Water Works 56 - 11/16/04

You Can’t Tell The Players Apart without a Scorecard

Before we proceed any further I should make one thing clear. Some of you have mistaken me for someone who knows more than I really do. To set the record straight – I am not an expert at anything you have read or will read here. The real experts in the audience have probably guessed that, but I want to make sure I don’t mislead the rest of you into thinking Water Works is something it is not.

More important, I have no intention of becoming an expert either.

You baby-boomers in the audience must recall those old television shows that introduced young viewers to the mysteries and wonders of science, often with equipment and ingredients any self-respecting bunch of twelve-year-olds could round up in short order. The best ones usually ended with the warning: “Kids, don’t try this at home!” Which of course only inspired some of us to attempt occasionally hair-raising variations of our own.

That’s the spirit I’m trying to stir up with Water Works. All you need to get in touch with your inner twelve-year-old here are a computer, an internet connection and a sturdy pair of shoes. And no matter how much enthusiasm you bring to whatever you may be inspired to try your hand at, you will never have to explain to your parents how you lost your eyebrows.

Sloshing around in creeks is fun and great exercise, and highly recommended. You won’t need to build your own web site – even if you have a twelve-year-old around to teach you – because there are dozens of them out here already. New Jersey has a large and very active community of environmental advocates. Our water supply is just one of their many concerns. They are all on-line and no slouches at explaining what they’re for and against, what they’re doing, and how you can pitch in if you want to.

Spending some time exploring what is available on the internet may repay you handsomely. The New Jersey Public Interest Research Group’s water page is a good place to start. The Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions has a library of links to resources as extensive as you will find anywhere. If you want to stay informed about environmental news in the state, Garden State EnviroNet collects the top stories every day, and will even send them to you if you ask. They have a searchable archive of every story they have printed for the last 7 years and also provide links to roughly 500 other sites.

Follow the links from any site and it won’t take long before you stumble across small marvels like the Ten Towns Committee, one of the most original and ambitious initiatives in watershed protection I have seen. Visit the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and you will be amazed at how much a relative handful of people can accomplish. Finally, though considered enemy territory by many here in Franklin Township, the web site of our state’s Department of Environmental Protection is an invaluable resource. One of our fondest hopes here is that the folks in charge down there will get around to reading it themselves someday.

What can a self-professed amateur add to all that expertise? Water Works is the place where the kids are always trying it at home, so to speak. That is what the series has been all about from its very beginning. Our first 52 chapters really consist of nothing more than Fellow Correspondent’s Technical Evidence and my attempt to understand its implications. It didn’t take me long to realize back then that most of my readers knew even less than I did about a subject of which I knew almost nothing. We all learned at the same pace. What you are reading here now, and will be for some time to come, is everything else that occurred to me along the way that I’m still muddling through.

Water Works is hardly breaking news to most environmental professionals and veteran activists. For them, it’s closer to light entertainment. Those of you who sit on town committees, planning boards, environmental commissions and such are the readers I’m really trying to rope in, along with any public-spirited civilians you can recruit to join the ranks of the water-obsessed. We will need all the help we can get. We amateurs will have more influence over New Jersey’s future than the community of environmental experts and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection ever will.

Look at a map of New Jersey and you will see what I mean. (Maps) If you take the state’s total area and subtract all the land subject to regulations that supersede municipal ordinances – state and county parks, protected areas of the Pinelands and Highlands, the coastline running from Sandy Hook to Delaware Bay, preserved tracts, lakes, reservoirs, streams and wetlands – you will still have more than half the state left over. All of it is within commuting distance of New York City or Philadelphia. The sheer number of people crammed into that portion of two of America’s largest metropolitan areas is unprecedented. What we leave of it for the next generation is in the hands of the town committees, planning boards and environmental commissions of hundreds of individual towns – groups made up of amateurs like you and me.

So from now on, whenever you feel I’m making too much of a nuisance of myself, try thinking of me as a sort of poster child for the rest of you.

One of the privileges amateurs in any field have is the right to ask seemingly stupid questions. Despite having declared Water Works a politics-free zone of the internet (54), I am allowing myself an exception provoked by our recent presidential election. My question is – shouldn’t political conservatives be conservationists too?

Here in Franklin Township that is more than mere rhetoric. We are a very conservative town. McLennan County, Texas, the place President Bush calls home when he is not at the White House, gave him 65.7% of its votes in his bid for re-election. Franklin gave him 65.1%. I didn’t vote for the president, but if I were to poll my fellow members of the Franklin Planning Board I would expect to find that about two-thirds of them did. Yet as anyone who knows us will tell you, we are considered to be among the fiercest defenders of the environment you will ever meet.

