescribed for each of these land cover

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types. The effects of these individual land cover types are then weighted according to their respective fractional areal coverage within the grid cell. As the RAMS computer program runs, LEAF-2 calculates several different surface processes, for example, the storage and vertical exchange of water and heat within and between multiple soil layers, multiple snow layers (if we were considering winter instead of summer), vegetation, and the overlying atmosphere, while the rest of RAMS simultaneously solves the atmospheric equations. The resolution of the NCEP data grid is quite coarse, with a spacing of 2.5 degrees × 2.5 degrees in latitude and longitude, or a few tens of thousands of km2, but this dataset is sufficient to force RAMS at its lateral boundaries. The application of this dataset keeps the simulated meteorology inside RAMS evolving in a way that is consistent with the outside atmospheric environment throughout our chosen time period, July and August 1999. RAMS assimilates this NCEP data every six hours at the outer boundaries of its simulation domain. The RAMS program inputs the 2.0-arcsecond latitude-longitude land cover data and, on grid 3, resamples the data to a 2 km gridded map projection before starting the simulation. We specified each of the three grids in RAMS to have forty vertical levels, from the surface to 25 km altitude, and eleven additional vertical levels downward into the soil, from the surface to a 2.5 m depth. At least a month-long time scale is required to properly investigate the interplay between the more slowly varying, large-scale meteorology and the diurnal processes (e.g., the daily exchanges of heat and moisture between the land and the atmosphere) that respond most directly to the land surface state. In addition, the equations and algorithms that RAMS uses to estimate atmospheric motions as well as the processes that produce cloud and rainfall droplets yield only a first-order approximation to real-world conditions that can produce rainfall. In the sea breeze circulation, low-level winds near the surface flow from the ocean to the land, with a reversal of wind flow from the land to the ocean at somewhat higher levels in the atmosphere. The circulation pattern also includes an area of upward vertical motion over the land with downward vertical motion over the ocean.

Chapter 8

A Century of Natural Disasters in a State of Changing Vulnerability New Jersey, 1900–1999

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James K. Mitchell

Introduction Everywhere on Earth relationships between societies and their physical environments are subject to periodic disturbances. Natural hazards are one important source of such perturbations. In addition to threatening the lives of people and acting as a drain on the public purse, floods, storms, blizzards, forest fires, and droughts also signal the existence of flawed societal responses to environmental constraints on the human use of the physical world. When these events occur, the provisions that humans make to buffer themselves from harm are put to the test. Sooner or later, however, protective adjustments become mismatched with changing hazards and losses ensue.1 In an accompanying atmosphere of crisis, hurried and illconsidered searches for improved alternatives are all too frequent, thereby helping to recreate the conditions for subsequent disasters. Fortunately, outcomes of this kind need not occur. Scientists, planners, and managers who understand the process of adjustment and keep watch for telltale shifts in patterns of events and human responses are in a good position to help society avoid major losses by identifying and redressing deteriorating relationships between people and nature well before they give rise to full-blown catastrophes. New Jersey provides both an excellent laboratory for studying the changing calculus of natural hazard and an ideal context for applying the results. Not only is there a comparative wealth of documentary material 164

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about a wide range of twentieth-century natural hazards and their consequences; the need for improved management of risks and vulnerabilities is acute. In this state the task of adjusting human populations to environmental constraints has long been hampered by galloping demands for the conversion of open spaces to urban uses, by a limited supply of usable land, and by the rapid pace of societal change: hence new arrangements for living with hazards are incubated in the equivalent of a pressure cooker. Given the increasing degree to which other parts of the world are subject to similar problems, New Jersey functions as a valuable bell-weather. To paraphrase Mayor Kenneth Gibson’s well-known 1970 comment about Newark’s status as a trend-setter for American’s urban problems: wherever the world’s developed areas are going with respect to natural hazards, New Jersey is likely to get there first. For that reason above all others, historically informed studies of New Jersey’s experience with natural hazards are both necessary and desirable.2 There is already a large body of scholarship on the human dimensions of natural hazards, much of it produced since World War II by geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists.3 After some early seminal studies of floods, droughts and environmental diseases as drivers of societal change, historians largely neglected this field.4 However, a number of recent books, and collections of history conference papers promise to reverse this trend.5 To date there have been no comprehensive history-focused studies of New Jersey’s natural hazards although many researchers in the natural and social sciences have sketched the historical background of New Jersey hazards in works that addressed other themes.6 The present examination is therefore a path-breaking endeavor. A canvas of New Jersey’s twentieth-century experience with natural hazards and disasters offers a valuable perspective on today’s issues of hazard management and environmental policy making in general. It is based on analysis of evidence from a wide variety of sources. Among others, these include federal and state government reports, published professional literature from the field of natural hazards research, and archived editions of the New York Times. Websites sponsored by nongovernmental organizations, local history buffs, and hazard interest groups have also been tapped, including a number that carry oral, written, and photographic records of specific New Jersey disasters. Personal experiences of New Jersey hazards and a career studying the human dimensions of natural hazards and disasters also infuse the analysis. Nevertheless, the unstudied sources that might have informed this chapter remain vast, diverse, and not always obvious, so

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it makes no claims to being a truly comprehensive survey of available information. Rather it is a sample of the whole that is as useful for helping to pose questions as it is for providing pertinent answers. Natural hazards are not extreme in New Jersey compared with many other places but they have proved to be important both in their own right and as prompts to broader environmental management actions. In this chapter, seven events are first singled out as possible candidates for a “Great disasters of twentieth-century New Jersey” list. This section is then followed by an analysis of trends in the major components of hazard. Finally, pre1900 records of New Jersey hazards are queried to explore the possibility that twentieth-century data provide an unrepresentative picture of the state’s potential for catastrophe. We begin by considering New Jersey’s status as a hazardous place.

A State of Modest Extremes The terms “New Jersey” and “natural disasters” are not an obvious pair. For one thing, some kinds of hazardous natural phenomena that are common elsewhere do not exist within state boundaries (e.g., volcanoes, avalanches, icebergs). Others that are present do not pose high levels of risk to human life and property (e.g., earthquakes, subsidence). Yet others that gave evidence of activity in the far distant past have not been associated with damaging events in New Jersey since European settlement began here some three to four centuries ago (e.g., tsunamis). New Jersey’s list of truly threatening natural events is mainly populated by coastal storms, blizzards, forest fires, river floods, and periodic droughts. Yet even among these there are few that would rate a mention on the roster of noteworthy American natural disasters. There are no in-state equivalents of the Galveston hurricane of 1900 or Miami–Dade County’s Hurricane Andrew (1992); the massive, catastrophic fires that consumed Peshtigo (1871) or Yellowstone National Park (1988); the Mississippi floods of 1927 or 1993; or the Great Plains “dust bowl” droughts of the 1930s. Blizzards may be an exception.7 The state’s experience with the great northeastern blizzard of 1888 and its successors in 1947 and 1996 clearly merits attention, though New Jersey’s blizzard record has been overshadowed by the more newsworthy accounts of neighboring places like New York City, which were also affected by the same events.8 In per capita annual losses of insured property from all types of weather-related catastrophes, New Jersey ranks thirty-fourth among the fifty states.9 Compared

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to other parts of the country, this is a state of modest natural extremes. But disasters do occur and their repercussions have been widespread.

Major Disasters Any attempt to construct a list of major twentieth-century natural disasters is necessarily a difficult exercise that involves choosing criteria for different types of impact (e.g., deaths, injuries, economic losses, evacuees, etc.); selecting damage thresholds (i.e., at least x deaths per year, minimum public service disruption times); bridging gaps and resolving inconsistencies among different datasets (e.g., precise counts versus estimates); and similar complications. The aggregation of losses at different scales adds further problems. For example, are events that produce large but diffuse patterns of losses equivalent to those that involve smaller loss totals heavily concentrated in single communities? Should communities that suffer repeated moderate losses be lumped together with communities that experience a single acute, severe disaster? Different evaluators employ different methods for answering these questions, with different implications for interpreting the outcomes. Some small New Jersey communities have been destroyed and subsequently rebuilt—often more than once (e.g., Forked River, Ocean County, in 1930 by fire; Harvey Cedars, Ocean County, in 1944 by tropical storm, and in 1962 and 1992 by nor’easters).10 Others are chronically hazard prone—frequently in the news and often damaged without being entirely devastated. Municipalities like Wayne (Passaic County), Warren Grove (Ocean County), and Sea Bright (Monmouth County) are representative examples. One of the state’s larger communities—Atlantic City—has experienced significant storm damage at least ten times during the century (1903, 1934, 1944, 1954 (twice), 1962 (devastating), 1978, 1984, 1991, and 1992).11 Trenton has had similar experiences, encountering one tornado (1902), three floods (1903, 1955, 1975), and one blizzard (1996) on its list of most newsworthy events of the twentieth century.12 The growing importance of natural hazards and disasters in New Jersey is reflected in the increasing frequency with which they provide a reason for gubernatorial Emergency Orders.13 These orders have the force of law and may remain in effect indefinitely, although most are intended to be temporary. They generally permit the governor to direct organs of the state to take specific actions in relation to rapidly developing problems or other crises. Between January1941 and the end of 1999, 781 Emergency Orders

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were issued by governors of New Jersey. Thirty-nine of these involved States of Emergency or other actions in relation to threatened or actual natural disasters. Orders terminating or rescinding previous orders (approximately 39 more) are not included. River floods (19), droughts (8), winter storms/blizzards (7), and coastal storms (5) clearly dominate these actions, accounting for 32 of the 39. Hurricanes and tropical storms (2) and wildfires (1) triggered three orders. The rest were administrative actions. As noted above, these numbers suggest that the importance of natural disasters, as gubernatorial issues, increased significantly beginning in the 1980s. However, it is possible, indeed likely, that other factors should also be taken into consideration. Since 1974 governors have made increasing use of Executive Orders to conduct a wide range of government business, not just for disaster relief, whether because of difficulties with the legislature or for other reasons. This accounts for at least part of the upsurge in disaster-related orders after 1970. Nevertheless, the mere fact that governors attached enough importance to natural disasters to warrant the issuance of Executive Orders is reason enough to believe that they have been high on the state’s political agenda in the latter part of the twentieth century. Moreover, the frequency with which such orders have been issued—once or twice a year on average in the last two decades—illustrates the extent to which state residents have become familiar with the notion of New Jersey as a hazardous place. Executive Orders and other disaster declaration data tend to understate the publicly perceived hazardousness of New Jersey with respect to certain kinds of risks. Chief among these is flooding. For example, New Jersey ranks fourth among all states in numbers of flood insurance polices in force; during 2000 there were 174,744. This is less than the 1,737,222 in Florida, 353,152 in Louisiana, and 358,413 in California but well ahead of many states that are much larger than New Jersey and have greater susceptibility to flooding. New Jersey also has a relatively high rank (18th) with respect to insured losses from all types of weather-related catastrophes.14 During the 1990s these losses exceeded $1.2 billion or approximately $143 per head of population. This is comparable to the per capita losses in California during the same period ($150) but well behind those of Hawaii ($1,649), Florida ($1,427), and fifteen other states. Bearing these caveats in mind, a list of New Jersey’s major natural disasters might look something like table 8.1. This table prompts a number of observations. First, it includes seven events—three river floods, two coastal storms, one drought, and one multiblaze forest fire episode. Most hazard events lasted a number of days and

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Major Natural Disasters in New Jersey, 1900–1999

Date

Type

Location

Impacts

October 7–10, 1903

Flood after passage of tropical storm

Passaic River basin

$7 million damages; estimated 2000 cost of repeat up to $3 billion (National Water Summary, 1989)

September 14, 1944

Tropical (coastal) storm

Long Beach Island, Brigantine, Atlantic City, Ocean City, Sea Isle City

8 deaths, 460 homes, and 217 other buildings destroyed, c. 3,600 buildings damaged; $25 million loss

August 7–13, 1955

Flood after passage of Tropical Storms Connie and Diane

Delaware, Raritan, and Passaic River basins

Worst along middle Delaware and in Blairstown on Paulins Kill, at least 50 N.J. and Pa. deaths

March 6–9, 1962

Nor’easter coastal storm

Entire Jersey oceanfront coast

10 deaths; $130–400 million loss; half Cape May’s population evacuated

April 20–22, 1963

37 major forest fires

Pine Barrens

7 deaths, 186 homes and 197 outbuildings destroyed; 190,000 acres burned

1960s

Drought

Statewide

Considered the 20th-century drought of record but may have been surpassed in 2000–2002.

