NJAS Opinion: Autumn, 1992

"Environmentalism is really about what kind of human world we want to construct inside Nature."

William Cronon in "Changing the Landscape of History," by Jim Jubak. The Amicus Journal 14. No.2 (Summer 1992)

There is a not insignificant tragedy unfolding around us here in New Jersey, as well as in other parts of the country, but it is especially acute along the eastern seaboard. It isn't arriving with the drama of a Mount St. Helens' eruption or the roar of a great coastal northeaster, and its origins lie as much inside our heads as in the external world. For, you see, the tragedy resides in the very economic visions or models of development we hold inside, and what they do to the natural world and ourselves when we construct them-mostly all of a type. That type is what most of us grew up with and now live near, if not in: suburban sprawl and that jumble of telephone lines, advertising cacophony and architectural mishmash lining the shopping districts of-take your pick: from Route 1 to 17 to 23.... What's that you say-never liked or understood abstract art? Go back and take a look at painter Stuart Davis's Swing Landscape (1938); if you can't find a copy, take a look again at Route 17 or 23-that's the part of your heritage he was painting.

But now is not the time to fight the battle of aesthetics over commercial strips and/or modern painting. It is time, though, for the struggle over rural visions, because it seems that in the battle for the northeast forests-the Northern Forest Lands Study, the Adirondacks, the New York-New Jersey Highlands, the fate of the Delaware Bayshore-and all the remaining undeveloped rural regions that the New Jersey state plan wanted to see preserved, we conservationists are losing ground. Losing ground partly because the communities already in place in and around these rural areas can't seem to find a sustainable alternative to earn their keep other than through transforming the particularities of their landscapes by the growth patterns which have elsewhere led to the great suburban letdown, that nagging sense of loss of human community as well as the great displacement of natural habitats, and the pollution of air and water through excessive auto dependence. And the loss, too, of the varieties of local flavor that we associate with America's traditional small towns and villages, whether it's a New England town square. Quaker meeting place and Main Street in southern New Jersey, or the stone architecture stamped with a region's particular geologic colors, as in old Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It's no coincidence that our State Plan vision, muddled and compromised as it is (and about to be delayed, perhaps for good, by an act of the New Jersey legislature as we go to press), offered us "Communities of Place" as its alternative. although it can't deliver a viable means or the control of the forces working every moment against achieving the real substance that ought to form the structural skeleton of Communities of Place: an integration of transportation, work, and residence in a way that doesn't overwhelm nature, and retains some visual connection, reflected in its style, to its regional character.

So why are we hearing snarls from the people who feel their growth thwarted in the Adirondacks, Sussex County, Pine-lands-a snarl neatly captured by one New Jersey farmer's phrase when he wrote in a Daily Record guest editorial: "If you want to see rural. then be willing to pay for it." (He means all land gets the highest and best development use-if it doesn't, the private owner gets the difference between full build-out value and the restricted use's price). We're hearing the snarls primarily because many of these people are, at their best. just temporary "stewards" of the land. but only as long as their current economics are comfortable. They're on their way, via the American Dream. to somewhere else, most likely the "burbs." Nature's going too, on their terms, as are our historic sites. Their other hats say "land-entrepreneurs," and they come in a variety of styles from real estate speculators to mall moguls, to private up-scale golf course community boosters or "rural" vacation home marketeers. (Poconos, Long Beach Island, Lake George, Cape Cod, take your pick.) Today, they all promise to do environmentally sensitive development. Don't tell them how, where, or what the cumulative impact might be twenty-five to fifty years from now. Their individual wisdom, don't we know, works out, through the magic of the market, to be the best for everyone.

