Pinelands

Proposed National ParkNew Jersey
Batsto Lake in the Pine BarrensPhotograph: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0
All proposed National ParksPinelandsNo active campaign
Location
New Jersey
Current protection
Pinelands National Reserve; Wharton, Brendan T. Byrne, Bass River, and Penn state forests
Status
No active campaign
Tier
Tier 2 · National Monument
In the book
Not featured in Undiscovered America

Why should it be a National Park?

The Pine Barrens cover more than a million acres of southern New Jersey, the largest stretch of wild land on the Middle Atlantic seaboard: pitch pine and oak, cedar swamps, tea-colored rivers, and the globally rare pygmy pine forests where full-grown trees stand shoulder high.

Beneath it lies the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, one of the largest freshwater reserves in the East, and within it are the ruins of iron furnaces and the villages of the Pineys. It is the East's great wilderness in plain sight of its biggest cities.

The history of National Park Campaigns

The Pine Barrens were saved from a 1964 plan for a supersonic jetport and a new city of 250,000 people. In 1966, the New Jersey Audubon Society helped form a proposal for a Pine Barrens National Monument, and the Park Service looked at a park and a monument before deciding to recommend neither. Instead, Congress created the Pinelands National Reserve in 1978, the country's first, to be managed with the state as a living landscape.

Distinct National Park attempts
1 (1960s–70s Park Service study of a park or monument)
Other designation attempts
2 (1966 national monument proposal; 1978 national reserve)

Sources

  • Pinelands Preservation Alliance, State of the Pinelands reports
  • New Jersey Monthly, "30 and Counting: the Pinelands Protection Act"
  • Wikipedia, Pinelands National Reserve
Know of a campaign? Tell us
  1. 1911

    Biologist Witmer Stone publishes The Plants of Southern New Jersey, documenting the Pine Barrens flora.

  2. 1964

    A regional planning board proposes a supersonic jetport and a city of 250,000 in the Pine Barrens.

  3. 1966

    The New Jersey Audubon Society helps form a proposal for a Pine Barrens National Monument.

  4. 1968

    John McPhee's The Pine Barrens brings the region national attention.

  5. November 10, 1978

    The National Parks and Recreation Act creates the Pinelands National Reserve, the nation's first.

  6. 1979

    New Jersey passes the Pinelands Protection Act and creates the Pinelands Commission.

  7. 1983

    UNESCO designates the Pinelands a biosphere reserve.