Water Works 60 - 8/1/05

How to Make History, the Easy Way

We are what we take for granted. Our ability to spot an unforeseen opportunity or problem to be solved depends on assumptions we make about any situation in which we find ourselves, as much as it depends on experience and expertise.

“Think out of the box” is a figure of speech I suspect will have a
shelf-life as long as any of Shakespeare’s. I believe the expression refers to an exercise I recall from college. It must have been part of a psychological test. You were presented with an array of dots in rows and columns, forming a box on an otherwise empty page. All the dots in the box had to be connected with a minimum number of straight lines, tracing a single, angled path through them. Correct solutions (there were several) confirmed your inventiveness. One more line than that consigned you to the ranks of the mediocre. My score probably meant I should have been put under house arrest – I don’t recall that part exactly.

Most people tried to solve the problem by drawing lines that stayed within the box. All the correct solutions required lines that extended through it and intersected outside it, which enabled you to connect more dots with each line. To see how the pattern of dots made that possible, you had to expand your field of vision, and make no assumptions about how much of the page you could use and what you could do with it.

I can’t think of a better example of failure to think out of the box than the continuing debate over what New Jersey should do with Petty’s Island. The question is whether a former CITGO oil storage depot in the Delaware River, now the nesting-ground for a family of bald eagles, should be turned into a wildlife refuge in its entirety, or whether its 392 acres should include a “world-class” hotel and conference center, a golf course, offices and new homes, shopping – and the eagles, if they prefer to stay.

CITGO proposed to clean up what all agree is an industrial brownfield and donate Petty’s Island to the state. The state turned the offer down, in favor of a plan by the Township of Pennsauken to redevelop the place. Since CITGO has refused to sell the island to Pennsauken, the township intends to acquire it through power of eminent domain. (i) Surprisingly, the dispute has become a talking point in our current gubernatorial race. An environmental issue that receives that much attention in a New Jersey political campaign is seen less often than a bald eagle, so it’s not likely the matter will be resolved any time soon.

Petty’s Island sits off the southernmost end of Pennsauken’s waterfront on the New Jersey side of the Delaware. Most of the island lies across a channel from Camden, where the river begins a sharp turn south under the Ben Franklin Bridge between Camden and Philadelphia’s Center City. The island is about a mile up-river from the bridge, almost dead-center in the entire Philadelphia metropolitan region. Spreading out from both sides of the river for many more miles in every direction, including its suburbs in New Jersey, it’s the second largest concentration of people in an urbanized area on the east coast, and the fifth largest in the United States.

A wildlife preserve on an island in the middle of all that, in sight from Interstate 95, the most heavily traveled highway between Maine and Florida, may strike some as a waste of valuable real estate. It makes perfect sense to me. For years I lived just a few city blocks from Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, an improbably large swath of green, open space that begins right at the edge of the downtown skyline, at the Museum of Art, and ends at the city limits. You can get lost there. By the time you realize you are only 100 yards from a city street, you will see things that might make you think it was 50 miles away.

The size of Fairmount Park makes it more attractive to wildlife than smaller, less contiguous, and more intensively groomed open spaces. Habitat fragmentation is a risk we take no matter how carefully we develop any tract of land. Smart developers, if they want to make nature a selling point for what they build, know that. The relative isolation of Petty’s Island, out in the river, is probably what the eagles found so congenial, as did the herons, hawks, foxes and other wild things there that we don’t usually see in our back yards.

CITGO and the environmental groups lobbying the state to preserve the island say building on it will ruin it as a wildlife habitat. Pennsauken and the state’s Department of Environmental Protection say it won’t. If the dispute was confined to habitat fragmentation and other impacts of development, based on all the accounts I’ve read, CITGO and the preservationists won a long time ago.

Unfortunately, Petty’s Island is a New Jersey island. What is really at stake is the taxable value of the improvements Pennsauken wants to build on it, compared to the island’s value as a preserve. From that perspective, the position the township and the state have taken is clear. If the eagles, herons, hawks and foxes want to enhance Pennsauken’s tax base by sticking around, they’re welcome. Otherwise, they won’t be missed.

It’s the law of the jungle. Like many towns on both banks of the Delaware from Trenton down to Delaware Bay, Pennsauken is a casualty of the river’s decline from its days as a great thoroughfare of manufacturing, refining and shipping. The derelict hulks of an era that peaked 50 years ago are some of the regional landscape’s most distinctive features, as you can see from any bridge or rise on a highway. Pennsauken has been far luckier than neighboring Camden, a place that practically redefines despair, but it needs extensive revitalization. It’s a matter of civic survival.

The town has been planning a future for Petty’s Island for 20 years, and it shows. What it wants to do is exactly what a town wanting to reclaim a waterfront would have done a generation ago. Building out half the island for a hotel, several hundred new homes, offices and shopping will make it nearly as busy as the mainland. There are friendlier habitats several miles down-river in the Delaware estuary for any of the creatures living there. Why would they stay?

The amount of land Pennsauken plans to develop on the island is less than three percent of all the land in the township. If it leaves the island alone and redevelops that much more of the mainland – which certainly needs it – the town’s 36,000 residents will have an attraction in their municipal front yard that the largest cities in the country will envy. And if any of us want to go there, or if any of the millions of people living in the Philadelphia metropolitan region want to go there, we have to visit Pennsauken. I’ll let you connect the rest of the dots.

