Across the Watershed - Fall 2000

Though she's lived in a Basking Ridge retirement community for five years, don't think of Candace McKee Ashmun, recipient of GSWA's 2000 Marcellus Hartley Dodge Award, as retired - or even slowing down.

Since 1982, Ashmun - Candy to her friends - has been a consultant on environmental issues and office automation. Before that she was an employed environmentalist - first as director of research for the Upper Raritan Watershed Association, then as the first executive director of the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions (ANJEC). She also does volunteer work at the local, regional, state and federal levels.

Currently, for example, she's consulting working with ANJEC as coordinator of the Environmental Summit, a regular gathering of environmental professionals. She's also working with New Jersey Conservation Foundation analyzing the state's proosed new Water Quality and Watershed Management plan.

In addition, she's a member of New Jersey's Pinelands Commission, a gubernatorial appointment she's held since 1979, and serves on the boards of several non-profit organizations and coalitions. Among her past volunteer positions, in 1989 she chaired the NJ Department of Environmental Protection's Great Swamp Advisory Committee. She was also a founding member of the State Planning Commission.

"I grew up in Oregon, so an interest in the environment just came naturally," Ashmun says, referring to that state's natural beauty and aggressive environmental movement. "When I moved with my husband to New Jersey in 1946, I became involved in a variety of local issues, particularly education and environmental issues." Then, in the late 60s, while chairing Bedminster Township's Environmental Commission, she used her physics degree from Smith to land a water-quality testing job with the Upper Raritan Watershed Association - and soon three light bulbs went off.

"I came quickly to see the inseparable connection between land use and water quality - that you can't improve water quality in a vacuum," she says. "I also learned that most environmental issues - especially water quality - can't be addressed on a town-by-town basis. You need regional approaches.

"Third," Ashmun says, "I came to realize that if you want to win environmental battles, emotion and rhetoric aren't enough. You need solid data. You may not always win even with the data on your side, but you almost always lose if you don't have it."

These learnings, she says, may seem obvious to many today - but they helped drive new approaches to environmental protection back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. She cites the Great Swamp Advisory Committee's three-year study as a good example of a regional approach to gathering hard data, and linking land usage and water quality, to identify ways to protect the National Wildlife Refuge. (That work in turn has guided GSWA's efforts to seek and support regional approaches to watershed issues - for example, by working with the 10 Towns Great Swamp Watershed Management Committee.)

What's given Ashmun the most satisfaction in her half-century of public service? "Clearly," she says, "the growing acknowledgment that you have to consider land-use planning and environmental protection together, and not as separate issues. You need the planning and zoning people, the water-quality people, the toxic-cleanup people, the transportation-planners and others in a room together. You need representatives of government and private organizations, and private citizens as well. Without these coalitions, environmentalists are invariably frustrated."

Finally, what's her view on volunteerism today? "Two things," Ashmun says quickly. "First, as a group, environmental volunteers today just seem much smarter, more informed and more dedicated than ever before. They know the value of having facts as well as rhetoric - and as I said, it's facts that win the day.

"On the other hand," she continues, "volunteers are often harder to come by than in the past, simply because of the increasing complexity of everybody's lives. Given the sheer 'busyness' of everyone's schedule, it's just extraordinary what they're able to accomplish."

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