Pinelands history holds lessons for today. Good policy takes time. New Jersey needs a data center moratorium.

In the summer of 1978, New Jersey did something governments rarely do: it stopped. Faced with mounting pressure to open the Pine Barrens to large-scale development, the state imposed a development moratorium on the region. It was a blunt instrument, but time has shown that it was the right one. This decisive action was taken to protect the Pinelands, and we can do it again today to protect New Jersey from data centers.

The moratorium, enacted through the Pinelands Review Committee established by Gov. Brendan Byrne, halted major development while planners, scientists, and policymakers worked out what the Pinelands actually were and what protecting them would require. At stake was a million-acre expanse of coastal plain sitting between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, underlain by one of the largest unconfined aquifers on the Eastern Seaboard: the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer. That exercise in deliberate restraint, unglamorous, contested, and temporary by design, made everything that followed possible.

To understand why, it helps to understand what the Pinelands faced in the mid-1970s. The region had spent decades being underestimated. Its acidic, nutrient-poor soils made conventional agriculture difficult, and its dense scrub oak and pitch pine forests struck developers as an obstacle rather than an asset. But the suburban building boom of the postwar era changed the calculus for developers with a growing appetite for land in proximity to cities like Philadelphia.

What they saw was proximity: the Pines lay within an hour’s drive of two major metropolitan areas. Plans circulated for a new international jetport. Residential subdivisions were advancing from the edges. Without intervention, the Pinelands’ fate was likely to follow that of much of the Jersey Shore’s hinterland, absorbed, incrementally and irrevocably, into the suburban sprawl radiating outward from Camden and Trenton and the Shore towns.

The ecological arguments for protection were already well developed. The Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer system holds an estimated 17 trillion gallons of some of the purest freshwater on the continent. The Pinelands support globally rare plant communities adapted to periodic fire and acidic soils, including several carnivorous species found nowhere else in the state. The region contains habitat for the federally threatened Pine Barrens treefrog and serves as a migratory corridor for dozens of bird species.

These facts were documented, but documentation is not legislation. Between knowing what is at stake and building the legal and institutional machinery to protect it, there is a great deal of work to be done. That work requires time that active development pressure does not permit.

Durable, effective policy takes time

This is what the moratorium provided. Beginning in 1978, the development pause created the conditions for two overlapping processes to unfold without the clock running against them. At the federal level, Congress was working to designate the Pinelands as the nation’s first National Reserve. At the state level, Byrne’s administration was assembling the evidence base, stakeholder engagement, and the legislative consensus needed to create a permanent governance structure. Neither process could have proceeded coherently while bulldozers were advancing across the landscape. The moratorium made the timeline workable.

The New Jersey Pinelands Commission was established by statute in 1979. Its charge was to develop a Comprehensive Management Plan that would govern land use across more than a million acres, balancing conservation requirements with the rights of the region’s existing communities. The CMP, adopted in 1980, was the product of that deliberative window. It established a graduated land-use framework, identified Preservation and Protection Areas with the most stringent controls, and created Agricultural Production Areas and Rural Development Areas where economic activity could continue under defined standards. It was, and remains, one of the most sophisticated regional planning documents in American history.

None of that complexity was available off the shelf. It had to be built through ecological surveys, legal analysis, community meetings, intergovernmental negotiation between 15 municipalities and seven counties and the state and federal governments, and a level of democratic legitimacy that takes time to establish. A moratorium bought that time. A moratorium, notably, that was itself a form of regulation, not a ban on all activity, but a pause on the specific category of large-scale development most likely to foreclose options before the planning process could establish what those options should be.

Pinelands history holds lessons for today

The lesson is not complicated, but it bears repeating whenever a comparable situation arises: when the resource at stake is irreplaceable and the pressure on it is immediate, the first obligation is to create the conditions for good decisions.

The new generation of data centers being built across the United States, including New Jersey, is adding unprecedented demand to our energy and water infrastructure. They also have major impacts on host communities that are subjected to the constant noise and pollution of hastily built data centers.

The warehouse boom of the pandemic era was a warm-up test that our planning systems failed. Warehouses were built in inappropriate locations, subjecting residents of small communities to disproportionate impacts. Many of these warehouses still sit empty, waiting for a tenant that may never come, because the zeal of developers was greater than the actual demand.

Municipalities like Pemberton Township learned their lesson from the warehouse boom and have quickly moved to ban data centers from their towns. They learned to be proactive in the absence of real leadership from statewide leaders like the governor. Diversions with half-measures like Sherrill’s four-point plan to put “guardrails” on data centers provide little comfort to communities in the crosshairs of developers.

Meanwhile, New York state has imposed a ban on new data centers, pressing pause on new development for one year. This buys its government some time to properly implement protections for ratepayers, the grid, and water resources. So I ask you, New Jersey: Why not follow the lead of our neighbor to the north?

New Jersey should press pause

Recent polling shows that 65% of New Jerseyans support a ban on new data centers until our energy crisis is addressed. The Pinelands Preservation Alliance petition calling for a moratorium has garnered more than 9,000 signatures and the support of more than 60 organizations. U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. has indicated support for a national moratorium. So why has a moratorium taken a backseat to the bevy of bills that we’ve seen rushed through the Legislature? These half-measures nibble around the edges, rather than cutting to the heart of the problem.

Although the threats posed by data centers are relatively new, New Jersey’s history offers wisdom that can be applied to our modern challenges. The Pinelands Commission marks its work today against a plan that was written in a window opened by a moratorium. The forests, water, and wildlife are still there. It shows that a pause is not a failure of action and may actually be one of the most important tools available to address an existential threat.

This is a break-the-glass moment to brandish our trusty tool: the moratorium. It worked to protect the Pinelands decades ago, and it can do the job again to protect New Jersey for current and future generations.