September 16–17, 1999

Flood after passage of Tropical Storm Floyd

Raritan and Passaic River basins

4 deaths; $1 billion loss statewide

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one—the sixties drought—stretched over several years, perhaps a decade. Second, disasters did not occur at regular intervals. Most (71 percent) took place during the century’s middle decades (1940s, 50s, and 60s). These were also the most deadly disasters, accounting for almost all disaster fatalities. Third, weakening tropical storms have proved much more problematic than hurricanes, especially for inland areas, where they produced record-setting floods in the Delaware, Raritan, and Passaic basins. Fourth, the number of people killed by natural disasters in New Jersey has been relatively small.15 However, the scale of economic and material losses has been large and growing. Given the costs of Tropical Storm Floyd and estimates of the costs for a repetition of the 1903 Passaic flood, it seems likely that New Jersey has entered an era where billion-dollar natural disasters are increasingly likely.16 However, before we can accept these judgments a number of analytic complexities need to be addressed. Chief among these is the nature of natural hazard.

The Nature of Natural Hazard Natural hazard is a joint product of human and nonhuman components that can be summarized with the aid of a simple two-variable formula wherein “risk” stands for the natural contributions and “vulnerability” represents the human ones. Hazard = (Risk) × (Vulnerability) Here attention is directed to the (neglected) human side of the equation, so risk is treated as a single, uncomplicated set—though it is, in fact, a more complex variable.17 Vulnerability can be further broken down into three primary components: Vulnerability = (Exposure) × (Resistance) × (Resilience) Roughly speaking, exposure is a measure of the population at risk, resistance can be equated with the effectiveness of existing measures that are intended to prevent, avoid, or reduce losses, and resilience refers to the capacity of a hazard-impacted community to resume functioning in an acceptable manner after experiencing serious loss. With all other factors being equal, communities with high levels of exposure, low resistance capabilities, and poor resilience are most likely to suffer disaster, even though risks may not be very large.

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Risks Five kinds of natural risks have historically been particularly important in New Jersey and continue to be troublesome today. Blizzards and droughts can be experienced anywhere in the state but the other three common risks (floods, coastal storms, forest fires) exhibit distinctive spatial patterns. The nine southernmost counties (fig. 8.1), which comprise the Inner and Outer Coastal Plains (fig. 8.2), are most at risk to coastal storm-related winds, floods, and erosion as well as forest fires.18 Here risk is primarily a function of an exposed position with respect to storm tracks, low-lying topography, the unconsolidated nature of surface geology, high percolation rates of the dominant sandy soils, and the extent to which the region is covered with fire-susceptible vegetation. The remaining twelve counties of central and northern New Jersey (Middlesex, Mercer, Hunterdon, Somerset, Warren, Sussex, Morris, Bergen, Passaic, Hudson, Essex, Union) are most at risk for various kinds of river flooding. In this region watersheds tend to be small, steeper than elsewhere, and floored with impervious rocks that shed runoff quickly into numerous streams. Although blizzards and droughts can occur anywhere, they are more troublesome in central and northern counties that are more urbanized, more elevated, colder, and lack major aquifers. It is worthwhile observing that risk has long ranked higher as an object of scientific inquiry than any of the other components of hazard. As Ian Hacking points out, in the nineteenth century the advent of probability theories and statistical tools for measuring departures from norms opened the way for the scientific analyses of events—such as floods and storms—that had hitherto been consigned to the unexplained realm of chance.19 As the twentieth century unfolded in New Jersey, the amount, spatial coverage, and types of scientific data about risks changed markedly and it is difficult to make sense of the evolution of human adjustments to hazard without taking this into account. (It might be added that scientific attention to vulnerability—though still limited—is currently on the increase and it may well be necessary to provide a similar analysis of public knowledge about vulnerability in future accounts of hazard adjustments.) Public and nongovernmental organizations have been observing, monitoring, measuring, gathering, collecting, analyzing, and reporting on natural risks in New Jersey for more than a century. The systematic collection of scientific information about extreme natural risks began in the eighteenth

Figure 8.1. New Jersey’s counties. Source: Rutgers University, Department of Geography, 2005.

D

M

O

LA

IN

E PI

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HI

L GH

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ID A GE LL & EY R V

T OU

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CO

T AS

AL

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0

20 miles

Figure 8.2. New Jersey’s major watersheds. Source: Rutgers University, Department of Geography, 2005.

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century and continued throughout the nineteenth century but most of what is known today is derived from twentieth-century observations and records. By the beginning of the twentieth century the age of exploration, surveying, and mapping was long past its peak in New Jersey and public environmental agencies were more concerned with rationalizing the exploitation and use of natural resources or with protecting citizens—and especially their property—against harm from natural extremes. Systematic weather observation and record keeping in New Jersey began during 1886, although individuals had established local networks of observers from the 1840s onwards.20 Natural disasters played an important role in speeding the installation of data-gathering instruments as well as the collection and cataloging of readings. In almost every case these actions were sparked by concern about the prospect of continuing heavy property losses—first of timber, later of structures exposed to river floods, and even later of oceanfront homes and commercial properties. Losses due to forest fires spawned a number of information-gathering initiatives by state and federal government agencies. Systematic and continuing records of forest fires in New Jersey were first kept in 1872. A decade later Franklin Hough prepared a Report on Forestry in which he indicated that “the whole country (New Jersey) is overrun about every twenty years by fire”—especially during 1820, 1829,1832–33, 1856–59, 1865–66, 1870–72, 1875, 1880–85, 1900, 1902 and 1908–9.21 This was followed up by Pinchot and Graves’ seminal report on New Jersey’s Pine Barrens fires.22 Floods stimulated similar efforts to gather data about environmental fluctuations. The U.S. Geological Survey issued its first two flood reports nationally on the Passaic River floods of 1902 and 1903.23 Although stream gauges had been installed in New Jersey as early as 1887, the instrumentation of New Jersey’s rivers for purposes of collecting data on water flows and river heights received a major boost from these floods.24 More specialized flood warning gauges were also deployed in a number of places.25 From a handful of stream-gauging stations in 1900 the numbers eventually grew to 206 by the early 1990s, only to experience an approximate 50 percent cutback to 92 gauges, mainly as a result of government fiscal retrenchment but also due to the development of more efficient recording devices and remotely sensed information systems. Data on coastal storms in New Jersey has been collected since the second half of the nineteenth century as part of state and national weather observation networks, but storm-related erosion was a greater source of

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worry. By 1900 the New Jersey oceanfront was already festooned with bulkheads, seawalls, groins, and jetties of all kinds—wooden, stone, concrete, and metal—but, as pointed out by early geomorphologists like William Morris Davis and Douglas Johnson, their net effect on the supply of sediments necessary to sustain beaches and other coastal landforms often made matters worse.26 However, shore erosion did not attract state and federal government attention until the century was already well advanced. Concern about disappearing sand and collapsing buildings spurred the New Jersey Board on Commerce and Navigation in 1929 to fund studies designed to identify causes and possible responses.27 Douglas Johnson was a key player in this work and in 1929 organized study teams from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct path-breaking research on beaches near Long Branch. This research in turn stimulated the federal government to constitute a formal Beach Erosion Board in 1930 that later evolved into the Corps’ Coastal Engineering Research Center (1964)—a leading international research institution for engineering-related responses to coastal erosion and storm damage that is still active.28 Subsequently these traditions have been carried forward by new generations of geographers and geologists such as Norbert Psuty, Karl Nordstrom, Stewart Farrell, and Susan Halsey, based at Rutgers University, Stockton State College, and other institutions. These researchers have been highly influential in supplying the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s coastal engineering and management programs with scientific analyses of coastal problems and policy advice.

Exposure Natural risks are an essential part of natural hazards but they are far from being the most significant driver of the upward trend in hazard losses that has characterized the twentieth century in New Jersey. An increasing degree of exposure to risk has been a far more potent force. That more and more people and investments are being placed in areas at risk is perhaps the most important component of rising vulnerability to natural disasters. Population and population density figures provide a surrogate measure of exposure to natural hazards. It is widely accepted that population is an important driver of hazard both because larger populations often mean larger numbers of people at risk and because larger populations require increased infrastructure and other material investments for their support. All other things being equal, the most hazard-susceptible sites are usually

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avoided by developers during early phases of settlement, but later come under increasing pressure when safer alternatives have already been exploited. New investments in locations at risk then contribute to heavier losses by amplifying risk-driving natural processes and also raise the total loss potential by placing newer and more expensive investments in harm’s way. The population of New Jersey grew by almost 450 percent during the twentieth century, in the process propelling a change in the state’s dominant landscapes from a mixture of small towns and moderate-sized cities amid a predominantly rural setting to an overwhelmingly urban and suburban landscape whose rural surroundings are rapidly receding.29 The rate of population expansion was fastest in the first three decades (1900–1930) but the largest absolute increments occurred during the 1950s and 60s.30 The fewest numbers were added during the 1930s depression era. Compared with the decades that preceded them the two most recent decades (1980s and 90s) were a period of reduced population growth. Today New Jersey hosts around eight and a half million residents. They are not evenly distributed throughout the state or among its various natural risk zones. Historically, most people have lived in the suburbs of New York and Philadelphia as well as along the transportation corridor that runs between the two. This is one of the least risky parts of the state with respect to natural disasters. Although patterns of growth have varied both in time and space throughout the century, the general trend has been toward more people, in denser concentrations, in increasingly risky locations. Recent growth has been strongest in the small watersheds of northern and central New Jersey, in coastal counties, and along the fringes of the Pine Barrens. Four recently suburbanized counties (Bergen, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean) now account for one-third (32.8 percent) of the state’s population, up from about one-seventh (13.0 percent) at the beginning of the century. Two counties that lie mostly within the flood-affected Raritan River basin (Middlesex, Somerset) grew by 930 percent. The four oceanfront counties—which are most exposed to coastal storms and beach erosion— grew 916 percent and much of the new population there moved onto barrier islands and former wetlands, which are among the most at-risk locations.31 Likewise, Burlington County, which contains a major piece of the firesusceptible Pine Barrens, grew by 727 percent.32 The shift to riskier locations appears even more dramatic on the local scale than at the county or state levels. Although comprehensive data on hazard zone occupance are not yet available for the municipal level, Stafford Township in Ocean County provides an example. The township occupies a

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slice of the Pine Barrens fronted by wetlands along Barnegat Bay. It is exposed to serious risks of forest fire and contains at least one old village community, Warren Grove, which was sited and constructed with fire protection specifically in mind, as well as a number of large modern housing developments scattered throughout the woods.33 It also hosts the extensive Beach Haven West “lagoon” housing complex, which is sited on filled wetlands adjacent to Barnegat Bay where there is a clear risk of flooding. Some real estate developers style Stafford “the fastest growing municipality in the fastest growing county in New Jersey.”34 In 1940 the township had a population of 1,253; today it is home to 22,532—an increase of 1,798 percent in sixty years, with almost half of that growth occurring in the last decade of the century. Similar growth has appeared around the fringes of the Pine Barrens in many other municipalities. In 1960 the population of Whiting in Ocean County was less than 4,000; by 1990 it was almost 36,000. Today, senior citizens make up three-quarters of Whiting’s population.35 When fires threaten communities on the edges of the Pinelands, it is common for news media to report precautionary evacuations of retirement housing complexes, rehabilitation centers, and nursing homes. Many residents of these areas are elderly and a substantial proportion are also handicapped, infirm, or otherwise have limited mobility—clear indicators of heightened vulnerability to hazard. Census-based population figures tend to understate the case for increased human exposure to natural hazards in some areas. This is because they record population according to domiciles, rather than the activity spaces that people occupy during the course of a day, a week, a year, or a lifetime. For example, seasonal populations in resorts that line the Jersey shore are customarily up to ten times larger than winter populations. How this compares to nineteenth-century totals is presently unknown. Whether they are now more dispersed than previously is also difficult to assess. Towards the close of the nineteenth century it was possible to reach most of the shore via good mass transit links from inland (e.g., railroads). Most of these subsequently ceased operating by the mid-twentieth century. Now movement is almost entirely by private automobile—in theory granting greater spatial and temporal flexibility to travelers but in practice constrained by routing bottlenecks such as the bridges and causeways that are the bane of evacuation planners.36 In a similar fashion diurnal commuting flows bring huge numbers—in the hundreds of thousands at least—to metropolitan centers like New York and Philadelphia as well as workplaces that are increasingly dispersed throughout the state. Exposure to hazard is