We see no contradiction there. For example, our attitude toward our water supply is what you would expect from a board of fiscal conservatives reviewing public expenditures. If you want to build something here, you have to convince us that you can balance the hydrologic books. We are fond of counting and measuring things. We are very strict about impacts on stream corridors and wetlands, stands of trees, wildlife habitats, and even views of historic buildings. If you have plans to inflict any changes on us, you will be required to do so as prudently and conscientiously as you can. It’s a matter of simple respect for the 300-year tradition of good stewardship we inherited and consider our duty to continue.

That fundamentally conservative stance makes us “environmental extremists” to the majority of the state’s self-proclaimed conservatives, and to some very prominent moderates too. They would rather have us apply our standards less strictly, allow the maximum amount of latitude to whomever wants to alter the complex natural systems we’re trying to protect, and reduce our exercise of due diligence to the bare minimum. That is not an unfair characterization of the typical conservative approach to environmental regulation – in fact, it is practically a nutshell description of the conservationist brief against the notorious “Fast Track” bill, that bit of spine-stiffening our state legislature required to enable them to pass the Highlands Water Protection Act. Is that how real conservatives should behave?

“Yes!” say New Jersey’s conservatives – at least most of them, anyway.

They have plenty of company. The result of this year’s presidential contest seems to say that more than half of the country agrees. Nearly as disturbing for conservationists was the realization that the environment was not an issue of any consequence in the race. Since New Jersey will be electing both its governor and state assembly next year, we should start thinking now about how to discourage those national trends from becoming more fashionable here.

Whatever else you may think of them, the leadership of both state political parties will never stand accused of originality. A look at why conservation disappeared from the national political debate may help us encourage New Jersey’s conservatives to act less like their red-state brethren and more like conservationists.

There are several reasons why environmental issues were absent from the recent presidential campaign. The Democrats fear that raising them is like handing ammunition to their opponents. But they overlook a self-inflicted problem the Republicans face. Aside from their usual reluctance to give environmental issues as high a priority as the Democrats do, Republicans have another reason to keep a tight lid on the subject. They can’t afford too much gratuitous thinking about it in their largest metropolitan areas – places like Denver and Las Vegas, or Phoenix and Houston (i) – all suffering from growing pains far worse than any New Jersey ever inflicted on itself.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas with populations larger than 1 million. (ii) The fastest growing ones are in the territories that were part of the Louisiana Purchase and Mexico 200 years ago. Early maps called those regions “The Great American Desert,” because the first explorers were struck by how dry the place seemed, though most of it doesn’t resemble anything we would think of as a desert. Much of it proved to be extremely fertile land for growing and grazing, so long as the limitations of water supplies were respected. For the last 50 years cities and suburbs have been growing there, with the same concentrations of people we have here and a lot less water. Blue New Jersey has more in common with parts of the Rockies, the Great Plains and the Sun Belt than you might assume.

Take heed, New Jersey conservatives! My fellow Republicans, this could be the opportunity of a lifetime and the stuff of which political legends are made. “The cutting edge of societal evolution” is right in front of your noses. You moderates, who talk a better game than you play – “More hat than cattle,” as they say in Texas – you listen up too. A chance to bask in your party’s national spotlight is yours for the taking. After fouling our nest for generations, we have finally begun to turn things around, while every day the most urbanized spots of those electoral-map red states grow more like what New Jersey used to be. The second Bush administration will do for them what Viagra did for Bob Dole.

Those red-state urbanites are already looking for solutions to problems we’re now putting behind us. If we stay the course, eventually we may get to brag about turning New Jersey into their promised land. If that sounds far-fetched, think again. Wedged between the country’s first and fifth largest cities (iii), at once the most urban and suburban state, but still 40% rural (iv), New Jersey is the laboratory for America’s urban future as much as any place could be. Is there a metropolitan area anywhere in the country, red or blue, that can match what we’ve done to secure a future for ours in only the past 3 years? Plus, having made every mistake imaginable for more than 300 years gives us no small advantage.

“A 300-year tradition? We’ll take it!” sayeth our conservatives.

Be patient – they may finally get it right someday. Perhaps they need more time to think things through. While we wait, we will put politics behind us and turn our attention to more technical concerns. For our next few episodes we will take a look at what the folks in the white coats have been up to in this urban futures lab of ours, and learn what some of their findings mean.

Ron Gutkowski