Contest Lands:
Conflict and Compromise in New Jersey's Pine Barrens
By: Robert J. Mason
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992
ix + 257 pp. Maps, tables, references, index. Cloth, $44.95
A discouraged John McPhee closed Pine Barrens (1967), his tribute to the
vast sweep of pine and peat in south central New Jersey, certain that little would be
done to save the region. "Given the futilities of that debate," he wrote,
"given the sort of attention that is ordinarily paid to plans put forward by
conservationists, and given the great numbers and the crossed purposes of all the big
and little powers that would have to work together to accomplish anything on a major
scale in the pines...they seem to be headed toward extinction."
McPhee's prediction about the pinelands' future was as inaccurate as his studied
weariness was effective in generating calls for legislative action. Governor Brendan
Byrne, influenced by McPhee's book, signed the Pinelands Protection Act in 1979 and,
two years later Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus established the barrens as the
nation's first "national reserve." The piney woods were saved.
That is not quite how Robert Mason frames the issue in Contested Lands. Instead,
in eight closely argued chapters that explore the complicated political context of
Byrne's and Andrus' decisions, as well as their combined impact on the land and
people of the region, he reaches a less sanguine conclusion: environmental gains in
the Pine Barrens came at a cost.
The costs were human, and emerged most clearly through the clashes that the
development of the Pine Barrens' Comprehensive Management Plan provoked. Mason deftly
introduces the CMP's guidelines for water quality, land use and quality of life, as
well as its concerns over habitat protection and wildlife preservation, details the
influence these have had on shifting alliances between
environmentalists, agricultural and construction interests, then explores the
protracted struggles to insure compliance in three specific townships. The
New Jersey plan, like its peers nationally, involved a
"considerable centralization of land use regulatory power" (31), power that
it could (and did) abuse.
Indeed, the control of people is one of Contested Lands's central worries. It
gives voice to those who fear being "museumized: classified, in essence, as an
endangered species, to be carefully managed along with the rest of the region's flora
and fauna (189)." To avoid this, while developing a more "socially and
economically just environmental program" (4) that does not rely on current
"top-down" management, with its implicit arrogance and elitism, Mason
proposes strengthening local political clout. On the question of township compliance,
for instance, he suggests that the Pinelands Commission not act
as "judge," and force compliance, but serve as a
"facilitator," encouraging "well governed" towns to censor
"badly governed" ones for failing to met commission standards (166). This
remarkable faith in local governance leads him to doubt the commission's ultimate
impact: after all, "the absence of a strong, centralized Pinelands
planning program would not have meant the total destruction of the
ecological resource" (186). Perhaps, but it does not take much destruction
to unbalance environmental integrity, in turn making future preservation of the
diminished terrain more difficult to defend, precisely the scenario that so unsettled
McPhee 25 years ago.