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often as much a function of the time of day and the day of the week as the location of a home address. Between 9 am and 4 pm on weekdays suburban neighborhoods and entertainment venues are typically empty while cities, central business districts, and schools are typically full. The effect of a sudden snowstorm may be chaotic at rush hour during the week but benign on Sunday. These kinds of population shifts complicate the assessment of human vulnerability but have less effect on the vulnerability of structures and infrastructures because they remain fixed in place. This is one reason why vulnerability assessments have tended to focus on the vulnerability of things rather than the vulnerability of people—thereby introducing biases into public policies and hazard management programs. It would be misleading to suggest that the trend in exposure has been solely in one direction. Some older at-risk communities have declined or even disappeared. Small Pine Barrens villages like Harrisville have been abandoned in the twentieth century—as much because of their declining economic fortunes as the repeated fire danger. Today there are no private homes on Sandy Hook in Monmouth County or on Island Beach in Ocean County, and few in the floodplain of the Raritan River below Bound Brook. In each case preexisting land uses have been replaced by federal, state, or local parks and by recreational areas that are less susceptible to hazardrelated losses. For example, photographs taken in the opening decades of the twentieth century show farm machinery active in fields near New Brunswick that are now part of an extensive county park (Johnson Park)— a testament to efforts to replace other uses with open space and recreational facilities that began in the 1930s. On the other hand these positive changes have been heavily outweighed by others that added to the potential hazard burden.

Resistance Theoretically, even a highly exposed population is not necessarily vulnerable to hazard if it is well protected. Many kinds of protective adjustments were in place by 1900 and many others were adopted in the ensuing one hundred years. The fact that disasters continue to occur suggests that these measures have not been foolproof. However, the picture is a complex one both because there are many different kinds of adjustments and because every kind has had a somewhat different history. Moreover, some adjustments have fared better than others, some appear to be operating at the limits of their effectiveness, and some have never been tested by the

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kinds of events they are designed to offset. There have also been clear shifts in public preferences for certain types of protective measures; responses that were once commonplace are no longer embraced, though the legacy of their previous popularity lingers on. In addition, innovations are always appearing either in the form of products for sale or institutional reforms promoted by different interest groups, so the theoretical range of adjustments ebbs and flows over time. Broadly speaking, in 1900 forest fires were regarded as a nearly inevitable fact of life in New Jersey. Loss bearing was probably the most common adjustment, together with voluntary fire-fighting efforts by forest residents and post-disaster relief provided by other community members, churches, and charitable organizations. Some communities were abandoned after fires but it is difficult to be sure whether fires were the basic cause of abandonment since economic problems generally were a strong corollary factor. There was no organized system of warning for fires, nor any special plans for evacuation and sheltering. Permanent engineering works for fire control had not been invented, and fire insurance was available but rarely adopted in rural areas that were most at risk for fires. Some communities in the Pine Barrens had evolved practices for protecting emergency fire-fighting water sources and for clearing fire-breaks around clustered buildings but there was no government-sponsored hazard zoning.37 By the year 2000 there had been major changes. Some adjustments had reduced vulnerability to fires and others had increased it. Among the former was a state government–sponsored Forest Fire Service composed of a mixture of paid and voluntary personnel, trained and equipped with special vehicles, in conjunction with fire-watching towers, then airborne spotters, and finally computerized wildfire models and remotely sensed satellite imagery. Deliberate efforts to replace private, absentee ownership of forested land with public preserves, parks, and recreation areas and to regulate the use of environmentally sensitive lands through a new state-created Pinelands Commission in 1979 also helped to reduce vulnerability to fires. However, shifts in the economy and demography of Pine Barrens communities often had the incidental effect of increasing vulnerability as more people and capital investments flooded into peri-Pineland districts. Many of the newcomers were retirees or elderly infirm, who were physically vulnerable to fire risks, and most were reluctant to authorize local tax increases necessary to provide expanded public services, including better fire protection. Responses to coastal storms in 1900 offered some contrasts to the fire adjustment experience. Here a big difference was the existence of a system

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of life-saving stations at three-mile intervals along a coast that was much more sparsely populated than at present.38 Together with federally sponsored storm warning systems for mariners and others that had been in existence since the 1870s, these provided forms of protection not available to residents of fire-exposed communities. However, the primary beneficiaries of such adjustments were seafarers, owners of commercial cargoes, and fisher folk, many of whom were not in-state residents. Although the lifesaving stations disappeared by midcentury, the concern for preserving lives offshore was replaced by a concern for saving them onshore. Beginning in the 1970s coastal evacuation planning became an important activity for federal agencies (e.g., the Army Corps of Engineers, Philadelphia District) working in concert with the New Jersey Division of Emergency Management and State Police.39 The presence of “evacuation route” signs on highways leading inland from the oceanfront is now one of the most common modern sights for coastal visitors. If they look around they can usually make out the sirens that sound the alarms that signal evacuations. Not so visible, but perhaps more important, is a system of state, county, and local emergency management that plans and trains for storm emergencies in the event they occur. This system is responsible for responding to all types of emergencies, including man-made ones as well as natural, and it extends throughout the state, not just the coastal areas. With the help of voluntary organizations that manage emergency shelters and provide post-disaster relief to victims (e.g., the American Red Cross), the formal emergency management system has made major strides in recent years to upgrade the status of planning for, and coping with, sudden emergencies. Together with their federal counterpart, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the state-level emergency managers were, at century’s end, also in the process of shifting priority attention to the task of hazard mitigation (i.e., addressing the underlying causes of disasters instead of just responding to their consequences). For example, under the provisions of Project Impact, Trenton, Atlantic City, and Avalon were among New Jersey communities that had agreed to serve as case study sites for a wide range of hazard mitigation initiatives. The entire agenda of hazard protection, however, seems to have been reconfigured following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It is too soon to be sure what the eventual outcomes will be but initial signs suggest that the welcome shift toward mitigation has come to halt, indeed gone into reverse.40 In 1900 another major difference between adjustments to coastal storms and adjustments to forest fires was the profusion of predominately

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privately constructed coastal defense works, such as bulkheads, groins, and embanked railroad rights of way near built-up areas like Sea Bright, Asbury Park, Long Branch, and Atlantic City. Heavy losses to these features were already placing the future of adjacent homes in doubt at the beginning of the century.41 Thereafter there were repeated searches for more effective engineered structures, and for the funds to pay for them, that continue to the present without achieving more than partial and localized success. For example, in 1928 the New Jersey Budget Commission granted $855,000 for coastal protection, mostly for construction of groins (sometimes erroneously referred to as “jetties”). This was succeeded by calls for federal assistance, and a grant of $4 million was authorized by President Roosevelt. Since seawalls, bulkheads, and groins were employed to no avail, requests for more ambitious solutions were made. At one point in the early 1960s the Army Corps of Engineers discussed the possibility of placing massive rock groins at intervals of a few hundred yards along the coast from New York to Mexico, supplemented by beach sand pumping and replanting. During the second half of the twentieth century a great deal of criticism was directed at these “hard” engineering adjustments to storm and erosion risks.42 Today, the previous emphasis on “hard” engineering has been increasingly replaced by a shift to “soft” engineering (e.g., beach nourishment, dune revegetation), though the legacy of structure-led coastal defenses persists almost everywhere. The change was beginning to occur at midcentury in the form of beach nourishment conducted by the Beach Erosion Board, and such schemes have become the norm during the past two decades.43 On the one hand nourishment reflects a growing desire to replicate natural processes rather than oppose them, as massive walls and other structures had done. But on the other hand nourishment is expensive because sand is swept away by storms and requires periodic replenishment. In addition, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers–sponsored nourishment schemes require the benefiting communities to share only a small proportion of the costs, approximately 5 to 10 percent, with the rest being borne by state and local governments. This passes a disproportionate share of the expenses for coastal protection on to larger noncoastal constituencies that do not necessarily benefit as much as coastal property owners. In other words, debates about coastal protection have increasingly turned on issues of equity and distributional justice as much as concerns about absolute cost, environmental impact, and technical appropriateness. Finally, though nourishment appears to retard erosion quite well, it does not necessarily help with flooding because storm surges can elevate sea levels, thereby allowing water to pass

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into back beach areas or entirely across barrier islands where houses and infrastructures are located. The residents of coastal areas have been quick to take up one nonengineering adjustment after it became available following passage of the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968.44 This legislation was intended to link the purchase of federally subsidized insurance with municipal agreements to control land use in floodplains—river as well as coastal—in ways that would eventually reduce the numbers of structures at risk. However, the latter provisions have generally been interpreted to mean elevating homes above expected flood levels. Not only does this assume that available records of storm damage are sufficient to be an accurate guide to the future, it forecloses on other possible land use options. In effect local governments have been reluctant to live up to their side of the bargain and floodplain development has increased in many places, especially along the coast. Efforts to introduce dune management legislation that would have substituted another form of “soft engineering” (i.e., artificially constructed and planted dunes) and supporting land use controls for protective structures also failed. Among coastal property owners in New Jersey the rate of adoption of flood insurance is among the highest in the USA, and payouts after major storms are commensurately large. In 2000, $11 billion worth of New Jersey coastal property carried federally based flood insurance. These buildings are generally owned by people who are more affluent than the average and presumably better able to bear the losses. Many are “repeat offenders,” who gain reimbursements for damage inflicted by several storms. One-third of all flood claims submitted from New Jersey to date (i.e., about $131 million of $403 million) are accounted for by just 3,887 coastal properties. Sixteen of New Jersey’s beach towns rank among the top two hundred communities nationwide with multiple losses.45 River flood control in the United States has been popularly identified with the building of massive engineering structures, including dams, flood walls, diversions, levees, and retention basins on a regional scale by large agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. New Jersey possesses a number of projects that fit into this conception but they are not the norm. More usual have been smaller earth-filled berms and levees, such as the one that rings the religious community of Zarephath on the Raritan, or so-called channel “improvements” and drain-and-fill schemes for low-lying marshy areas. Many municipalities have also favored periodic channel clearance projects, which are intended to ease the movement of water but often are the ecologically destructive equivalent of clear-cutting forests. It is sometimes

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the case that engineering structures that were built for entirely different purposes function, inadvertently, as flood control devices. For example, long, high railroad embankments serve to retard incoming floodwaters from the Passaic River in Wayne and in Bound Brook from the Raritan River. There are believed to be about 1,600 dams in New Jersey. Most were erected by private owners or by local communities for purposes of power generation or impounding of recreational ponds. Since the 1980s such dams have themselves been seen as contributors to flood risks because many are not maintained and fail during heavy rainstorms. Three dams failed and twenty-one others were damaged in 1999 during Tropical Storm Floyd.46 The removal of dams and the nurturing of damaged ecosystems are now components of a new field of “restoration ecology,” which has come to be included as a responsibility of the Army Corps and others who work to protect flood-prone areas. Large flood control dams have been proposed, most notably after the 1903 Passaic floods and after the 1955 floods on the Delaware River.47 The Corps of Engineers has a long list of flood control projects, including levees and flood bypass tunnels in various stages of planning and development, but these have been on the books for many years—sometimes many decades— most without coming to fruition. At present there are a total of fifteen active Corps of Engineers flood control projects in northern and central New Jersey. Most are being evaluated for feasibility and have not progressed— indeed may never progress—to the design or construction stages. High cost, lack of economic justification, major environmental impacts, or lack of public acceptability are among the reasons for not proceeding. Nonetheless requests for engineering works continue to be made. The case of the Upper Rockaway River in Morris County is typical. The floodplain of this stream contains at least one thousand structures that have been flooded in 1971, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1984, 1996, 1999, and 2000. Six studies have been conducted by the Corps but no engineering works were ever constructed.48 It should not be thought that engineering structures represent the only, or even the most effective, way of protecting communities against flooding. But they do seem to be the alternative that has sprung first to mind among government leaders and laypersons in the twentieth century. Perhaps, reared in a culture that has long celebrated the achievements of industrial engineering technology (e.g., Alexander Hamilton’s Society for Useful Manufacture, the Roebling family, Thomas Edison, etc.), New Jerseyans, like many Americans, are inclined to the “tech-fix.” However, national policy makers have been encouraging the use of nonstructural

