The Pinelands have been saved several times. Settlers from Europe chose not to clear the woods. Customary crops didn’t thrive, hence, the name Pine Barrens.
The planned pumping-out of fresh water by Joseph Wharton for sale to Philadelphia was stopped by state law around 1900. About 10 percent of some 1 million acres has been purchased and preserved as state forest, while the other 90 percent has experienced slow development by government restriction, such as the Pinelands Commission.
Recent articles in the Courier Post that talked about the drying out of Pinelands ponds and low oxygen levels since 1992 in Atlantic County bays greatly heighten concern about out South Jersey ecosystems. Pumping out Pinelands aquifers to support more subdivisions and strip malls only could exacerbate, not lessen, these harmful trends and must be stopped by state action.
Today, Washington, Wall Street, and the World Trade
Organization chant a mindless mantra of “growth, growth, growth,” but cancer
is a kind of growth, too, the kind that kills you. If there is no “balance of
nature,” perhaps we need to create one between human activities and other
Earth life.
As Green Party candidate for Congress in the 1st District, I urge a
new federal-state partnership to purchase the development rights to land in
endangered ecosystems, like the Pinelands. Outright land purchase can be very
expensive, and land use restrictions are greatly resented and resisted by
property owners and seem to only slow development.
If two worlds had to be chosen to sum up the Green world view, they would be community and ecology. We need to strengthen both.
Published in the Courier Post on Saturday, September 28