Well, you can't build rural communities of place when the "habits of the heart" contain within them the destructive centrifugal tendencies that the book of that same title sees as pulling American families and society apart (Robert Bellah. Habits of the Heart, Individualism, and Commitment in American Life ([New York: Harper and Row, 1986]). And although this writer is sympathetic to many of the thoughts contained in Wendell Berry's essay "Conservation is Good Work." which appeared in the Winter 1992 issue of the Amicus Journal, Berry vastly underestimates the power of the ecologically destructive models that have reached into the minds of the residents of the rural areas he wants to help through his plans for a subsidized rural "self-sufficiency." (We note some contradiction in the terms.) He is closer to the mark when he talks about an "economy of recreation." But any successful rural conservation today, and in the future, cannot rely upon individual conversion experiences alone, although "seeing the light" is going to have to be part of what happens if we are to work for a genuine pluralism of rural economies. But to succeed, especially in the most threatened natural and historic areas at the edges of the megalopolis, the individual will need a collective Jacob's ladder to climb in the way of a unifying vision of that economy and a land-use plan to carry it out.

In England. such a model includes lots of financial incentives for the private countryside landowners, especially the farmers, but they are restricted in their ability to develop by the District Council Plans, which are the local expression of what amounts to, since 1947, national land-use planning. But in America, with the notable exceptions of states like Oregon and Vermont, the best we can manage in the face of the overwhelming forces for laissez-faire development. are growth "management" plans, like Pinelands, for very specific areas where the natural and historic resource-public interest values give our side a fighting chance to fend off takings challenges. And any praise for Oregon's overall land-use plan has to be tempered by its inability to prevent ecological disasters on the federal and private forest lands within its boundaries.

So what might a new model for rural conservation look like? Since we are pleading for a pluralism of models, any new plan must look first to the uniqueness of what it is trying to preserve, natural and historical. It then, through a legally guided plan, puts the protection targets first in a new hierarchy of values, or. if you will, "habits of the heart." It then structures the new zoning "do's" and "don'ts" to protect the features that would be destroyed by the old, entirely private patterns of development. This usually will lead to tiers of sensitivity to govern development patterns and densities. In selected areas within the planning entity's jurisdiction but far from the most sensitive protection objectives, growth zones with adequate infrastructure and more traditional development expectations are allowed, and won't, and don't in the Pinelands, look much different than other typical suburban patterns. But this is an option that may only work when there is a large planning region to begin with, such as in the Pinelands.

But in many other areas that won't retain their best features or offer any hope for a livelihood because they may not have the Pinelands' room to maneuver with traditional suburban growth zones, a more explicit rural economic vision is needed. And it doesn't seem as though the U.S. Forest Service offers much hope with its models skewed to timber extraction. The scale needed for a sustainable economy based on timber products would be too disruptive and destructive to natural resources in many of the locales that need saving closer to the metropolitan areas.

No, what we have in mind is the logical completion of what we see left undone in New Jersey and other areas of the eastern seaboard and its marriage to some of the concepts of Wendell Berry's rural "economy of recreation." The potential model exists in fragments all around us. But first we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that we grow economically in these special areas primarily by physical expansion. volume, and density, and instead substitute a vision of conservation economics based upon thinking, writing, inventing, telling, and showing (aka education?). In short, a vision of what Bucks County was some time ago, or rather, a phase it passed through on the way to suburbia: a farming region at the edge of the metropolis which had intense tourist nodes and a remarkable variety of artists tucked away' in it's villages and estate barns and cottages. The problem was that Bucks was really "just passing through," and had no plan to maintain its riches, artistic and natural, in the face of the seed pods of suburbanization--the speculators and large developers who moved in and undermined a magical area. But there is more to tell.

If you've ever been to Virginia, you know, by scores of roadside markers, every place Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson took a fork in the road or scattered a Yankee picket line. But has anyone done the same for the natural wonders of an area? Again, there are hints on how to proceed in the fragments all around us, like in Carl S. Oplinger's and Robert Halma's The Poconos, An Illustrated Natural History Guide (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). This book is a marvelous idea, weaving the natural and human history of a manageable target area with descriptions of field sites and the maps to get you there. A hybrid of a Peterson Field Guide and Triple AAA tour book. Linked with a series of well-done road side markers, a version of it could form the model for the building blocks of any conservation area's tourist trade. It is precisely this type of educational and promotional material that is so long overdue in our Pinelands. Come to think of it, anyone familiar with the work of New Jersey historian John T. Cunningham knows that our state is missing a golden tourist opportunity by not revitalizing and redesigning our roadside signage. We have no shortage of historical or natural materials to be proud of and to draw upon for innovative accompanying texts. With all the books on New Jersey history, natural and otherwise, the delay in the marriage of the two seems scandalous. These things have always seemed so obvious, that with all the rhetoric floating around about revamping our educational system one wonders if this really isn't the expression of a major cultural malady--the constriction of our imagination by one dominant value….and you know which one I mean.