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alternatives for the past two decades. Among others these include the restoration of natural flood protection ecosystems (e.g., wetlands); flood proofing (e.g., raised lower floors, lower floors used as parking decks, lack of ground floor openings that would admit water, moveable building contents); government-funded buyout and removal programs for repeatedly damaged structures; combined flood insurance and hazard zoning schemes; purchases of flood-affected land for open space uses; removal of habitually flooded underpasses; moveable flood gates at strategic openings; and improved flood warning and evacuation systems. Some of these adjustments are now beginning to appear in disaster-affected New Jersey towns. Responses to drought in twentieth-century New Jersey have been cyclical and heavily dependent on expanding water supply infrastructure. Typically, as population increased, demand rose beyond the supply capacity of local water systems—a condition that was usually revealed by a significant drought. This triggered a search for new sources of supply, which proved sufficient until they were again exceeded by rising demand, thereby setting off another search for additional supplies. New reservoirs were the preferred adjustments in central and northern parts of New Jersey, where underground water supplies were sparse and difficult to develop but the glaciated upland topography provided sites for impounding rivers. Elsewhere, in southern New Jersey, large underground aquifers and lack of suitable reservoir sites encouraged communities to rely on pumped well water. Yet, surface reservoirs near cities often became polluted as urbanization increased, and new sources were sought at greater distances from users. By 1900 some of the state’s larger cities were already pumping water from lakes and reservoirs up to thirty miles beyond municipal boundaries. Newark began drawing from the Pequannock Watershed as early as 1891, and seventeen years later Jersey City started receiving water from the Boonton Reservoir twenty-five miles to the west. It is worth noting that the search for “pristine” water reflects the enduring importance of risk perception in the selection of adjustments to hazard. Many water specialists have pointed out that properly treated river water is not only just as safe to drink as water from distant hills but also much nearer at hand and often immediately available in large quantities. But these arguments have largely fallen on deaf ears; consumers often make judgments about risk that are at variance with those of technical experts. Reservoir construction was particularly vigorous during the opening decades of the twentieth century, with subsequent additions, usually triggered by specific droughts, during the 1930s, early 1950s, and early 1960s.49

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For example, Oradell (1901) and Boonton (1908) reservoirs were among the first additions. Wanaque, begun in 1920 and finished in 1930, was later extended in the late forties and early fifties after a 1929–32 drought raised questions about its ability to meet existing demands. It is now the largest single reservoir supplier in the state. Around this time the Delaware and Raritan Canal was also converted to water supply purposes. Two big reservoir additions followed during the severe 1960s drought—Spruce Run (1963) and Round Valley (1965). Since then the pace of reservoir construction has tailed off, with the last significant additions occurring in 1989 at Merrill Creek and at Manasquan in 1990. Today the era of reservoir construction for water supply purposes seems to be at an end, partly because New Jersey has run out of appropriate sites but also because other means for increasing the efficiency of water use or reducing demand now appeal to state leaders and residents. Lands that were acquired by the state for future reservoir sites have been turned over to open space uses (e.g., the proposed Six Mile Run Reservoir site, in Franklin Township, Somerset County). During the 1960s and 70s various studies pointed out the benefits obtained by interconnecting the state’s many separate water purveyors so that water surpluses in one system could be shared with others that were in deficit.50 This became one of the foundations of the 1982 State Water Management Plan, which was itself an innovative attempt to deal with a range of water issues in a more comprehensive way than heretofore.51 Subsequently, there has been an upsurge in efforts to encourage water conservation, not only during drought periods, but also on a longterm basis. The state’s Extension Services, environmental groups, and other advisory bodies now promote low-flow restrictors for shower heads, toilets, and other appliances as well as the use of gray water and water recycling. Indeed the Eagleton Institute’s New Jersey Poll has asked more questions about conservation-related adjustments to drought than about any other natural hazard. This is an indicator that political leaders and citizens alike now regard droughts as a legitimate and fruitful area for innovative public policy making. Emergency drought restrictions on water use have also come into their own, facilitated by new institutional arrangements among the governor of New Jersey, public water agencies, and private water supply systems. These began during the 1970s. In the most recent drought emergency, from March 2002 to March 2003, the state adopted increasingly stringent bans on outdoor watering practices, and the issuance of building permits was suspended in three townships of Atlantic County because aquifers on which this area relies were not being recharged quickly enough

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to ensure a reliable supply of potable water to an expanding population. Although this was an emergency procedure, the threat of invoking gubernatorial powers to protect water resources has acted as a chastening reminder that New Jersey is now in an era when drought adjustments that require changes in human behavior are being seriously contemplated and enacted. For a society long committed to “technological fixes” as a first-preference means of hazard management, this is a signal departure.

Resilience When employed in the context of disasters, “resilience” usually refers to the capability of a victim or a disaster-affected city to rebound from loss. At first glance resilience would seem to carry only positive connotations; surely the ability to resume one’s customary activities quickly and fully after suffering adversity is entirely praiseworthy. But what if those activities were ill-advised to begin with? Or there exist alternative, more appropriate sites on which they might be practiced? Or if there are better ways of using the places that are susceptible to hazard? Would the best interests of society not be better served by adjusting to these constraints rather than reestablishing the circumstances that prompted disaster? Has New Jersey become more resilient since 1900? At first glance the answer would seem to be a simple yes; after all, in the first half of the century it was not unheard of for residents to withdraw from fire-stricken homes in the Pine Barrens or for railroad companies to abandon bridges and rights of way that were repeatedly damaged by coastal storms and erosion, both tacit admissions that some New Jerseyans had not found successful ways of sustaining their desired land use practices in the face of natural extremes. These kinds of responses all but disappeared after World War II as the drive to develop New Jersey’s open spaces accelerated, even when these were exposed to hazard. Whether New Jersey has become more resilient or less resilient to natural disasters during the twentieth century is difficult to assess. Part of the problem arises from differing conceptions and definitions of resilience, part from a shortage of data with which to measure resilience, and part from lack of agreement about whether the attainment of some kinds of resilience ultimately forecloses better alternatives for coping with future hazards. When these caveats are taken into consideration, it seems likely that New Jerseyans live in a state that is now more certain of recovering from extreme events than at any previous time but mainly as a consequence of the greater

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interconnectedness, among different areas and different communities, that is a product of “modernization.” In other words, so long as a relatively small number of disaster-stricken communities can call upon aid from a larger pool of non-disaster-stricken communities, disaster recovery is assured, even if the cost of poor hazards management choices becomes very expensive.52 When employed in the context of disasters, resilience usually refers to the capability of a disaster victim or a disaster-affected city to rebound from loss. It has become common to find that the leaders of such communities often employ the notion of resilience to mobilize public support for tasks of reconstruction and recovery. Victims are typically informed that they will not be defeated by adversity but will rise, phoenix-like from the debris of disaster, to shape a future that will be both grander and better than it might otherwise have been. In such appeals, community resilience is equated with personal qualities of hardiness, independence, ambition, and resourcefulness, which are much celebrated in the popular imagery of American culture. This can sometimes be a smokescreen that allows leaders to compensate for lack of foresight and for failure to engage in actions that might have prevented or mitigated disaster. Despite its popularity as a theme of public rhetoric, resilience is the most poorly understood and least-documented aspect of disaster vulnerability. Comprehensive data on rates and degrees of disaster recovery in New Jersey are lacking and must be inferred from anecdotal evidence or limited case studies. Moreover, interpretations of resilience are complicated by the fact that somewhat different concepts and criteria are employed, depending on whether the operative notion of resilience is individual or collective. What follows considers these two types of resilience.53 Given the low levels of deaths and injuries inflicted by extreme natural phenomena in New Jersey, it might be thought that few people have had much cause to worry about disasters in the twentieth century, thereby minimizing the likelihood that individual resilience will be relied on as an adjustment to hazard. However, several countervailing factors must also be taken into account. First, disruption of normal activities and loss of material welfare remain as major concerns of individuals even when personal safety is no longer at issue; accelerating economic losses due to disaster are characteristic of New Jersey. Second, some groups are disproportionately likely to suffer disaster losses. This is especially true of minorities and other disadvantaged groups. Third, there has been a more general “shift to anxiety” triggered by the occurrence of uncertain but wrenching societal

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and environmental changes towards the end of the twentieth century; these may reinforce or exacerbate specific individual concerns about environmental hazards. Each of these factors has had some effect on resilience as a component of New Jersey’s hazard management. Threats to property values are often sensitive public issues in a state where (1) much personal wealth is invested in homes; (2) municipalities are heavily dependent on property taxes to finance schools and local government; and (3) property insurance companies are increasingly reluctant to offer coverage for coastal storm and erosion damage. In such settings, rising property losses due to natural hazards could be major sources of personal anxiety and thereby major challenges to individual resilience. There can be little doubt that some New Jersey populations are more frequently called upon to be resilient in the wake of disaster than others. A persuasive case can be made for the argument that marginalized immigrants have long been at disproportionate risk from natural hazards in New Jersey. Early in the century immigrant farmers suffered heavily from fires in the Pine Barrens. To a significant degree they became scapegoats in the eyes of longer-term residents, who frequently held them responsible for poor vegetation management practices and irresponsible land clearance techniques that contributed to the fires: “Hundreds of uneducated immigrants have invaded the Pines, owing to the cheapness of the land and proximity to large cities,” explained New Jersey’s state geologist in 1899. “Few of these have brought with them European forestry ideas, and many of the most disastrous fires are those which they carelessly set in clearing their farms.”54 Later in the century some poor minority populations became disproportionately concentrated in flood-prone parts of older cities like New Brunswick, Newark, and Paterson. For example, the worst-affected victims of Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999 were primarily migrants from Central America who occupied rental apartments in low-lying sections of the ironically named Bound Brook. These and other immigrants have frequently lacked the resources of local knowledge, accumulated wealth, family and community support networks, language skills, and experience of New Jersey norms and customs. Elderly retirees in the Pine Barrens and some coastal communities who are disproportionately exposed to fire, erosion, and storm hazards also lack the knowledge, mobility, and resources necessary to ensure successful protection against hazard. Throughout the twentieth century there have been massive changes in the assumptions that govern human expectations about the future, leading

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to greater uncertainty. Perhaps the most important of these is the dawning realization that humans possess the capacity to destroy both the human species and the habitable Earth. One component of this concern has been fed by the experience of global wars characterized by major assaults on civilian populations, weapons of mass destruction, and genocide. Another reflects the declining value of remoteness in a globalizing world where no location is ultimately secure from attack or the influence of others. Finally there is the discovery that humans have altered natural ecosystems and lifesupport systems in fundamental ways, including artificially enriching the carbon content of the atmosphere and dissipating much of its protective ozone shield.55 As the century came to a close, New Jerseyans were becoming increasingly aware that they lived in a predominantly human-constructed state where the margins of safety against natural hazards that were once provided by undeveloped lands and low-density populations were now considerably shrunken. In this respect the capstone event of the twentieth century may not have occurred until 2001, when this new sense of vulnerability was underscored by the terrorist attacks of September 11. All of these changes have probably affected the resilience of individual New Jerseyans but it is presently impossible to be specific about the details. The most that can be said at present is that, in the absence of effective anticipatory and mitigative actions, increased uncertainty probably places greater demands on the resilience of individuals in post-disaster situations, perhaps diverting resources from other more productive tasks. The role of collective resilience is a quite different story. In the past two or three decades many New Jersey governments and private firms have adopted plans for protecting infrastructure against natural hazards. Network interconnections, redundancies, backups, failsafe technologies, and the like increasingly form a cushion against that subset of rare events that used to occur more frequently. The net effect of these adjustments is to increase the scale at which systems fail. Higher-probability events are better buffered than previously but the very largest extremes are at least as potent as ever and probably more so because they are less expected. Granted the fact that the post-disaster resilience of some people is less than others, there remains the matter of deciding what constitutes an acceptable standard for measuring successful resilience. It has often been assumed that a return to the status quo ante is evidence of recovery—the quicker, the better. In recent years hazards researchers have come to question this view because it often perpetuates human behaviors and land uses that contribute to future disasters. For this reason resilience is now being

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reinterpreted to mean recovery that leaves individuals and communities better prepared to prevent, avoid, or reduce the impacts of future extreme events. Under the earlier interpretation, resilience has clearly increased throughout the twentieth century but if the revised view of resilience is employed, it is not at all clear that resilience is growing.

