Credit: (Amy Golden)
The headwaters of the Black Run Creek in Evesham Township are among the most pristine reaches of New Jersey’s 938,000-acre Pinelands National Reserve.
Only about 15 miles from Philadelphia’s city limits, the stretch of wetlands, streams and cranberry bogs is an ecological wonderland where threatened species like the bobolink and the Eastern box turtle live and breed amid grasslands and cedar swamps.
“You can’t really appreciate how magnificent it is until you get out on the trails and take it all in,” says Amy Golden, a retired veterinary dentist who leads bird counting and photography outings at the 1,300-acre Black Run Preserve. “You can’t help thinking you’re in New Jersey’s last bastion of unspoiled land.”
The Black Run Creek meanders through the preserve before feeding into the southwest branch of the Rancocas Creek, which in turn feeds into the Delaware River. For more than 1 million people in Burlington County and areas downstream, ecologists say, the Black Run is an essential component of clean drinking water.
NJ Spotlight News first chronicled the preserve in its “Water’s Edge” series in 2023, exploring the threats to the area but also the steps that have been taken to protect it. But two years later, it faces still more challenges.
Trying to protect pristine waters
Developers are now looking to bulldoze some 800 acres of privately owned land in the Black Run headwaters and build up to 270 new homes. Opponents of the plan, who’ve collected more than 5,000 signatures against it, say the threat to the Black Run headwaters is proof that long-awaited reforms to better protect Pinelands water can’t come fast enough.
Credit: (NJ Pinelands Commission)“Plans for development in this area have been kicking around for decades,” said Jaclyn Rhoads, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit that works to protect the Pinelands and its remarkably pure system of aquifers.
“The good news is that new rules to limit this kind of intrusion are at hand,” Rhoads said, in an interview with NJ Spotlight News last week. “The bad news is that it’s taken way too long. Pressure on the aquifer from drought, from brush fires, from overdevelopment is only getting worse.”
The changes Rhoads refers to are a series of amendments to the comprehensive management plan the state has used for decades to control development within the Pinelands reserve, which was created in 1978 by an act of Congress that recognized the region’s unique nature. Roughly the size of Rhode Island, the Pines remain the largest contiguous stretch of forest land on the Eastern Seaboard.
The reserve is also home to the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer, 17.7 trillion gallons of water that is among the purest in North America: A 1966 U.S. Geological Survey study described the water as “bacterially sterile, odorless, clear; its chemical purity approaches that of uncontaminated rainwater or melted glacier ice.”
Besides its renowned purity, the aquifer is also notably shallow, only a few feet below the surface. In swamps and other boggy places, experts say, the aquifer’s surface is essentially the floor of the Pinelands itself, an aqueous matrix of mosses and peaty, acidic soils where indigenous flora like the Atlantic cedar thrive.
If too much of that special water is sucked out of the aquifer — by development, drought or the encroachment of rising seawater — the unique web of Pineland life dies.
What’s in the proposed new rule?
In 2023, the state-run Pinelands Commission passed a rule that would expand the state’s power to limit withdrawal of water from the aquifer for new development or other uses. Under that new provision, now in effect, any withdrawal exceeding 50,000 gallons a day would have to be reviewed and approved by the commission. For many years, the threshold for state approval had been set at 100,000 gallons per day.
Another change that has been proposed but is not yet in effect would severely restrict efforts to develop the Black Run headwaters in Evesham Township. That amendment would officially redesignate 2,440 acres of the watershed from “rural development” to “forest area.” Under the new designation, developers could only build a single house for every 25 acres. The 270-unit project would be cut to about 35.
The proposed new Black Run rule still must undergo a public comment period this summer and a final commission vote set for September.
Advocates for all the new Pinelands rules, both those proposed and those already in place, worry how they might be enforced in a new administration under a new governor, set to take over in Trenton next year. They also say more needs to be done to offset pressure from heavy development bordering the preserve, as well as extreme conditions driven by climate change.
“These amendments are an important step, but any preservation efforts are at the mercy of politicians in Trenton,” said Jeff Tittel, former longtime head of the New Jersey Sierra Club, who was involved in the early drafting of the new rules. “It’s also a fair question to ask if these new restrictions are too little, too late. It took more than twenty years just to get these steps in place. How long will it take to reach further and give us more tools to offset the effect of climate change?”