To help develop and achieve these new rural economies, environmentalists are going to need more allies than we currently have. That means greater cooperation with historical preservationists, who ought to share many of our values and whose physical targets should often overlap with our own--such as in the Highlands of New York and New Jersey. And this union could, without the slightest bit of exaggeration,. go a long way to meet some of the most outraged cries against our preservation plans from thwarted rural workers like those in the Adirondacks who blockaded the New York State Thruway to protest a proposed tougher Adirondack protection plan. Currently the hopes of these people are pinned to the never-ending growth of the second home market or the construction of places the equivalent of the International Trade Zone in New Jersey. In other words, constructing urban and suburban schemes in very rural places. There is so much that needs to be done to stabilize, restore, and improve existing historic sites and the support facilities that would have to be built to accommodate a sizable increase in the tourist trade that many of these people could be employed enriching their natural and cultural resources rather than drowning or destroying them.

In a recent luncheon/round table on just a topic, held near Greenwood Lake and Sterling Forest in the New York Highlands, NJAS pointed out that the construction or rehabilitation of "bed and breakfast" accommodations, spaced about a day's hike apart-ten to twelve miles-along the Appalachian Trail, would meet the needs and broaden the appeal of such activities for a greater range of the population who can't or won't ever be able to backpack thirty miles at a stretch. There is some interlocking logic here; in order to meet current American legal tests to save an area for its natural or manmade history, we really do have to meet a substantial burden of due process proof in court that we have resources over and above the average landscape's. If we don't, then we probably won't pass legal taking muster or have the pragmatic "critical mass" to pass the tourist attraction test either. But we've got to get there in time with the arguments, plans, and public resources to pull these elements together not only to save our worthwhile objectives, but to give the residents there some legitimate hope for an economic future that doesn't have to turn their--and our--mutual landscape upside down. Whereas the book we mentioned on the Poconos is a splendid model on how to go about integrating rural resources and economics, the Poconos themselves are not.

No essay on this subject would be complete without some thoughts specifically addressed to the role of agriculture in rural areas. In New Jersey as elsewhere, their formal representatives have battled nearly all the planning concepts espoused by environmentalists. But we think the farmers real battle is with the forces of the unfettered marketplace, which has always, in the Western world, priced farm produce well below the costs of the inputs of production and the added costs of modern marketing. At the same time while farmers knock down or complain about our land use models, such as Pinelands and Transfer of Developments Rights (TDR's), with one hand, the other hand is busy accepting a wide variety of federal and state market-buffering subsidies. The difference between farm policies in America and England, however, in matters of land-use planning at least, is that in England, the public subsidies occur within the district plans that have reciprocal restrictions on the ability of owners to convert farms to suburbs or other development uses. The English outlook does a much better job of viewing and protecting the many other human and societal values inextricably interwoven in the concept of farmland than does our lopsided, one-dimensional view driven by highest and best-use.

Maybe, for the farmers about to be trapped within the jaws of the suburban juggernaut, society should make the offer to include farm families in the state public employees medical and retirement benefit system at perhaps a modest self-contributary rate, in exchange for a greater societal role in the ultimate fate of the land.

So while the political landscape this fall is sure to abound in pleas for a diversity of educational models, we also need, if we are to have a genuine economic pluralism in this country, new models of rural economics to keep people, nature, and our own physical history on a sustainable preservation path. That this path, at least along both our seaboards, but probably in other areas as well, can't emerge without a revitalization of our cities, is as important a piece of the greater economic and conservation puzzle as the ones we have just discussed. For a glimpse of that broader view, we recommend the four articles on cities in the special section of the Summer 1992 edition of the Amicus Journal. But a new path also won't emerge without the political will and courage to directly face the dilemmas posed by the current destructive pattern of land-use as usual. And, it almost could go without saying for our readers, the fate of our Threatened and Endangered Species depends on the way we resolve the issues entwined within these topics.