Conclusions The five types of natural hazards discussed here have played different roles in the lives of New Jerseyans during the twentieth century, and the nature of those roles has changed in different ways throughout that period. One way to understand these dynamics is with reference to trends in the major components of hazard. Briefly stated, risks of storms, floods, droughts, blizzards, and forest fires have changed only incrementally in the past century. However, shifts of population and investment patterns within the state have placed, and continue to expose, a large number of people and a vast slice of wealth in places that are inherently risky. For this reason, if no other, state policy makers should be prepared to address problems of accelerating losses in (1) coastal counties (storms, erosion, forest fires); (2) some other parts of south Jersey (e.g., Burlington County—fires); and (3) flood- and droughtsusceptible suburbanizing sections of central and northern New Jersey as well as older inner cities with flood-vulnerable immigrant populations. In so doing, it will be important to remember that contextual forces that are unconnected with natural hazard will play a large role in driving the processes that expose humans to loss. Many of these will remain the same but it is also possible that twenty-first-century hazard-producing environments will be surprisingly different from those to which we have been accustomed. Some phenomena may not remain exclusively within the realm of hazard and may also become thought of in other ways. New variants of old hazards may appear together with entirely new risk-causing processes. The history of twentieth-century resistance to hazard in New Jersey is highly complex. On the whole it is a tale of increasing ability to guarantee the safety of humans but not of buildings, infrastructure, and other valued entities. But the addition of more types of adjustment from which choices might be selected and the competition among proponents and among potential users for favored alternatives, serves to complicate the process of adoption of protective measures. Trends are detectable, such as the tendency for higher levels of government to take on more of the responsibilities for

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protecting individuals at risk or for paying the costs of their failures to do that job themselves. Likewise, there has been a shift away from engineering technologies towards nonstructural alternatives. There is also clear evidence that the limits of some adjustments are close to being reached (e.g., coastal evacuation systems, fire suppression). Trends in resilience are strongly modulated by considerations of scale. It is clear that the state as a whole is now more able to bounce back from disaster than at any previous time but the future of small disasterstricken communities (e.g., population less than 10,000) can still be tenuous. Population subgroups that are marginal to the societal mainstream are in the worst position of all, either because they may wish to remain anonymous to officialdom (e.g., illegal immigrants), because they lack the resources with which to secure their rejuvenation (e.g., elderly, poor, single mothers with dependent children), or because they are unaware of the sources of assistance that are available (e.g., recent migrants, linguistic minorities). Some of the common features that wind their way through the twentieth-century experience of natural disasters in New Jersey can be best stated in the form of four dilemmas that beset public policy makers. First is the question of whether to frame hazard management policies with respect to worst-case risks (e.g., great hurricanes, floods of record) or lesser extremes (e.g., dying tropical storms, local storm-water runoff hot spots) that may be more important not just in the aggregate but also because the mediating effects of increasing vulnerability may be just as great for smaller-scale physical events as for larger ones. In other words if people move into the most at-risk places, even very small risk increments can produce disproportionate losses. Arguments can be advanced on behalf of both policies—planning for hurricanes has undoubtedly improved New Jersey’s chances of staving off losses due to nor’easters and dying tropical storms, but it also undercuts the credibility of warning systems that are rarely validated by actual hurricanes. Waiting for the next great Pine Barrens fire is a bit like waiting for Godot—New Jerseyans might take pride in having crafted fire management systems that have functioned increasingly well for most of the twentieth century but without the comforting guarantee that they will perform so effectively when the “big one” eventually occurs. Second, shifts in the mix of hazard management technologies may improve capabilities for coping with natural extremes but they also change the parameters of hazard in ways that alter the nature of the problem in unanticipated directions. We have seen that the early reliance on “hard”

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engineering structures for coastal protection, flood alleviation, and drought mitigation has increasingly given way to new combinations of “hard” and “soft” engineering technologies and broadly “behavioral” adjustments (e.g., land use controls, water conservation) in coastal and river floodplains as well as drought-prone areas. Yet pressures to vest confidence in more narrowly conceived measures remain strong and seductive; witness the backlog of Corps of Engineers project proposals that have little chance of being adopted, or the fervor with which different interest groups advocate the supremacy of different alternatives, such as ecological technologies, economic incentives that affect the use of risky places, legislated penalties, and institutional reforms. Some form of integrated hazard management system, including watershed management initiatives, taking account of all of the different approaches is both necessary and evolving, but the very complexity of such a system compounds the potential for even more unanticipated outcomes. The Jersey shore’s embrace of flood insurance is a case in point; by adopting insurance we are reducing some risks while simultaneously increasing shore zone investments that raise other risks. The insurance system was cleverly designed and intended to produce a quite different outcome—lower flood damage totals as a result of lower levels of exposure. Third, New Jersey’s twentieth-century experience of hazard illustrates a dilemma about what is now referred to as “sustainable development.” The dilemma has been present from the outset but still remains unappreciated by many environmental planners. It is no surprise that economic profits and losses have always featured heavily in the calculus of policy makers who were concerned about the state’s natural hazards. Pinchot’s early report about forest fires and the New Jersey Board on Commerce and Navigation’s somewhat later one about shore erosion are good examples. But as the century unrolled other values have begun to be included, especially those that have to do with the long-term viability of natural lifesupport systems. Policies that affect the role of fire in the Pinelands and the drainage of coastal wetlands are representative. Unfortunately, sustainable communities are not necessarily safe communities. Orrin Pilkey, a Duke University coastal scientist, may be correct about the ultimate unsustainability of much coastal settlement on New Jersey’s highly eroding and storm-affected coast, especially as sea levels continue to rise, but few would agree to abandon any of the major coastal communities that are now only sustained by heroic efforts of beach nourishment and other measures. This sort of example serves as a pointed reminder that the sustainability/ safety dilemma has not yet been properly addressed.

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Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, is the dilemma of whether the proper response to natural disasters should be retrospective and reconstructive or prospective and innovative. For those who have suffered loss in disasters a return to the status quo ante ranks high among their desires, a fact that political leaders often recognize with promises of aid and mass media commentators underscore with human interest stories. But it is remarkable how often New Jersey’s disasters have provided spurs to innovation. We owe much of our environmental monitoring system to worries about disasters; witness the stream gauges and meteorological instrumentation that provides all sorts of spin-off benefits for New Jersey’s populations. The Delaware River Basin Commission and the state’s Water Supply Commission also owe their genesis to major floods and droughts. Beyond these findings are two more general issues about the contemporary relevance of New Jersey’s twentieth-century experience with natural hazards. One of these focuses on the changing role of “gatekeepers,” especially scientists, who interpret natural hazards for the broader public and thereby help to organize debates about policy. In the past the scientists who staffed state environmental agencies were often passionate advocates of deeply held personal beliefs about the moral value of conservation and the necessity for activist government intervention on behalf of these views.56 In the contemporary era, when public bureaucracies have been the object of much political criticism, should we assume that the same kinds of people and agencies will play similar roles? What other possibilities might be on the horizon? Finally, considered against long-term environmental and societal trends, how representative is the state’s twentieth-century experience with natural risks and to what extent is the twenty-first-century context of natural risks and vulnerabilities likely to be different? The further back in time the record of extreme events is pushed, the greater the likelihood of uncovering larger extremes; and, as the evidence of expanding human impacts on climate and other aspects of the physical world accumulates, the more likely that future extremes will be different from, and possibly worse than, those of the past.57 The record of twentieth-century disasters is certainly a valuable guide to the future but there is every indication that it can neither be regarded as a static base for decision-making nor a definitive blueprint for the future. Notes 1. Robert Kates, “Human Adjustment,” in Ten Geographic Ideas That Changed the World, ed. Susan Hanson, 87–107 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

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2. Kenneth Jackson, “Gentlemen’s Agreement: Discrimination in Metropolitan America, chapter 7 in Reflections on Regionalism, ed. Bruce Katz, 198 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000). 3. For studies by geographers see David Alexander, Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Piers Blaikie, Terry Cannon, Ian Davis, and Ben Wisner, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disasters, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 1994); Ian Burton, Robert Kates, and Gilbert F. White, The Environment as Hazard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; 2nd ed., Guilford Press, 1993); Kenneth Hewitt, Regions of Risk: A Geographical Introduction to Disasters (Harlow: Longman, 1997); and Ben Wisner, Piers Blaikie, Terry Cannon, and Ian Davis, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004). For studies by sociologists see Thomas Drabek, Human System Responses to Disaster: An Inventory of Sociological Findings (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986); Dennis Mileti et al., Disaster by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 1999); and E. L. Quarantelli, ed., What Is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). For studies by anthropologists see Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds., Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press and Oxford: James Currey, 2002); and Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman, eds., The Angry Earth (New York: Routledge, 1999). 4. William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976); Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged set (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; originally published as ten volumes, 1934–61); K. A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 5. For books see John Dickie, John Foot, and Frank M. Snowden, eds., Disastro!— Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics, Society (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Alessa Johns, ed., Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1999); Louis A. Perez Jr., Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987); Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For history conference papers see Christof Mauch and Christian Pfister, eds., Natural Hazards: Cultural Responses in Global Perspective (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 6. Jonathan Berger and John W. Sinton, Water, Earth, and Fire: Land Use and Environmental Planning in the New Jersey Pine Barrens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 120–21; Karl F. Nordstrom, Paul A. Gares, Norbert P. Psuty, Orrin H. Pilkey, Jr., William J. Neal, and Orrin H. Pilkey, Sr., Living with the New Jersey Shore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986); Norbert P. Psuty and Douglas D. Ofiara, Coastal Hazard Management: Lessons and Future Directions from New Jersey (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Stephen J.

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8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press; republished by University of Washington Press with a new preface by the author, 1997 and 1998). Paul J. Kocin and Louis W. Ucelline, “Snowstorms along the Northeastern Coast of the United States: 1955 to 1985,” Meteorological Monograph Series, Vol. 22, No. 44 (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1990). On the blizzard in New Jersey see David M. Ludlum, The New Jersey Weather Book (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983). For the snow storm in New York see also Mary Cable, The Blizzard of ’88 (New York: Atheneum, 1988). During the 1990s New Jersey losses averaged $149 per capita. The national mean per capita annual loss was $299. Hawaii topped the list with $1,621 per capita and Idaho brought up the rear with $22 per capita. These figures do not necessarily correlate with total losses suffered by each state because participation in insurance schemes varies significantly among the states. New Jersey Department of Parks and Forestry, Memorable and Historic Wildfires in New Jersey (Trenton, 1999). Federal Emergency Management Agency, Watermark, Fall/Winter 1998, 13. See http://www.capitalcentury.com/. For details see “New Jersey Governors’ Executive Orders, 1941 to January 1990,” Rutgers-Newark Law Library, New Jersey Digital Law Library, http://njlegallib .rutgers.edu/eo/eolist.htm#Kean, and State of New Jersey Executive Orders, http://www.state.nj.us/infobank/circular/eoindex.htm. Katherine Abend, Flirting with Disaster: Global Warming and the Rising Costs of Extreme Weather, U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund (Washington, D.C., 2001). The numbers of deaths attributable to technological disasters—especially transportation-related fires—have been significantly larger. For example, around 400 died when the shipping piers at Hoboken burned on June 30, 1900; 137 died during the burning of the liner Morro Castle off Asbury Park on September 7, 1934; and 36 died in the crash of the airship Hindenburg at Lakehurst on May 6, 1937. C. C. Vermeule, “The Floods of 1903: Passaic Floods and Their Control,” Annual Report of the State Geologist (Trenton, N.J., 1904). For example, natural risks may combine cyclical processes that operate at different rates (e.g., ENSO-driven weather cycles, which shift irregularly between El Nino and La Nina stages), disjunctive one-of-a-kind surprises, systems that are modified by humans (e.g., runoff regimes skewed by urbanization), and those that are beyond human reach (e.g., solar energy fluxes). Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland, Salem, Gloucester, Camden, and Burlington Counties. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). David M. Ludlum, The New Jersey Weather Book (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 8017. New Jersey Department of Parks and Forestry, Memorable and Historic Wildfires in New Jersey (Trenton, 1999); Pyne, Fire in America, 63 (see n. 6).

