NJAS Opinion: February, 2003

By Eric Stiles, Vice President for Conservation & Stewardship

How long before New Jersey runs out of space for new development?  Fifty years?  Seventy-five years?  One hundred years?  According to recent reports by the Rutgers Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis (www.crssa.rutgers.edu), the estimates begin at 30 years.  The countdown for conservation has started.  We have a mere three decades to safeguard our natural heritage for future generations.

Habitat is being degraded and fragmented, forcing wildlife into isolated, scattered refuges.  Our wetlands are being filled and waterways threatened by unregulated development.  The very air we breathe is increasingly contaminated as we are forced to commute longer distances to work from homes in sprawl development.

The remaining undeveloped land represents the last home for New Jersey’s Noah’s Ark of plants and wildlife.  It is critical for safeguarding our supply of drinking water and integral for our quality of life including recreational opportunities. 

As open land becomes increasingly rare, property prices will continue to skyrocket.  Conservationists are concerned that rising land prices will make it prohibitively expensive to buy and protect these precious areas.  Meanwhile, developers are racing to buy, build, and buy even more before the cost of land becomes a deterrent.

From 1986 to 1995, builders well aware of rising costs rushed to develop an average of 45 acres every day.  Daily, six football fields’ worth of wetlands were filled in and nine football fields worth of forested land were cut down.  One tenth of the state’s land is now buried under impervious ground cover like asphalt or cement.

Even people unconcerned by the threats development poses to the environment are painfully aware of the consequences.  Hillsides appear to have been shaved bald for the purpose of new housing.  Traffic jams, the product of zero local and regional traffic planning, are an expensive daily headache.  Polls released by Quinipiac University in January 2003 found that 2/3 of New Jersey residents stated, “over-development is the greatest threat to the quality of life in New Jersey”.

Now, New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Brad Campbell are developing a long overdue program for smart growth.  In his State of the State Address, the Governor targeted the “chain reaction” of troubles “set off by uncontrolled development.”  He has wisely agreed to spend an additional $100 million over the next three years for open space protection.  He is empowering municipalities to halt unwanted development, and he is directing money toward urban redevelopment.

So far, New Jersey has practiced what could only be called blind growth.  With the exception of a few areas such as the Pinelands, the land has been bulldozed, paved, and developed in the most haphazard fashion.  The Highlands Region, home to many threatened and endangered species and providing one-third of New Jersey citizens with their drinking water, is suffering some of the most rapid loss of forest cover.  Thirty percent of the new development is in the form of single-family homes sitting on virtually treeless plots of land.  Rather than redeveloping former commercial properties and urban centers into livable communities, we are destroying our natural lands.  Rather than developing on less productive farmlands, the “prime” farmland of the state’s $52 billion produce economy is a target and probably a fading vision.

The proposals by Governor McGreevey and Commissioner Campbell favor regional development planning and regulations in order to protect resources across political boundaries.  Despite protestations of local officials afraid to lose control, this decision is wise.  Towns and municipalities often lack the resources to oppose development in court as well as the expertise to understand where their piece of the pie fits into the larger map of the state’s ecology.

Growth management policies in rural and urban areas have already been successful.  In New Jersey, the Pinelands Commission has directed growth without endangering its ecosystem and its unique Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer.  A study by The Brookings Institution recently found that smart growth in other states increased the availability of affordable housing while raising the value of existing property, promoting the quality of life, and protecting the environment.  Simply put, smart growth benefits everyone except developers anxious to build rows of McMansions as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

NJ Audubon understands that smart growth is dramatically different from no growth.  We cannot stop development.  Instead, our mission is to preserve the lands critical to natural resources and to direct environmentally conscious growth to other areas.  The events of the coming years will shape the future of New Jersey’s natural heritage.