Give Me the Wide-Open Spaces

How come we yearn so fervently, so passionately, to preserve our untouched, land? CHRISTOPHER HANN goes roaming through the rustling woods of his youth to find the answer

Photograph by Walter Choroszewski

In my mind, the woods stretch out forever. I follow a beaten path that runs through this wild place, winds through the chest-high brush, and passes beneath a row of tall deciduous trees. The path leads me through a thicket of evergreens until they surround me, tower above me. They are my redwoods. Maybe I'll stay here forever. These are not my woods, but that doesn't matter. Nothing does. I'm just a boy.
In memories, I still revel in those woods. In 1966, they bordered the backyard of our new home in Bridgewater. Today, thirty years of memory bestow on them an almost mystical quality. For a seven-year-old more accustomed to the quarter-acre lots that divided his old neighborhood in South Plainfield, the woods beckoned with the irresistible promise of fresh opportunity. My brothers stalked deer and pheasant and rabbit in the woods. In the frosty mornings of fall and winter, we walked our dog there. In the spring, we picked wild strawberries in a wide patch that seemed made just for us. In the summer, we hung on the limbs of a friendly old apple tree. As a young boy lost in childhood, I could spend hours in the woods, never bothering to contemplate such weighty matters as tomorrow.
Nearly a decade had passed when bulldozers arrived at the woods. And by the time morning had turned to night, the woods had been replaced by the foundations of what would become large new homes in a horseshoe-shaped neighborhood, with paved streets and streetlights. Telephone wires were laid underground so the new development would not be sullied with rows of thick wooden poles edging its curbs. And just like that, an entire place vanished. Even now, I recall the fledgling neighborhood in metaphoric terms: an early symbol of the inexhaustible march of development that would sweep almost uninterrupted across Bridgewater's 32 square miles--indeed, across all corners of New Jersey, the nation's most thickly populated state.
I felt a certain measure of frustration about witnessing such a drastic metamorphosis of the landscape. Perhaps I should have expected it. Just as our new neighbors imposed on us, no doubt we had im-posed on those who preceded us. When we moved to Bridgewater, our neighborhood was so new that some of the houses were still under construction. And I, especially, should not have been complaining. After all, my father, a civil engineer, made his living as the vice president of an excavation company, from whose long success my family and I benefited immeasurably. (The company slogan was unapologetic: Diligent Diggers of Dig-nified Dirt.) And I do not ignore the very important fact that all the construction provided thousands of people with good jobs and the opportunity to buy their own home--still the single most abiding benchmark of American prosperity.
Nonetheless, the feeling of frustration persisted--and it was not mine alone. In the eighties, as New Jersey's development of new homes, office buildings, and shopping centers accelerated at an unprecedented rate, there developed a widely held belief that things had gotten out of control. Public-opinion surveys showed the preservation of New Jersey's remaining undeveloped lands, commonly known as open space, to be a top priority. In 1990, Governor Thomas Kean, who was about to leave office after eight years, spoke to the issue in his farewell speech, wondering aloud how the proliferation of strip malls contributed to the state's quality of life. In August 1995, a Star- Ledger/Eagleton Poll found that 72 percent of the state's residents felt an increasing anger about the quality of life here--a 12 percent increase from a decade earlier.
Of course, any number of factors can contribute to such a swing in public sentiment, not the least of which is a general dismay over residing in the sort of place that renames its proudest landmarks after the highest bidder. Still, it can scarcely be debated that the rapid pace of postwar construction has touched just about all of New Jersey's 8 million residents--beneficiary and sufferer alike--and shaped the collective condition of our community in ways large and small.
Yet even as we witnessed the encroaching spread of new construction, moving southward and westward across sandy soil and rounded hill, churning its way from our neighbor's home to ours and then beyond, we have strived with mounting urgency to preserve those special places that have escaped its yawning reach. And in so doing we have, over the last quarter of the twentieth century, come to define a vital force at work within the soul of New Jersey.