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22. New Jersey Report of the State Geologist, 1899. 23. G. B. Hollister and M. O. Leighton, The Passaic Flood of 1902, U.S. Geological Survey Water Supply and Irrigation Paper 88 (Washington, D.C., 1903), 56; M. O. Leighton, The Passaic Flood of 1903, U.S. Geological Survey Water Supply and Irrigation Paper 92 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 48. 24. See http://nj.usgs.gov/publications/FS/fs-109-02/. 25. February 11, 2003, was the 100th anniversary of the first two flood warning gauges in New Jersey. The March 2, 1902, flood that damaged Paterson triggered the installation of two gauges on the Passaic, and others were later added to the Pequannock and Rockaway Rivers in time to record the even larger Passaic Basin floods of 1903. 26. Cornelia A. Dean, Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1877. 27. Successor to the Board of Riparian Commissioners, which was first established in 1864, in part because of disputes with New York State over ownership of wetlands and islands in New York Harbor. 28. Mary-Louise Quinn, “The History of the Beach Erosion Board, U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers, 1930–1963,” Miscellaneous Report No. 77-9, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Coastal Engineering Research Center (Fort Belvoir, Va., 1977); and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “History of Coastal Engineering,” Coastal Engineering Manual, Part I. EM 1110-2-1100 (Part 1), 30 April 2002, i–36. 29. It should also be noted that abandonment of agricultural land in New Jersey has also been proceeding since the mid-nineteenth century. Regrowth forests now occupy considerable regions, especially at higher elevations in the northwest and in the pine woods of south Jersey. 30. These variations raise interesting possibilities for testing certain theories about factors that promote hazard. Several scholars have argued that the rate of societal change may be a more important factor leading to disaster than the absolute magnitude of change or levels of living achieved. 31. U.S. Department of the Interior, The Impact of Federal Programs on Wetlands: A Report to Congress by the Secretary of the Interior, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1994), http://www.doi.gov/oepc/wetlands2/index.html. 32. Some counties still have potential for further population expansion in hazardprone locations. Along the flood-susceptible upper Delaware River (Sussex, Warren, Hunterdon) population increased by only 382 percent during the twentieth century—significantly less than the statewide average. 33. Berger and Sinton, Water, Earth, and Fire, 120–21 (see n. 6). 34. See http://www.nj.com/newhomes/community/stafford.html. 35. See http://www.caucusnj.org/caucusnj/special_series/pinelands_transcripts.pdf. 36. New Jersey State Policy Office of Emergency Management, 1992. 37. John McPhee, The Pine Barrens (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976). 38. The national lifesaving station system was founded in 1854 at the urging of William Newell, a bachelor’s and master’s degree holder from Rutgers. See http://www.lehsd.k12.nj.us/seaport/Thulin/william_newell.htm. Newell was later appointed superintendent of the New Jersey stations (1861) and was honored by the New Jersey state legislature in 1896 for being solely instrumental in creating

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39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

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the system. See http://www.lehsd.k12.nj.us/seaport/Thulin/life_saving_station_ history.htm. Individual station houses were added in New Jersey throughout the early part of the twentieth century and continued in their original use (under the auspices of the Coast Guard) until the end of World War II, when they were decommissioned. New Jersey State Police Office of Emergency Management, New Jersey Hurricane Evacuation Study, 1992: Technical Data Report (West Trenton, 1992). James K. Mitchell, “The Fox and the Hedgehog: Myopia about Vulnerability in US Policies on Terrorism,” Terrorism and Disaster: New Threats, New Ideas; Research in Social Problems and Public Policy 11 (2003): 53–72. See http://www.srsd.org/search/studentprojects/2000/redhouse/. Michael Craghan, “The New Jersey Shore: The Developed Coast,” in From the Hudson to the Hamptons: Snapshots of the New York Metropolitan Area, ed. Ines M. Miyares, Marianna Pavlovskaya, and Gregory A. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 2001). Craghan notes that beach nourishment schemes have been reported in New Jersey as early as 1923 and that 122 such episodes have occurred between then and 1996 (Craghan 2001). One of New Jersey’s U.S. senators, Harrison Williams, was a key proponent of flood insurance and introduced unsuccessful bills in 1962, 1963, and 1965. Inquirer (Philadelphia), March 7, 2000. See http://www.state.nj.us/dep/nhr/engineering/damsafety/floyd.htm. On the Passaic floods see Norman F. Brydon, The Passaic River: Past, Present, Future (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1974), 225; and on the Delaware River floods see Irene Traviss Thompson, “The Tocks Island Dam Controversy,” in When Values Collide: Essays on Environmental Analysis, Discourse and Decision (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1976) 35–60. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “History of Coastal Engineering,” i–36 (see n. 28). New Jersey State Climatologist, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim/histdroughts.html (accessed 2004). Carey, L. Zobler, M. Greenberg, and R. Hordon, Urbanization, Water Pollution, and Public Policy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1972). The validity of assumptions used to create the plan has recently been called into question by the experience of the most recent (early 2000s) drought. According to State Climatologist David Robinson, with the benefit of hindsight, we can no longer take it for granted that the 1960s drought—which is the drought of record for water planning purposes—is the most severe that is likely to affect New Jersey. Like the well-known NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) syndrome, this process might deserve its own label; perhaps the SITCOM (Share in the Consequences of Mismanagement) syndrome. SITCOMs represent a dark side of the insurance principle wherein others are invited to share the costs of avoidable losses rather than unpredictable misfortunes. For psychologists, mental health therapists, and crisis counselors, resilience is the ability of individuals to deal with stress, anxiety, fear, and other physical or

198

54. 55.

56.

57.

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emotional traumas. For transportation engineers, utility network operators, and IT users, resilience is equated with the reliability of public infrastructure systems during times of acute hazard. For corporate executives and entrepreneurs, resilience is signaled by minimal business interruptions and maximal continuity in the production and distribution of products or services. New Jersey State Geologist, Report of the State Geologist (Trenton, 1899), 289. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Climate Change and New Jersey, EP230-F-97-008dd, Office of Policy Planning and Evaluation (Washington, D.C., 1997). Samuel P. Hayes, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). K. Harrington, “Climate Change and Urban Drought in Northern New Jersey” (Ph.D. dissertation in geography, Rutgers University, 1996), 354.

About the Contributors

Heather Fenyk is a Ph.D. candidate in urban planning and policy development at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. She holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. in city and regional planning from Rutgers University. She is president of Global Metrics, LLC, a planning and geomatics consulting firm based in New Brunswick, New Jersey. David H. Guston is professor of political science and associate director of the consortium for science, policy, and outcomes at Arizona State University. He has served on the National Science Foundation’s panel on Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology (2000–2002), the National Academy Steering Committee on Engineering Ethics and Society (2002), and was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002). His book Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research (Cambridge University Press, 2000) won the 2002 Don K. Price Prize from the American Political Science Association for best book on science and technology policy. John Hasse, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of geography at Rowan University. With a master’s degree in urban planning from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and a second master’s and Ph.D. in geography from Rutgers University, Hasse’s research interest focuses on land use geography, environmental planning, and spatial analysis. Richard G. Lathrop Jr. received his B.A. in biology from Dartmouth College in 1981, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in environmental monitoring from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He is presently an associate professor in the department of ecology, 199

200

About the Contributors

evolution, and natural resources at Rutgers University, where he also serves as director of the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis (CRSSA). Neil M. Maher is an assistant professor in the federated department of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark, where he teaches environmental history, landscape studies, the history of technology, and the history of health and medicine. His book Nature’s New Deal: Franklin Roosevelt, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2006. During the 2004–2005 academic year he was the Verville Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, where he researched his next book project on the environmental history of NASA and the space race. Bonnie J. McCay is a professor of anthropology and ecology in the department of human ecology at Rutgers University, where she teaches in the undergraduate curriculum in environmental policy, institutions, and behavior and coordinates the graduate certificate program in human dimensions of environmental change. Her books include The Question of the Commons (1987, with J. Acheson), Oyster Wars and the Public Trust (1998), Community, State, and Market in the North Atlantic Region (1998, with R. Apostle et al.), and Enclosing the Commons (2002, with R. Apostle and K. Mikalsen). In June 2000 Dr. McCay was named the Rutgers University Board of Governors “Distinguished Service Professor.” Eileen McGurty is associate chair of the graduate program in environmental sciences and policy at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches courses in waste management, environmental history, and environmental planning. She received her doctorate in urban and regional planning from the University of Illinois, and has published widely on environmental justice and garbage topics. She worked as an environmental planner throughout the New York–New Jersey region and continues to fuse theory and practice in her work. James K. Mitchell is a professor of geography at Rutgers University. He has chaired the U.S. National Research Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on the International Decade for Natural Hazard Reduction (1985–1987) and the International Geographical Union’s Study Group on the Disaster Vulnerability of Mega-Cities. Mitchell founded and directed the Association of American Geographers’ Hazards Specialty Group, the international journal

About the Contributors

201

Global Environmental Change, and the quarterly Environmental Hazards. Professor Mitchell is the author of more than 120 professional works on the human dimensions of environmental hazards, including The Long Road to Recovery: Community Responses to Industrial Disaster (United Nations University Press, 1996) and Crucibles of Hazard: Megacities and Disasters in Transition (United Nations University Press, 1999). Robert W. Reynolds is the Freyberger Professor of Pennsylvania German Culture and executive director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled American Rustic: The Landscape of Recreation, which examines the origins of rustic vacationing and the development of a rustic landscape in northwestern New Jersey. Other publications include six national register nominations for historic districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Vermont. During the summers, Reynolds lives at Beaver Lake, one of the lakes held hostage by the Lake and Park Bill, in a rustic 1912 bungalow. Bryant Simon is professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Oxford University Press, 2004) and A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and coeditor of Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from the Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 2000). Louis T. Steyaert is a remote sensing scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. His research examines the effects of land cover change on regional weather and climate variability. As a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Steyaert has also conducted drought monitoring, early warning alerts, and climate impact assessment studies in many developing countries. He is a graduate of the University of MissouriColumbia with Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Atmospheric Science and an A.B. in Mathematics. Robert L. Walko graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.S. in physics and an M.S. and Ph.D. in atmospheric science. He has specialized in numerical weather simulation and was co-developer of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) while employed at Colorado State University over a fifteen-year period. His research experience and interests

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About the Contributors

include convective storms, tornadoes, physics of clouds and precipitation, land surface biophysics, numerical methods, and atmospheric dynamics at all scales. He is currently a senior research scientist with Duke University and has developed a new global version of RAMS, known as the OceanLand-Atmosphere Model (OLAM). Christopher P. Weaver is an assistant professor in the department of environmental sciences at Rutgers University. He has also served as associate director of the Center for Environmental Prediction from 2001 to 2005. He received an A.B. in geological and geophysical sciences from Princeton University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1996. Paul Stuart Wichansky is a graduate of Cook College at Rutgers University, where he received a B.S. and M.S. in meteorology. He worked with the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) as an aviation cooperative meteorologist, before returning to Rutgers for his Ph.D. in environmental science. Paul is presently a Ph.D. candidate with the Center for Environmental Prediction.