Someday, one of us may see a bald eagle soar over Independence Hall. Or perhaps a kid in Camden might see one on a day when it matters most, a reminder that his world is a lot bigger than Camden. I imagine Ben Franklin would have admired the vision it takes to keep eagles nesting in that stretch of the river, by the bridge that bears his name. Instead of eagles on Petty’s Island, Pennsauken’s visionaries and our visionaries in Trenton would rather see – shopping.

Petty’s Island is a relatively simple bit of urban reclamation. The town of Pennsauken hasn’t yet built itself past the point of no return, as the city of Los Angeles has, for example. Planners, environmentalists and the real estate industry there have long dreamed of restoring the Los Angeles River to its natural state, as the focus of a network of parks. Over the years, an obsession with engineered flood control and disregard for other options turned a once free-flowing river into the concrete channel best known to many of us as the scene of car chases in movies.

Assumptions Los Angeles made generations ago about how large it would grow and the amount of water it would need, and about its choice of flood control measures, all turned out to be wrong in light of what we know today. Reclaiming most of the river may be impossible. The costs and the work required to rectify only some of the city’s mistakes will have to be spread over a lifetime or longer, the way medieval cathedrals were once built.

We leave a large footprint wherever we tread. Consider the Golden Sunlight Mine, an enormous gold mine cut into the side of Bull Mountain, in southern Montana. From its top at the crest of the mountain, the mining pit is 1,500 feet deep, a hole in the ground big enough to hide the Empire State Building. The problem with the mine is how to restore the site when mining operations cease. The chemistry of rock dug from gold mines changes when the rock is exposed to the atmosphere. Refilling Golden Sunlight with the several hundred million tons of rock pulled from the mine for more than 20 years may be the best solution, or it may inflict more harm on local water supplies than leaving the pit unfilled. A bigger problem is that neither of the proposed remedies comes with a guarantee it will work.

We will probably never put another major river in a channel, at least not on the scale Los Angeles did, or dig another mine the size of the Golden Sunlight without a plan for reclamation in hand before the digging begins. Both will be with us for a long time though, reminders of just how short-sighted we can be.

As we do with the built environments of earlier civilizations, by the time archeologists from some distant future reach the paper trail excusing ours, they will have to puzzle their way past wonders like that mine. If it’s left unfilled, what will they think when they first see it? It could be the remains of anything, from an unearthed ancient city to an unfinished monument of our own, or even the ruins of some barely imaginable catastrophe.

As a nature preserve, Petty’s Island may puzzle those archeologists too. A glance toward Philadelphia makes it seem a natural extension of Fairmount Park, but if they look to its New Jersey side, they will marvel at how we managed to restrain ourselves. The state’s obsessive love for cars, highways and suburban sprawl will leave them thoroughly confused. As they dig deeper, the public policies that enshrine our disregard for the consequences of the way we live will be hard to believe. When they finally hit bottom, and the political shenanigans surrounding Petty’s Island, they may conclude that the island must have been preserved as an act of rebellion, by a people pushed beyond the point of endurance, an outraged citizenry that already had so little confidence in its leaders, it refused to let them pump their own gasoline.

Spectacular mistakes like the Los Angeles River, Golden Sunlight and Petty’s Island – if we choose to make it one – don’t happen overnight. The river and the mine as they are today did not result from any single decision. Each resulted from a long series of decisions that spanned decades, and each is the product of a particular way of thinking. Petty’s Island could have been preserved a year ago, almost at the stroke of a pen. We are still arguing about it now because the people who manage our public affairs lack the habits of mind needed to appreciate the opportunity the island presents.

“Creeping normalcy” is a way of life in New Jersey. Many people naturally assume that living here requires us to put up with a progressively degraded environment. Occasional and wonderful exceptions aside, as a general rule that’s been true. If we want to reverse that trend, half the battle is teaching our presumptive leaders how to avoid mistakes with irreversible consequences. New Jersey still has plenty of building and growing to do. Petty’s Island is a perfect place to begin learning how to get the rest of our history right.

When we need a reminder of how to get it all wrong, we only have to spend some time in rush hour traffic. My discussion of the state’s traffic problems a few episodes ago was more than a shameless ploy to get your attention. (57, 58) There is no better example of creeping normalcy. We all know that no matter how bad New Jersey’s traffic is now, it will inevitably grow worse. We live with it every day and we’ve learned to take it for granted. That’s less punishment than we probably deserve for willfully ignoring decades of warnings.

Another insidious form of creeping normalcy is our tendency to progressively lower our expectations for the conduct of public
officials. Their conduct in the case of Petty’s Island has not been a pretty sight. Some of the more prominent proponents of preserving the island – mainly candidates for political office – haven’t behaved any better. Watching them argue a case they barely comprehend themselves has at best provided comic relief.

If Petty’s Island is eventually preserved for reasons that have little to do with its environmental merits, that will be good news the way winning a lottery is good news. We will have learned nothing. Politics will always be with us, but it should have limits. It’s time to tell the powers-that-be and the political wannabes now wrangling over Petty’s Island – they should expand their field of vision beyond their own career prospects and stop embarrassing the rest of us. If that doesn’t do the trick, tell them to think hard about our rush hour traffic.

Ron Gutkowski