The family next door

Part I: What we did to the neighborhood

(This is Part I of two-parter. The second part is coming later today. Feel free to wait for that one if you prefer to read it as one piece.)

I live in the most densely populated state in the union.

The entire state is just a smudge of land stretching only 60 miles across wedged between larger neighbors. It is less than 1/10th the size of Wyoming, barely 1/20th the size of Montana. Yet, it is home to a population six times larger than the two combined.

Somehow, my little state of New Jersey, is home to over nine million people.

That population radiates out from the major cities to the east and southwest: New York City and Philadelphia.

Between the two is a long belt of suburbia that is first dense with multifamily buildings and then thins to mostly single-family homes with yards that grow bigger and bigger until the midpoint between the cities when they shrink again as one nears the other metropolis.

It is a state of bustle and adaptation, pretty to the point of beautiful in places, but long maligned as a punchline. Its reputation was fully earned. For decades, New Jersey was the poster child for reckless industrialization and utter disregard for the environment.

By the start of the 20th century, the state had been nearly entirely denuded of mature trees. Demands for fuel, lumber, furniture, industry were gluttonous and the state obliged without an ounce of foresight or or concern about the consequences.

That insatiable appetite consumed entire forests of old growth hardwoods. Centuries-old oak trees with trunks measuring six feet across. Towering maples with dense canopies so large, they shielded the equivalent of an entire city block from the summer sun. Gone. Reduced to fields of stumps, garish and ugly, dystopian.

And then, when those trees - the ones older than the state itself, the country, - the ones had been there since before there were colonies - were all gone, the appetite consumed whatever else could be felled and then milled into boards or pulp or paper.

In the southern part of the state, there is a stretch of land called the Pine Barrens. Its soil is sandy and alkaline. It doesn’t support farming or grazing well. It is prone to forest fires from lightning strikes in the dry heat of summer. But it is hospitable to pines and an array of birds and animals.

We clear cut that land too. Reduced it to a nearly barren expanse and then cleaved it open and bisected it with a highway cutting a long north-south line across the state.

“Progress” denuded New Jersey of its wilderness and in so doing, robbed an entire ecosystem of its habitat. Species were lost or diminished to the point of near extinction. Others had their populations explode thanks to the destruction of natural predators. Lost were nearly all bald eagles. Multiplied were birds like cormorants which empty entire lakes of fish life.

Natural destruction is never local though. Its effects radiate out with tides and migration - and New Jersey happens to be a critical crossroads for each of those phenomena.

It’s longest rivers are tidal. They flow out to the ocean and then back upstream with the pull of the moon. Pollution in New Jersey doesn’t just run out to the sea. It spreads and sprawls north and south, east and west.

There is a place I take my son fishing. It sits sixty miles up the Delaware River from the Atlantic Ocean. The body of water is a tiny lake nestled between mountain ridges. It is an artifact of the last ice ages. It sits in a deep gouge created by the force of glacial ice and then filled by its melting.

It is a pristine place. We catch rainbow trout as eagles and beaver fish for their share.

A few years ago, the trout we caught started to show up in the net with round lesions as if from infection or predation. I contacted state biologists and brought a sample down to a hatchery. The marks were lamprey bites.

The small streams feeding into, and flowing out of, that little lake were apparently spawning grounds for lamprey… a species typically found in salt water.

Sixty miles upstream from the ocean, a marine species laid its eggs which then hatched and grew to maturity before traveling back down to the sea.

In New Jersey, there is no such thing as local pollution. What goes wrong here moves and spreads. When earth and water in New Jersey become uninhabitable, entire ecosystems weaken; species thin and fail; and that, in turn, jeopardizes the survival of others.

And the phenomena is not limited to land and sea. Up above New Jersey, unseen by the nine million people below, is a migratory flyway. An aerial highway of sorts. Owing to its location and geography, it is a central crossroads for an impossible diversity of migratory birds. Each spring and fall, literally millions of birds travel across New Jersey to and from summer and winter ranges.

Hawks, osprey, waterfowl, songbirds.

Over 300 species of birds pass over the state or make year-round homes in it.

When the state denuded itself of forest and systematically polluted every single one of its largest waterways, it killed off not only its residents but also its visitors. Pollutants like DDT aggregated up the food chain until apex birds like eagles and falcons were too poisoned to lay viable eggs.

By 1970, there were virtually no bald eagles left in the state.

Like bobcats, they had been all but extincted in the state by the encroachment of a single species that held no regard for its place in an ecosystem shared with all other living things: mankind.

And that, to me, is an absolute sin.

My little state, the smudge of land between larger neighbors, poisoned first its own land and water and then exported that injury to neighbors near and far.

New Jersey wasn’t alone in its acts of destruction but it was a particularly egregious culprit located at a particularly sensitive crossroads.

We took nature to the very brink of ruin.

We pillaged and destroyed in the name of “progress’ and left behind wounds teetering on irrecoverable.

And then we got religion. Slowly. Incompletely. We woke up to the consequences of a gluttony for natural resources absent a concern for their survival.

Thankfully, nature is forgiving. Given time and amends, nature adapts, adjusts and renews.

Over the past 100 years, my little state, a place crowded with humanity yet still pocketed with beauty, has been on two long, slow, parallel paths.

Along one: forces of greed and disregard doing new damage
Along the other: a growing chorus of voices pushing to first stop that and then do what can be done to reverse it

Thankfully, the latter has grown while the former has weakened.

There are some things that cannot be undone... but nature adapts and adjusts. With proper amends, it also heals… but first, it adapts.

And that is the subject of Part II.

Adaptation and survival even in the hardest of circumstances.

Part I was the brutality of our war against nature.

Part II is the triumph of its survival; the beauty of its renewal.

I’ll post that one later today after I go pick up my son... an errand, for which, I am now running very late as always.

Be forgiving of my typos. I don’t have time to edit now but will clean up later. Maybe.