Index

Adirondacks, 91, 92, 96, 104 aerial photography, 112 aerosols, 128 air-conditioning, 18–19, 26n26 air flight: bird strikes and—, 31; fares, 19, 26n27 air pollution, 1, 3 Albright, Andrew, 92, 97–104 Allen, Woody, 20 Amboy Township, 54 American Angler, 90, 93 American Red Cross, 180 Anderson classification system, 114 ANJEC. See Association of New Jersey Environmental Commission Arnold, Robert, 54 –56 Arnold v. Mundy, 53–57, 58, 61, 62, 63 Arthur Kill, 32 Asbury Park, 181 Ashmun, Candace, 71, 73, 74, 78–80, 86–87 Association of New Jersey Environmental Commission (ANJEC), 72, 73, 78–79, 86 Atlantic City, 18 Atlantic City, 4, 11–12, 76; Convention Hall, 24; natural disasters, 167, 169, 180, 181; oyster wars near, 59; Queen of Resorts, 12–18; Queen’s Descent, 18–21; reclaiming nature, 23–24; remaking of, 21–23

Atlantic County, 121, 185 Atlantic Ocean, 4, 13–17, 51 Avalon, 180 Back Bay (Boston), 31 Barnegat Bay, 60, 177 barrier beach, 51 Bay Head Improvement Association, 61 Bayonne, 32, 41 beach erosion, 20, 21 Beach Erosion Board, 175, 181 beaches access issues, 60–62 Beach Haven West, 177 Beirut, Lebanon, 11 Bergen County, 115, 171, 176 Bergen County Utility Authority, 37 Berkeley, Lord, 55 Berkshires, 92 bird strikes, 31 blizzards. See natural disasters Boardman, Alexander, 14 Board of General Proprietors, East New Jersey, 54, 56–57, 58 Board of Proprietors of West Jersey, 97 Boardwalk, 11, 12, 14 –24, 24n10 Boonton Reservoir, 184 –185 Boston, Massachusetts, 31, 74 Bound Brook, 178, 183, 188 Brigantine, 169 Bud’s Lake, 99 Burlington County, 115, 120, 176, 190 203

204

buyout programs, 184 Byrne, Brendan, 75, 85 CAFRA. See Coastal Areas Facilities Review Act California, 61, 168 Camden and Atlantic Railroad, 13 Camden County, 115 Cape May, 13 Cape May County, 62 Caribbean, 19 Carpenter’s Pond, 94 Carson, Rachel, 69 Carteret, George, 55 casinos, 21–23 Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, 31 CEA. See Combustion Energy Associates Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, 113 Central America, 188 Central Park (New York City, New York), 100 Charles II, 55 Chauncey Center, 72,73, 79, 80–81, 86 Cheesequake Creek, 56 Cher, 22 Chester County House, 14 Chicago, 57 Civil War, 13 Clean Water Act, 5, 68, 73, 76–79 climate conditions: computer modeling, 139–145; historical and present-day land cover, 6, 131–136; land cover changes over last century, 136–139; sensitivity to landscape changes, 145–156 cloud cover, 150–151 Coastal Areas Facilities Review Act (CAFRA), 75, 79 Coastal Plains, 121, 171 coastal storms. See natural disasters Coastal Wetlands Act, 80 Combustion Energy Associates (CEA), 40– 41 Comprehensive Management Plan, 75

Index

computer modeling of climate: climate system model, 139–141; configuring, 143–145; design of numerical experiments, 141–143 Connecticut, 23, 112, 134 Conservation Foundation, 81 Construction Grants Program, 75 consumer economy, 29, 31, 34 Cook, George H., 131, 132, 132, 136 Cook maps, 132, 132, 134, 135, 137 Cortright, James, 99–100 counties, New Jersey, 172. See also specific counties Cronon, William, 3, 12, 17 crowds, 20 CRSSA. See Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis Culver Lake, 97 Cumberland County, 119 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 22 Davis, William Morris, 175 Deckertown (Sussex), 90–91, 100 deforestation, 130–131, 137, 159n7 Delaware, 134 Delaware Bay, 51, 58–60 Delaware Canal, 185 Delaware River, 51, 60, 169, 170, 183 Delaware River Basin Commission, 193 Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, 120–121 Digges, John, 52 digital orthophoto quarter quads (DOQQs), 114 dioxin, 43 Disneyland, 12, 20 Dixon, Justice, 103 Dollywood, 12 DOQQs. See digital orthophoto quarter quads Dove Island, 98 Dresden, Germany, 11 Drew University, 79, 86 droughts. See natural disasters Duke of York, 55 Duke University, 192

Index

dumping, illegal, 2 dust bowl droughts, 166 Eagleton Institute, 185 Earth Day, 21 East River, 32 Ebbing Wetlands, 78 ecological footprint, 113 Edison, Thomas, 183 EIS. See environmental impact statement electricity generated from landfills, 29–30, 43 Elizabeth, 41, 149 Elizabeth I, Queen, 52 Emergency Orders, 167–168 Emman’s Grove, 98–99 environmental commissions, 71 environmental community, emergence of, 78–86 Environmental Defense Fund, 76 environmental history, 3 environmental impact statement (EIS), 72 environmental indicators, 113 environmental policy, 3 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 38–39, 76–77; Wetland Identification and Delineation Manual, 84–85 environmental science, 3 EPA. See Environmental Protection Agency ERDAS Imagine, 114 erosion, 20, 21 ESRI ArcView, 114 Essex County: fishing in, 5, 95; land use change and urban growth, 115; natural risks, 171; waste transformation efforts, 28–30, 37, 39, 41–43 Essex County Resource Recovery Facility, 38 Essex County Utility Authority, 43 evacuation systems, 184 Executive Orders, 85, 168

205

Fair, Abigail, 73, 74, 81, 86–87 farmland loss, 119–120 Farmland Preservation Program, 120 Farrell, Stewart, 175 fecal counts, 20 Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA), 180 federal law and local knowledge, 76–78 FEMA. See Federal Emergency Management Association Fenske, Helen, 70–71, 73–76, 79, 86–87 Fenyk, Heather, 5 Ferrigno, D., 122 fires. See natural disasters first nature, 12, 17 fisheries management, 58 fishing, 5. See also free-fishing controversy fishing parks, 5 Flat Brook club, 96 flood control, 30, 182–183 Flood Hazard Control Act, 75 flood insurance, 184 flood proofing, 184 flood protection ecosystems, 184 floods. See natural disasters flood warning systems, 184 Florida, 19, 168 Florio, James, 75 Flushing Meadows, 32 fly ash, 37, 43 Ford Foundation, 76 Forest and Field, 101 Forest and Stream, 93–94, 97, 102, 103 Forest Fire Service, 179 forest loss, 120–122 Forked River, 167 Fowler, Kenneth, 97, 103 Foxwoods Casino, 23 Franklin Township, 185 free-fishing controversy, 5, 90–93; erosion of free fishing, 95–97; privatization and—, 97–103; public access, 104; tradition of free-fishing, 93–95 Fresh Kills landfill, 31

206

Freshwater Wetlands Campaign, 73, 79–83, 86 freshwater wetlands protection. See wetlands, protection Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act (FWPA), 68, 69, 71, 80, 85–86, 87 Funnell, Charles, 16 FWPA. See Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act Galveston, Texas, 166 gambling, 4, 21–23 garbage: crisis, 4, 28–29; recycling, 39– 40; wetlands and—, 30– 44 GCMs. See Global Climate Models geographic information system (GIS), 113, 114 –115 Giants Stadium, 31 Gibson, Kenneth, 39,165 GIS. See geographic information system Global Climate Models (GCMs), 139 global warming, 129 Gloucester County, 120 Goldfine, Morton, 85 Goldman, Clifford, 35 Governor’s Commission on the Meadowlands, 33 Grand Canyon, 16 Graves, Eisenhart, 174 Great Depression, 33 Great Plains, 166 Great Swamp, 70–75, 78, 82, 86 Great Swamp Committee, 73 Great Swamp Watershed Association, 73, 79, 81 Green, Seth, 94 Greenblatt, Aliza, 14 Greenblatt, Isidore, 14 Greenblatt, Marjorie, 14 greenhouse gases, 128 Green Mountains, 92 Greenwood Lake, 93 Greenwood Lake Sportsman’s Club, 95–96 Guston, David, 5 Guthrie, Woody, 14

Index

Hackensack Meadowlands, 4, 28–38, 51, 63, 75 Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission (HMDC), 32–38, 42; Comprehensive Plan, 34 Hackensack Meadowlands Reclamation and Development Act, 32, 74 –75, 79 Hackensack River, 2, 32 Hacking, Ian, 171 Halsey, Susan, 175 Hamilton, Alexander, 183 Harrisville, 178 Harsimus Cove, 58 Hartshorn Arboretum and Bird Sanctuary, Cora, 72 Hartz Mountain Industries, 85 Harvey Cedars, 167 Hasse, John, 6, 113, 114 Hawaii, 168 Hawthorne Camping Club, 96 Hawthorne Lake, 96 hazardous waste bills, 2 hazard zoning schemes, 184 Hewitt, Abraham, 96 Highlands, 121 High Point State Park, 120 Hilton Hotel, 23 historical land cover, 131–134 HMDC. See Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission Hoboken, 41 Hoffa, Jimmy, 31 Hough, Franklin, 174 Howell, George, 99 HUD. See U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Hudson County, 115, 171 Hudson River, 51, 58, 60, 63 Hume, Edmund, 36 Hunterdon County, 115, 120, 171 Hurricane Andrew, 166 Hurricane Dennis, 146 Hurricane Floyd, 146 Huston, Henry, 100

Index

Illinois, 57 Imax Theater, 24 incineration. See landfills, shift to incineration Inner Coastal Plains, 171 Institutes of Justinian, 52 integration, racial, 19 interdisciplinary knowledge, 3, 7 Island Beach, 178 Jakle, John 15 Jamaica Bay, 32 Jersey City, 31, 41, 58, 90, 97 Jersey Devil, 74, 75–76 Johnson, Douglas, 175 Johnson Park, 178 jus privatum, 52–53 jus publicum, 52–53 Kahn, Ed, Jr., 15–16, 17 Kays, Henry T., 104 Kean, Thomas H., 85, 86 Kearny landfill, 31, 36 Keim, Jacob, 14 Keswick, Pennsylvania, 19 Keyport, 53 Kirkpatrick, Andrew, 55–56, 62 Kyoto Protocol, 157 Lake and Park Bill, 92, 100–105 Lake Grinnell, 97 Lake Hopatcong, 96, 99 Lake Mashipacong, 101 Lake Michigan, 57 Lake Pochung, 90–91, 95 Lake Pochung Outing Association, 91 Lake Wawayanda, 93–94 Lancaster, Burt, 18 land cover, 128–131; changes over last century, 136–139; computer modeling of climate, 139–145; reconstruction historical and present-day, 131–136; sensitivity of weather and climate, 145–156 land development, 6

207

Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Feedback model (LEAF-2), 141, 145 landfills: leaching, 3; odor, 31; shift to incineration, 4–5, 28–47 land resource impact indicators, 113 Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), 134, 137 landscape, tracking changing, 111–113; methods, 113–115; results, 115–123 land use patterns, 6, 111–114; change and urban growth, 115–119, 116, 117, 128 Land Use Update, 118 Las Vegas, Nevada, 11, 12, 18, 21, 23 Lathrop, Richard, 6, 113, 114 LEAF-2. See Land EcosystemAtmosphere Feedback model Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi), 18 Leeds, Mrs., 73 Levittown, Pennsylvania, 19 Lewis, Jerry, 11 Little, Howard, 90–91 Little, J. R., 98 Little, Mrs. J. R., 98 Little Round Pound, 96 local knowledge and federal law, 76–78 Lochaber, Scotland, 60 Locke, John 53 Long Beach Island, 169 Long Branch, 175, 181 Long Island, 134, 139, 147–150 Louisiana, 168 Lynch, Kevin, 34 Magna Carta, 52, 55, 64 Maine, 91, 92 Malle, Louis, 18 Manasquan Canal, 60 Manasquan Reservoir, 185 Martin, Dean, 11 Martin, Merrit, 56–57 Martin v. Waddell, 53, 57, 58 Massachusetts, 71, 92, 112 Master Plan, 40 Matthews v. Bay Head Improvement Ass’n, 61–62