Credit: (Amy Golden)Neither of Jersey’s major-party gubernatorial candidates, Republican Jack Ciattarelli nor Democrat Mike Sherrill, have weighed in on Pinelands policy, although Ciattarelli has called for concentrating new affordable housing away from suburbia to urban areas, a switch that could remove pressure from areas bordering the preserve.
Tittel noted that political interference from Washington, D.C. might also impact preservation policy in the Pinelands, especially under an activist Trump administration. The federal government has one seat on the 15-member Pinelands Commission.
“We haven’t seen anything from Trump yet affecting preservation, but anything is possible,’’ he said.
Earlier protection efforts ineffective
Efforts to beef up protections for the Pinelands aquifer date back more than a quarter century, when water ecologists first noted that brackish water was creeping into freshwater wetlands bordering the preservation area. Studies on the Metedeconk River in eastern Ocean County and wetland areas in Cape May County showed that the freshwater aquifer was slowly in retreat.
Legislation to restrict major new withdrawals from the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer was proposed as early as 1999, records show, but failed to move ahead.
In 2002, the state authorized a landmark series of scientific studies that proved that aquifer levels were dipping significantly. The studies, which took several years to complete, showed that the Pinelands’ delicate ecology was highly sensitive to drops in the shallow groundwaters.
“We now had sophisticated models that showed how the natural systems in the Pinelands were reacting to development,” Carleton Montgomery, former director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, said in an interview. “It gave us a very powerful tool to protect the aquifer.”
‘Jurisdictional overlap’
But progress, Montgomery said, was partly hindered by “jurisdictional overlap” between the Pinelands Commission and the state Department of Environmental Protection. More often than not, he said, the commission’s wishes to exert stricter controls were superseded by weaker directives from the DEP that were not strictly concerned with protecting the aquifer.
Later on, Montgomery said, the 2008 recession stifled much new construction and development that might have spurred stronger protections. Then there were eight years of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration.
“It was a bleak time,” Montgomery said. “We basically went through eight years with the governor’s office saying, ‘We’re not going to do anything to be more protective of the environment’.”
Paul Leakan, a spokesman for the Pinelands Commission, did not directly address the criticism. But in a response to questions submitted by NJ Spotlight News, he noted that the commission staff had to consider “a number of strategies” that protected the aquifer while also meeting the demands to provide water in developing areas.
“The rules adopted by the Commission provide a margin of safety for the ecosystems and human uses of the K-C aquifer,’’ he said.
In mid-April of this year, wooden pallets that had been dumped in a remote stretch of Waretown were set on fire. Police allege that a 19-year-old man from Ocean County, who was charged with arson, simply walked off before the fire was extinguished.
Credit: (Emile DeVito, New Jersey Conservation Foundation)Over the next three weeks, what became known as the Jones Road Wildfire destroyed businesses, closed roads and forced the evacuation of thousands of people as it burned through more than 15,000 acres.
The fire came on the heels of a year-long drought that the National Weather Service said was one of the most prolonged and intense to hit the mid-Atlantic states in a quarter century.
“Get used to it, because that’s the future,” said Emile D. DeVito of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation.
Damage by off-road vehicles, wildfires
For the past 36 years, DeVito has trolled the Pinelands documenting habitat changes as an official with the foundation, a nonprofit organization that has preserved more than 140,000 acres of open space, farmland and parks.
DeVito spends a lot of his time battling the effects of illegal dumpers who he said are destroying habitats for indigenous species such as the Northern pine snake. He also works to curb the spread of illegal off-road vehicle use that has scarred large areas of the national reserve.
”There’s no shortage of people who care nothing about natural resources and just want to treat the Pine Barrens like a giant amusement park,” DeVito said. “It’s like the Wild West in the woods. A bunch of people can come in with four or five motorbikes and destroy hundreds of years of habitat in five minutes.”
DeVito said the Jones Road’s Wildfire was far more devastating than a similar one he saw 30 years ago in the same area. A tongue of the earlier fire at the foundation’s Forked River preserve, he said, was halted in its tracks by a swampy stand of Atlantic white cedar. This year, the fire rolled right through the same stand, damaging an estimated 20% of the iconic cedars.
In another area of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation’s preserve, an artesian spring that DeVito watched bubble out of the ground for decades simply dried up.
“There’s no doubt about it. The drought cycles are longer and deeper. The threat of catastrophic fire is growing,” he said. “The unique mix of moss and wetland is drying up. Without that, the Pine Barrens aren’t the Pine Barrens anymore.”
DeVito said he welcomed any change that would restrict water outflows from the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer. But he wonders, “Is it enough? Are we doing enough?”
