THE
HUNTERDON COUNTY NEWS |
TITLE: LETTER TO THE EDITOR - HIGHLANDS
WHY DO WE NEED THE HIGHLANDS REGIONAL MASTER PLAN?
In the three decades that followed the nation’s first Earth Day in 1970, an entire generation was enlightened to the unspeakable insults we had inflicted on our own natural environment. With every new revelation, Congress and the States promulgated environmental laws, rules and regulations in unprecedented proportions. The nation’s sense of remorse and guilt was so deep that massive state and federal beauracracies were created, thousands of persons, employed, and billions of dollars appropriated and spent. Being anti-environment was nearly akin to being anti-American, and many a political career began or folded on support for, or opposition to environmental issues alone.
Unfortunately, we were probably 100 years too late. Much to our chagrin, we found that a century of abuse could not be legislated away or rectified overnight, even after three decades of effort, and it is now doubtful that some of the ecological/environmental damage we inflicted can ever be fully remediated. So now we talk of acceptable risks and risk assessments – how many of our neighbors out of 10,000 a 100,000 or a million are we willing to sacrifice so that our economy can go on providing the rest of us with all those things that Wall Street advertising firms insist we absolutely, positively need.
There is much to be learned from this historical American experiment in human ecology.
First, of course, is the need to finally acknowledge that a system of natural ecological infrastructure exists everywhere, that it functions with or without our presence, and that when we interfere with its functions, the resulting efforts are often cataclysmic – despite our attempts to reconstruct, duplicate or mend it. Therefore, it is in our best long-term interests to keep as much of this natural infrastructure as healthy and as intact as possible.
Second, and perhaps the most important lesson to be learned is we did not fully realize, at least initially, the powerful influence that municipal land use planning has on the quality of our natural environment. As a result, local land planners have been involved only peripherally in the nation’s federal and state dominated schemes of environmental protection. We may think that federal and state governments have almost total control over protection of the environment. However, we often forget that long before these federal and state agencies sit down to review projects and issue regulatory permits for wide-ranging programs – such as wetlands protection, point-source wastewater discharges to surface waterways, air pollution control, floodplain management and protection of endangered plants and animals, municipal land planners will have been out there, well ahead of them, prescribing, mostly through local zoning ordinances, where residential subdivisions should be placed and what the densities should be. They will also have determined where and how factories, commercial and office building are to be located, how much impermeable parking lot and roadway asphalt is to be allowed, and where sanitary sewage and storm water collections systems are to be placed, as well as into which waterway they are to be discharged. They will also have determined what water supplies are to be used for all of this development, and where the new local roadways to accommodate all these new landscape changes will be placed. By the time, state and federal regulators arrive on scene to fulfill their obligations to protect the environment, the character of the environmental landscape will have already been pretty much determined. The character of these sprawling, developing landscapes and their resulting impacts are making many uneasy, including the very land planners who are helping to create them.
On the surface at least, current municipal land use practices appear to incorporate more opportunities to minimize damage to our ecological infrastructure. It is now common practice, for instance, for local planning boards to require the submission of site-specific environmental impact statements (EISs) for larger land development projects; and local ordinances now frequently require more on-site control of storm water runoff, soil erosion, vegetation removal, and steep slope construction. While these are certainly well-intentioned additions, there is a dark side to their application.
Collectively, they perpetuate a system of segmented, municipality by municipality reviews, analyses, and mitigation that is the antithesis of the way natural ecosystems actually function. The scope of inquiry of all those site-specific EISs rarely extend beyond the boundaries of the project site, let alone into the next municipality. Likewise, the mitigation measures embodied in local ordinances, and directed toward on-site mitigation of negative environmental impacts give a false sense of security that such impacts can be readily ameliorated on site, and even if they cannot, the effects on the offsite ecological infrastructure are alleged to be inconsequential. That is a fallacy of enormous proportions, and if you doubt it, take a look outside your window or take a walk along your nearest waterway. After 37 years of investigating, sampling and documenting nearly every conceivable human abuse of the natural environment, including criminal abuse, I challenge those that want so hard to wipe away environmental protection altogether, to prove me wrong. There is absolutely no doubt that a regional, ecologically based perspective, and a Regional Master Plan are desperately needed in the Highlands or we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors who once occupied the Northeast and Southwestern provinces of the state. The State’s citizens, including those of us who now live in the Preservation Area, called for such a perspective when their legislators enacted the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act in 2004. It was, and still is, the right thing to do.
William Honachefsky, P.L.S. P.P. QEP
Clinton Township
William Honachefsky is the author of 3 books on land use planning and environmental protection.