Robert D. Yaro
Executive Director, Regional Plan Association
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While most concerned citizens would agree that it is important to protect regional natural resources, any two reasonable people may define "region" and "regional" in different ways, all of them legitimate. We can define a resource, such as the Hackensack Meadowlands, for example, as one based on political boundaries (Essex and Hudson Counties), geography (in North Jersey), bio-regional systems (the Passaic and Hackensack watershed) or urban systems (part of the Greater Newark or Tri-State metropolitan region).
Unfortunately, most regional resource systems, including rivers, forests, mountain ranges, estuaries, and wetlands systems, transcend political boundaries, making their definition, protection, and management unnecessarily complicated. This is because town and county boundaries in most cases were not defined by the underlying biological or geological systems, since King Charles II and his successors in England, on which our system is based knew or cared little about these systems when they designated many of these boundaries. Complicating matters further, the expansion of metropolitan economies, housing markets and transportation systems in the late 20th century means that most of us live and work in even larger regions that transcend even state boundaries.
Regional Plan Association now defines the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut (or "Tri-State") metropolitan region as an area of 10,500 square miles, stretching from Trenton to New Haven and from Montauk to Poughkeepsie, and including 31 counties, 750 municipalities, and parts of three states. This area encompasses North America's largest metropolitan economy, valued at $640 billion a year, including regional housing, employment and other markets, transportation systems, and a vast array of environmental systems that support the lives of the region's 20 million residents.
The region's growth is now on a collision course with the natural resource systems, including public water supply watersheds, wetlands systems, estuaries, forests, wildlife habitat and farmland: the "green infrastructure" that makes life in the region desirable, and in many ways possible. For nearly half a century, despite relatively low rates of population growth, most of the region's growth has consisted of low-density, "de-centered" development, to the extent that developed land now covers more than 40% of the region's total land area. In fact, we have urbanized more land in the past 30 years than we did in the previous 300. Most of these newly developed areas are accessible only by automobile, contributing to the more than doubling of automobile registrations in the past three decades. Cars, in turn create greenhouse gases and pollutants and require paving that contributes to air and water pollution and visual pollution. Continuation of these land consuming development trends threatens the survival of the region's major natural resource systems.
Protecting these resource systems will be an enormous challenge, but it will also be a prerequisite if we are to retain the region's economic vitality and quality of life. More than ever before, these two attributes have become linked because the region's future economic success will be defined by its ability to offer a superlative quality of life to its citizens. This is because:
The components of quality of life can be defined in a number of different ways. Regional Plan Association's 1995 Quality of Life Poll determined that 89% of the Tri-State region's residents consider environmental concerns important in determining the region's quality of life; in fact, the poll determined that access to open space and greenery is the single most important factor in determining people's satisfaction with the region's quality of life. At the same time, 75% of the region's residents consider air and water pollution to be a problem in their community, and two-thirds of them would spend money for access to open space and for clean air and water. Even those aspects of the region's quality of life that residents like the least --highway congestion and high taxes-- are a consequence of our sprawling, automobile-based development patterns.
The inextricable link between environmental quality, quality of life and economic success was recently underscored by Fortune Magazine, which, in preparing its annual Best Cities for Business list (November 13, 1995) concluded that " . . no matter which operations a company is moving to a city, it had better be a nice place to live. Top quality workers demand a top quality living environment. That means affordable housing, good infrastructure, and plenty of opportunities for recreation and culture. Lifestyle matters to talented people who have a choice of locations --as nearly all do."
Through much of this century, each generation in New Jersey and the Tri-State region has successfully responded to challenges that threatened regional resource systems, making us national leaders in land use planning and environmental protection:
The juggernaut of unplanned sprawl that threatens to cover most of northern New Jersey threatens also threatens to undercut the region's natural resource systems, and its economic prospects. This tradition of innovative programs provides us with the institutional base and the public confidence to move aggressively to protect these resource systems.
Although it is important to look at the region's environmental resources as integrated systems, it is first necessary to define the individual resources that require protection. These include:
Protecting these resources will require that we fundamentally alter the region's development patterns, to attract new growth into compact centers, described by the New Jersey State Plan as "communities of place." To do so will require changes in values that drive residents and businesses to "greenfield" sites. It will also require new forms of cooperation between communities, levels of government, private property owners and developers, and private conservation groups and government, as well as creative new forms of regulations and incentives.
