Guest Column
Your Turn
Brian J. Racin

On the importance of preserving open space across New Jersey

As a current and former member of several conservation organizations with local chapters in New Jersey, I am glad when I read the local newsletters they present with stories of success in the areas of preservation and habitat protection.

I am dismayed, however, that these organizations seem only to focus on areas such as the Highlands, the Pine Barrens or the Bayshore. The rest of New Jersey is an integral part of all these regions and is an essential bridge between them to maintain and retain the native biota we enjoy as residents of and visitors to the state.

Powerlessness is a feeling I’ve often experienced over the years when witnessing the inexorable march of the “strip mall/McMansion machine” that is churning across the state of New Jersey even as its residents sleep. Since becoming a team member on a local environmental commission, I realize that the citizens of New Jersey are not powerless in the struggle to save open space and limit rampant overdevelopment. Each community is requested to produce a master plan and submit it to the state for approval and incorporation into the overall plan for the Garden State.

Over the course of the last decade, the Raritan River corridor, on its lower reaches, has been vacated by several industries, has had others move in anew, and has been reclaimed and remediated so that it can be brought to the table for consideration in several large redevelopment schemes aimed at providing economic opportunity for the region.

A minor-league ballpark was proposed for the former National Lead site in Sayreville, but you may have noticed a large drop in attendance at minor-league parks in the past two years since it seems that market has become saturated. Another proposal would have created an “Inner Harbor” area along the mouth of the river and the Raritan Bay. This would most likely culminate in the fruition of the forecasts of motor-vehicle traffic becoming three times worse than at present.

A proposal that seems like a better idea to me (and to local citizens and sportsmen who were asked) would be to involve other communities’ commissions along the river front to preserve the open space that is left as a continuous (if not contiguous) wildlife corridor/greenway for the residents of local communities to enjoy, rather than having to drive several hours to experience the Pine Barrens or Highlands or Bayshore.

The public needs to be made aware of this opportunity, for without a taste of the wild, no desire to preserve, protect or further experience it will manifest itself among the citizens of the forgotten tracts of New Jersey falling to the bulldozers.

This upcoming Earth Day 2007, we’d like to use this concept as a theme for the river cleanup sponsored by New Jersey Waterwatch to generate financial support from conservation organizations and for public outreach to generate support for the project among state and national legislators. In that way, the advocates for our wild flora and fauna, our citizens, can use their power to preserve a living ecoregion before the only way they’ll experience it will be in their virtual world on their personal computers or cable nature channels or on museum trips where a display would note the once-natural system that existed along the Raritan.

Although it may not look like or be equal in size to some of the “Biogems” or “Last Great Places” as named by some of the conservation organizations, it is regions like this that are vital to the survival of the larger living systems they serve to connect, since as our corridors disappear, so will the flow of life that sustains them.

Examples of success on a local level include the Hackensack Riverkeeper, the establishment of the Watchung Reservation and the Lawrence Brook Watershed Partnership and the work along the Passaic River watershed. What New Jersey needs now is a statewide, concerted effort in this area before we reach “buildout.”

Brian J. Racin is chairman of the South River Environmental and Shade Tree Commission