Our zeal for preservation may best be embodied in a state-sponsored program appropriately known as Green Acres. With the consent of New Jersey voters, the Green Acres program provides loans and grants to municipalities, counties, state agencies, and nonprofit organizations that purchase properties and develop them into parks. Since 1961, the state Legislature has placed Green Acres bond measures on November ballots nine times. The measures asked voters whether they wanted the state to borrow money--to be paid back by the taxpayers--for the purpose of establishing more parks. Although the New Jersey electorate has made something of a name for itself by raising hell over high taxes, voters have never rejected a Green Acres bond measure.
Some 22 municipalities and 10 counties have created open-space preservation programs of their own. In all, the voters have approved spending $1.3 billion, and the Green Acres program has preserved (or is in the process of preserving) 347,827 acres in New Jersey--nearly half the open space accessible to the public.
A parallel movement has sprung up over concern about the loss of agricul-tural land. With property values rising through the seventies and eighties, farmers across New Jersey felt increasing pressure to sell their land to developers. In 1981, New Jersey voters again voiced their concern at the ballot box, approving a bond measure to create a fund to preserve farmland. The money is used to pay farmers the difference between the value of their property as farmland and the value of their property as developable land. The farmer retains ownership of the property, which is restricted forever to agriculture, even if the farm should one day be sold.
Over the past fifteen years, the state of New Jersey has paid an average of 62 percent of the cost of these development easements, with municipalities and counties chipping in the rest. All told, New Jersey has spent $138 million to preserve farmland, and by the end of 1997 it is expected that 53,000 acres will have been preserved, about one-third of them in Burlington and Hunterdon counties.
While these impressive displays of concern over the loss of open space have occurred fairly recently, the notion is not a new one. I am reminded of Fred Brown, the craggy protagonist of The Pine Barrens, John McPhee's marvelous 1967 paean to that vast sylvan world in New Jersey's southern center. At 79, Brown had lived in the Pines his whole life. He knew its history, its customs, and its people; he knew its lonely sandy roads like we know every gentle curve of the Garden State Parkway. When McPhee spoke to him 30 years ago while researching the book, Brown complained about the newcomers who had started to build around the fringes of the Pines. To appreciate his plight, we should remember that the first paved roads in the Pines were not laid down until Brown was 40 years old. A way of life was coming to an end, the only way of life he had known, and even from within the evergreen cocoon where he had dwelled for all his days, Fred Brown could see it coming.
For all of our considerable woe over the loss of open space, it may surprise many to learn that according to researchers at Rutgers University, 80 percent of New Jersey's land cover remains forest, farmland, marshes, and lightly developed residential areas. Using satellite images that depict land cover, the Rutgers researchers found only 20 percent of the state's landscape to be "fully developed." Who would have imagined it, what with all the smokestacks and traffic jams that litter New Jersey's reputation? But think about it: In High Point State Park in New Jersey's northwestern corner, you can stand on a splendid day in autumn and look upon the seasonal scarlet and amber of three states; the sweet, rolling terrain in Hunterdon County still sustains farmers and horse breeders; table-flat parcels of rich soil reach to the horizon on the abundant farms of Burlington County; an un-disturbed majesty can be found along the Jersey Shore at Island Beach State Park; and more than 1 million foreboding acres of the Pine Barrens remain full of mystery and lore but few denizens. Five years ago, my wife and I moved to Lebanon Township, in the northwestern tip of Hunterdon County. Our home is tucked in at the bottom of a quarter-mile driveway of gravel. At the top of our driveway, across the street, a large horse farm grooms its chestnut brood for the harness track. A few miles away is Ken Lockwood Gorge, where an upland stretch of the Raritan River's South Branch (a stretch still clean enough to allow trout to reproduce) cuts a verdant canyon between Califon and High Bridge. Boulders--some of them the size of dump trucks--adorn the river throughout the gorge. It's one of my favorite places. Our house is surrounded by woods on every side, although the large plot of land adjoining our property to the west is owned by a development partnership. On occasion I'll take my son, Zachary, who is nearing his second birthday, on a walk through the woods and down to the stream behind our property. On the other side of the stream is a red house where a neighbor lives with her dog. The house is close enough so that in winter, after the leaves take flight from the trees, it can be seen through the woods. I imagine, though, that in Zachary's mind those woods must stretch out forever.

Christopher Hann is a writer for the Courier-News in Somerset County.

Copyright © 1997, Micromedia Affiliates

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