Elements of an effective strategy should include:
Across the United States and around the world, other metropolitan regions are taking steps to manage and protect important natural resource systems. Since the late 1940s, greater London has had effective programs to protect the London Green Belt and a network of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) across southeastern England. Paris has prepared a new Plan Vert (or Green Plan) to protect systems of forests, watersheds, and special scenic and historic landscapes ringing the Ile de France metropolitan region. Both of these regions benefit from the full financial and administrative support of their national governments, which feel a special responsibility to their capital regions --which hasn't always been the case here.
In the US, more than 30 regional land use regulatory commissions have been created since the 1970s, in areas containing some of the nation's most important natural and scenic resources. Most of these areas faced metropolitan or resort development, leading to the creation of regional preservation strategies. These areas range from the Florida Keys in the south to the Adirondacks, Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard in the northeast, to the Sawtooth Mountain district in Idaho to the Columbia Gorge and Lake Tahoe on the west coast. In addition, a new network of national heritage areas and corridors is being established in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other states. Some of these commissions have been created as partnerships between states (Columbia Gorge and Lake Tahoe, or partnerships between states and the federal government (e.g., the Blackstone Valley National Heritage Corridor in Massachusetts and Rhode Island). These models, as well as those within the Tri-State region, such as the Jersey Pinelands or Long Island Pine Barrens Commission could become models for protecting larger natural areas in the region, such as the Appalachian Highlands or the Kittatinny-Shawangunk range.
More recently, a movement has begun in the U.S. to create metropolitan greenspace systems, many of them initiated or administered by private conservation groups. The first of these is Boston's Bay Circuit, first proposed by Benton MacKaye in the 1920s to create a permanent green ring around the metropolitan area. This concept was revived in the 1980s, and is now a joint effort of state and municipal governments and the area's extensive network of private land trusts, including the statewide Trustees of Reservations.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, since the 1970s the private Greenbelt Alliance has been promoting protection of a permanent greenbelt around the 9-county region. Over a nearly 25- year period, several hundred thousand acres of open space have been protected by public and private action, but another estimated 525,000 acres remain at risk. In Portland, Oregon, the metropolitan government, Portland Metro, is working to protect a similar green network surrounding the region's urban growth boundary. In Chicago, the Openlands Project is protecting a system of forests, watersheds, lakefronts and prairies, including a new 23,000 acre prairie reservation at the former Joliet Arsenal. In Philadelphia, a similar Greenspace system has been proposed by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.
Finally, RPA's third regional plan proposes to build on the Tri-State region's one million acre park system to create a Metropolitan Greensward, that would include 11 large "regional reserves" protecting the region's major natural resource systems, and creating a permanent "green edge to growth" in the region. Ten of the reserves would protect the region's major mountain, estuary, and pine barrens systems, (including the municipal water supplies serving most of the region). These would include the Appalachian Highlands in New York and New Jersey, the Catskills, the New York Harbor and Long Island Sound estuaries, the coastal bay and barrier island systems on the New Jersey and Long Island shores, the New Jersey Pinelands and other resource systems. The 11th reserve would be a network of protected agricultural landscapes, including those in Hunterdon and Somerset Countiesin New Jersey. The RPA also proposes that Greensward also includes other large regional resource systems, such as the Great Swamp and the Meadowlands, a network of greenways along rivers and ridge lines, and a system of urban parks.
The RPA has already worked to create model planning systems to protect these landscapes, in places like the Long Island Pine Barrens and the Catskill watershed area, and will be working with coalitions of civic, community, environmental and business groups to protect others. The common theme in both of these efforts is that we need to strike a new balance between nature and humans in these places, and a new balance between conservation and development concerns, and between community and regional needs.
This bold vision for a permanent system of protected landscapes will take decades to create, and its success is not pre-ordained. To succeed, these initiatives will have to overcome long-standing conflicts between local home rule and regional concerns, and between public and private interests in land. Experience in New Jersey and elsewhere in the Tri-State region suggests that these conflicts can be overcome in ways that respect the interest of all parties. Efforts to create the Long Island Pine Barrens Commission, for example, were locally initiated, and resulted in a redefinition of home rule to include a three-town region encompassing the entire resource system. And private property interests were safeguarded in this program through assured purchase or transfers of development rights, and the designation of a compatible growth area to accommodate needed growth in appropriate locations. But it is also clear that these kinds of creative compromises can only be struck when there is strong public leadership and new forms of cooperation between community groups, environmentalists and developers and property owners.
If we can succeed in providing this leadership, and striking this balance, the investment of time and effort will be paid back in the form of improved quality of life, strengthened economic prospects, and a healthy environment, for generations to come.
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