208

McCay, Bonnie, 5 McGurty, Eileen, 4 Meadowlands, 7, 32– 44. See also specific sites Mercer County, 120, 171 mercury, 43, 44 Merrill Creek, 185 Mexico, 181 Miami Beach, 18, 19 Miami-Dade County, Florida, 166 Middlesex County, 171, 176 Millburn Township, 72 Miss America Pageant, 11, 24 Mississippi, 63, 166 Mitchell, James, 6 Monmouth County, 115, 120–121, 167, 176, 178 Monopoly, 11 Morris County, 96, 121, 171, 183 MSLA. See Municipal Sanitary Landfill Association Muir, John, 2 Mullica River, 59–60 Mundy, Benjamin, 54–55 Municipal Sanitary Landfill Association (MSLA), 36 NAIOP. See National Association of Industrial and Office Properties National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP), 85 National Fisheries Service, 76 National Flood Insurance Act, 182 National Land Cover Dataset. See U.S. Geological Survey National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), 143 National Priorities List, 1 National Reserve, 2 National Weather Service, 141 National Wildlife Refuge System, 71 natural disasters, 6, 20, 164 –166; exposure, 175–178; major—, 167–170; modest extremes, 166–167;

Index

nature of, 170; resilience, 186–190; resistance, 178–186; risks, 171–175 natural hazard, 170 Natural Resource Damages (NRDs), 63 Natural Resources Conservation Service, National Resource Inventory, 112 Natural Resources Defense Council, 76 Navesink River, 53 NCEP. See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Centers for Environmental Prediction Nelson, Julius, 59 Neptune City v. Avon-by-the-Sea, 61 Newark, 1; consumer economy, 31; fishing clubs, 96, 97–104; Meadowlands, 29–31, 38–44; natural disasters, 188; resource recovery policies, 39; urban problems, 165; warming temperature, 149; wetlands, 4 Newark Bay, 29, 32, 53, 60 Newark Housing and Redevelopment Authority, 41 New Brunswick, 54, 178, 188 New Hampshire, 92 New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, 131 New Jersey Appellate Court, 62 New Jersey Assembly, 73, 101 New Jersey Board on Commerce and Navigation, 175, 192 New Jersey Budget Commission, 181 New Jersey Builders Association, 84 New Jersey Coastal Management Program, 83 New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals, 102, 103 New Jersey Department of Energy, 38 New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP): freshwater wetlands regulations, 79, 87; garbage calamity, 28; jurisdiction, 1, 68, 75, 86; land use/land cover digital database, 113–115; wetlands classification, 84, 85 New Jersey Department of Health, 34

Index

New Jersey Division of Emergency Management, 180 New Jersey Extension Services, 185 New Jersey Meadow Reclamation Commission, 32–33 New Jersey Midland Railroad, 93 New Jersey Office of Legislative Services, 80 New Jersey Poll, 185 New Jersey State Police, 180 New Jersey Supreme Court, 53, 61, 102 New Jersey Turnpike, 2, 7, 35 New Jersey Water Resource Coalition, 73 New Jersey Water Supply Commission, 193 Newton, 98 New York, 134, 137, 147, 181 New York City, New York, 56, 96; air pollution effects, 32; Central Park, 100; cloud cover, 150; fecal counts, 20; garbage trucked from, 42; open land near, 75; oystering, 53; Pennsylvania Station, 31; urban growth, 111, 115, 130, 133, 138–139, 149, 176, 177; warming temperature, 148 New Yorker, 15, 17 New York Port Authority. See Port Authority of New York and New Jersey New York Susquehanna and Western Railroad, 98–99 New York Times, 165 Niagara Falls, 16 NIMBY. See Not in My Back Yard syndrome NJDEP. See New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection NLCD. See U.S. Geological Survey NOAA. See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Nordstrom, Karl, 175 Northwest Ordinance, 60 North Woods, 91 Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) syndrome, 197n52

209

nourishment schemes, 181–182 NRDs. See Natural Resource Damages NY/NJ Baykeeper, 62–63 Ocean City, 169 Ocean County, 115, 121, 167, 176–178 Ocean House, 14 Ogden, Maureen, 72–74, 76, 79–83, 86–87 Oradell Reservoir, 185 Osborne, Richard B., 13 Outer Coastal Plains, 171 overfishing, 5 oyster industry, 5, 60–62; law and 55–57; Raritan River and Bay, 54; public trust and—, 53–54. See also oyster war oyster planting, 53 oyster war, 5, 58–60 Palley, Reese, 12 Parton, Dolly, 12 Passaic County, 167, 171 Passaic River: flooding, 78; natural disasters, 169, 170, 174, 183; study of marshes, 32; waste dumped into, 1, 31 Paterson, 1, 188 Penn, Jack, 82–83, 86 Pennsylvania, 38, 134, 137 Pennsylvania Station, 31 Pequannock Watershed, 184 Pequot Indians, 23 Perth Amboy, 54, 57 Peshtigo, 166 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: fecal counts, 20; proximity to Atlantic City, 13, 14, 18, 19, 21; urban growth, 111, 115, 130, 133, 138–139, 148, 176, 177; warming temperature, 147, 149 photography, 112 Pilkey, Orrin, 192 Pinchot, Clifford, 174, 192 Pine Barrens: aquifer area, 2; nature found in, 7; natural disasters, 169, 174, 176–179, 186, 188, 191; wetlands area, 74 –75

210

Pinelands, 74 –75, 78, 86, 177 Pinelands Commission, 75, 179 Pinelands National Reserve, 75, 121 Pinelands Protection Act, 75–76, 79, 82, 83, 85 Pitney, Jonathan, 13 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey: agreement for incinerator, 39; jetport project, 70, 75, 86; resource recovery efforts, 39, 41, 42, 43 present-day land cover, 134–136 Price, Jennifer, 20 Princeton, 79 privatizing fishing spots, 5, 92, 97–103 Project Impact, 180 Psuty, Norbert, 175 public access to fishing, 104 Public Service Electric and Gas, 42 public trust doctrine, 5, 51–53; law and oystering, 55–57; meaning of state ownership, 57–58; oystering and—, 53–54; oyster wars and—, 58–60 Public Utilities Regulatory Act, 39 rainfall and temperatures, 146–153 RAMS. See Regional Atmospheric Modeling System Raritan Bay, 51, 53–54, 56–57, 60, 63 Raritan Canal, 185 Raritan River: industrial development of wetlands, 32; major natural disasters, 169, 170, 176, 178, 182–183; mapping of, 73; natural resources of, 72; oystering, 54, 57, 63; Wetlands Act and, 85 Rat Pack, 11, 12 RCMs. See Regional Climate Models Record (New Jersey newspaper), 78 recycling. See garbage, recycling reforestation, 119, 121 refuse problem, 4 Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), 139–143, 145, 147, 155 Regional Climate Models (RCMs), 139–143

Index

Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 32–33 Register, 99 removal programs, 184 Report of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, 33 Report on Forestry (Hough), 174 resilience, to natural disaster, 186–190 resistance, to natural disaster, 178–186 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, 39 resource recovery, 38–39 Resource Recovery Act, 38 restoration ecology, 183–184 Reynolds, Robert, 5 Richmond, Virginia, 74 rights of location, 97 Riparian Commission, 61 riparian grants, 57–62 risks, natural, 171–175 Rivers and Harbors Act, 77 Rockaway River, 183 Roe, Theodore M., 100–103 Roebling family, 183 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 181 Round Valley Reservoir, 185 rural suburbs, 146 Rutgers University, 131, 175; Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis (CRSSA), 113 Sandy Hook, 178 San Francisco, 53 sanitary landfills, 29, 44 – 45n2 satellites, 112 Sax, Joseph, 62 Scotland, 60 sea-breeze, 153–156 Sea Bright, 167, 181 Sea Isle City, 169 second nature, 17 sediment movement, 30 Sewer Extension Program, 75 Share in the Consequences of Mismanagement syndrome (SITCOM), 197n52

Index

Shark River, 58 Sheridan, John, 84 Short Hills, 73 Shrewsbury River, 53, 54 Silent Spring (Carson), 69 Simon, Bryant, 4 Sinatra, Frank, 22 SITCOM. See Share in the Consequences of Mismanagement syndrome Six Mile Run Reservoir, 185 Skylands, 121 Smith, Dick, 98 Society for Useful Manufacturing, 183 solid waste management practices, 4, 34, 75 Solid Waste Plan, 40 Solid Waste Planning Act, 37, 38, 41 Somerset County, 115, 120–121, 171, 176, 185 Somerset Hills Garden Club, 83 South Amboy Township, 56 Sparta, 96 SPOTView imagery, 114 sprawl, 6, 112, 129–130 Spruce Run Reservoir, 185 Stafford Township, 176–177 Starbucks, 24 State College Field Office, 79 State Forest Reserve Commission, 104 State Forest Reserves, 104 Staten Island, 31, 53, 56 State of Emergency, 168 state ownership, meaning of, 57–58 State Water Management Plan, 185 Steyaert, Louis, 6 Stockton State College, 175 Stokes, Edward, 104 Stokes State Forest, 120 storms. See natural disasters Strasser, Susan, 34 Stream Encroachment Program, 75 stricto sensu, 51 suburbanization, 19–20, 25–26n25, 29, 33, 129–130 Superfund sites, 1, 3

211

Sussex Anglers’ Club, 96 Sussex County: free-fishing controversy, 5, 90–104; land use change and urban growth, 115, 121; natural risks, 171 Sussex Independent, 101, 102–103 Sutherland clearance (Scotland), 60 Swartswood Lake, 92, 97–105 swimming pools, 19–20, 26n26 Taj Mahal, 12, 23 Taney, Roger, 57 technology, 12, 18 temperatures and rainfall, 146–153 terrorist attacks, 31, 41, 180, 189 Thames River, 52 Theobald, D., 112 Thompson, E. P., 63 Thoreau, Henry David, 2 Tidelands Commission, 61 Time magazine, 22 TM. See Landsat Thematic Mapper Trenton, 57, 167, 180 Tropical Storm Floyd, 170, 183, 188 tropical storms. See natural disasters “Trouble with Wilderness, The,” (Cronon), 3 Truesdell, Mr., 91 Trump, Donald, 12, 23 Union County, 115, 171 Union Station (Washington, D.C.), 31 United Nations, Biosphere area, 2 Upper Raritan Watershed Association (URWA), 71–72, 73, 78, 86 Urban Development Action Grant Program, 39 Urban Development Policy statement, 40 urban growth, 111–115; landscape impacts of, 119–122; land use change and, 115–119, 116, 117; wetland loss, 122–123 URWA. See Upper Raritan Watershed Association U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 76–77, 82–83, 85, 180–183, 192; Coastal Engineering Research Center, 175

212

U.S. Census, 134 U.S. Department of Agriculture, 146 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 39, 41 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 76, 85 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), 132, 174; National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), 134 –135, 136 USGS. See U.S. Geological Survey U.S. Supreme Court, 5, 53, 57, 58 Venturi, Robert, 18 Vermeule, Cornelius Clarkson, 132, 136 Vermont, 92 Virginia, 74 Waddell, William Coventry, 56–57 Walk, The, 24 Walko, Robert, 6 Wanaque Reservoir, 185 Ward, George, 91 Warren County, 171 Warren Grove, 167, 177 Washington, D.C., 16, 31 waste disposal, 1 waste sites, 3 waste-to-energy facilities, 38, 44n1 Waterfront Development Law, 69–70 water pollution, 1 Water Pollution Control Act, 76 water purification, 30 water quality control, 2 water resources, 5 watershed associations, 78–79. See also specific associations watersheds, 173. See also specific areas

Index

waterways, restoring, 60–62 Wawayanda State Park, 120 Wayne, 167, 183 weather conditions, 6. See also climate conditions Weaver, Christopher, 6 Weber, Dorothy, 14 West Virginia, 38 Wetland Identification and Delineation Manual, 84 –85 wetlands: garbage and—, 30–31; loss of, 122–123; protection, 2, 5, 68–89 Wetlands Act, 75 White Mountains, 91, 92 Whiting, 177 Wichansky, Paul, 6 wilderness, described, 3 Williamsburg, Virginia, 16 Willner, Andrew, 63 wind patterns, 32 women, role in wetlands protection, 5, 68–89 Woodbridge, 54, 56 World Trade Center, 31, 41 World War I, 14 World War II: end of, 39; post-, 4, 29, 33, 111, 165 Worthington State Forest, 120 Wynn, Steve, 12 X-Files, 76 Yellowstone National Park, 3, 166 Zarephath, 182 Zurn Engineering, 37