Destroy the forest to save it: New Jersey’s clear-cut approach to forest management

Atlantic white cedar restoration: You can’t see the forest for the trees, so cut them down.

New Jersey has come up with a strange new conservation philosophy: destroy the forest to save it.

The state says it wants to restore Atlantic white cedar in the Pinelands. That goal is important. Atlantic white cedar forests are disappearing, threatened by sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, altered hydrology, deer browsing, and a long history of logging and development. New Jersey once had roughly 115,000 acres of Atlantic white cedar; today, fewer than 25,000 acres remain.

But if the answer to losing forests is to bring in heavy equipment, clear-cut public forests and use herbicides, we need to ask a very basic question: At what point does restoration start looking an awful lot like destruction?

This is a clear-cut problem

The New Jersey Forest Service’s Atlantic White Cedar Restoration Project is a massive effort: a $20 million, 10-year program intended to restore about 10,000 acres. The money comes from natural resource damage settlements involving groundwater pollution. The state says the project will help restore cedar forests, protect water resources, and increase climate resilience.

But public money recovered because polluters damaged New Jersey’s natural resources should be used with extraordinary care. It should not become a blank check for industrial-style forestry on public lands.

The Pinelands were preserved for future generations. They were not preserved so that commercial logging interests could treat public forests like a timber farm.

The forest belongs to the public

The Pinelands are not just another piece of real estate. They are one of New Jersey’s great natural treasures and a nationally protected landscape. Wharton State Forest is part of that extraordinary public resource.

The public purchased and preserved these lands for their ecological, recreational, water-supply, and wilderness values. Under New Jersey’s public-trust tradition, these lands are held for the people. The forest belongs to the public, not the loggers.

That is why the state needs to be extremely careful when it turns public conservation land over to logging contractors, heavy machinery, and industrial forestry practices.

There is a legitimate ecological argument that Atlantic white cedar needs open, sunny conditions to regenerate. U.S. Forest Service research confirms that cedar seedlings do poorly under heavy shade and that relatively open conditions can be important for successful establishment. Research also shows that dense logging slash can interfere with regeneration.

So this isn’t about pretending cedar can magically grow underneath a closed forest canopy. It is about asking whether the state is choosing the least destructive way to create the conditions cedar needs. There is a difference between ecological restoration and an industrial logging operation wearing a green hat.

A clear-cut problem

The state’s approach involves mechanically removing competing hardwoods, shrubs, and other vegetation, along with herbicide applications, deer fencing, planting, and monitoring.

The Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan itself recognizes the need for cedar regeneration and allows clear-cutting and the management of slash under prescribed conditions. It also calls for fencing where necessary to protect cedar from deer and requires the least intrusive harvesting techniques where practical. (NJ.gov)

That does not mean every clear-cut is automatically good conservation. It means the state has an obligation to demonstrate that every acre being cut, every machine being brought into a wetland, and every chemical being applied is actually necessary.

Heavy machinery is not environmentally neutral. In wet, organic Pinelands soils, equipment can disturb soils, vegetation, hydrology, and wildlife habitat. The more aggressive the treatment, the greater the burden should be on the state to prove that the ecological benefit outweighs the damage.

Clear-cutting and heavy machinery will change the soil composition and may leave conditions unsuitable for white cedar restoration. The soils will dry out and become compacted, causing the restoration to fail. Instead, we will get invasive species and deer.

Otherwise, we are practicing the old New Jersey environmental policy: Cut first. Study later. Call it restoration.

White cedar needs sun. We need a scalpel instead of a chainsaw.

There is an important scientific complication that the public debate should not ignore. Atlantic white cedar is shade intolerant. Forest Service research shows that seedlings generally need substantially more light than they receive beneath mature forest canopies. Research also shows that abandoned cranberry bogs and other relatively open areas can provide suitable conditions for cedar regeneration.

That raises an obvious question: Why start by cutting healthy public forest when there are already disturbed and cleared landscapes that could be restored?

New Jersey has thousands of acres of former cranberry and blueberry agricultural lands, abandoned bogs, old disturbed areas, and other landscapes where restoration could potentially be concentrated.

The state should first look at places where the ecological disturbance has already occurred rather than automatically creating more disturbance. Restore the scars before making new ones.

Where existing forest must be treated, the state should demonstrate why less-intensive approaches cannot work. That could include carefully targeted removal, girdling, hand clearing, small patches or strips, protection of existing cedar regeneration, and aggressive deer exclusion.

Not every acre needs to become a parking lot for logging equipment.

The deer problem may be bigger than the chainsaw problem

There is another inconvenient fact in the restoration story: deer love Atlantic white cedar.

Forest Service research has documented serious deer impacts on cedar regeneration. A long-term New Jersey study at Penn Swamp found that deer protection had a dramatic effect on cedar regeneration, with inadequate stocking and poor development in areas exposed to deer browsing.

An earlier Forest Service study on the Wharton Tract found that excessive animal damage was preventing white cedar from successfully regenerating in some areas following clear-cutting or wildfire. Deer could reduce surviving cedar to stunted bushes.

That should change the order of priorities. If we spend millions clearing forests, planting cedar, and then let deer eat the seedlings, we haven’t restored anything. We have just created an expensive deer buffet.

The state should be able to demonstrate that deer protection is adequately funded and implemented before spending millions on mechanical clearing.

And then there are the chemicals

Mechanical clearing is only part of the problem. The restoration program has also used herbicides to control competing vegetation. The Department of Environmental Protection acknowledges that previous cedar restoration projects have included aerial herbicide applications and forestry mowing.

Pinelands Commission records from earlier cedar restoration projects show that herbicide applications have included chemicals such as imazapyr and/or glyphosate under the applicable regulatory standards.

Even if regulators conclude an herbicide is legally permitted, that doesn’t end the public’s right to ask whether it is necessary, appropriately targeted, and the least damaging alternative.

We are talking about the Pinelands and the watershed of the Mullica River, not some abandoned industrial lot. The Pinelands are famous precisely because their waters, wetlands, forests and soils are interconnected.

You shouldn’t need a chemistry degree and a forensic cartographer to figure out where the state intends to spray chemicals in a public forest.

For $20 million, we deserve more than chainsaws

The $20 million restoration program was created using natural resource damage settlement money. The state says those funds are being used to restore natural resources damaged by pollution.

That is exactly why the money deserves serious scrutiny. That money should be used to repair environmental damage and should go into the communities affected by the pollution in the first place. It should produce the greatest public ecological benefit.

Imagine what $20 million could do in communities harmed by pollution. That could include restoring wetlands and stream corridors, expanding urban parks and greenways, planting trees in overburdened communities, protecting drinking-water resources and cleaning contaminated sites so they can become new public open space.

New Jersey has communities surrounded by pollution and starved for parks, trees and clean water.

We should not have to choose between restoring the Pinelands and helping communities harmed by pollution. But when tens of millions of dollars are available, the state should explain why particular projects provide the greatest ecological and public benefit.

Polluters damaged the resource. The public should not have to watch the restoration money become a subsidy for contractors.

Where is the public in all of this?

Perhaps the most troubling part of this controversy isn’t even the chainsaws. It is the process.

For almost 40 years of environmental work, I have rarely seen a process this difficult for ordinary people to follow.

The public should be able to go online, open one comprehensive restoration plan, look at the maps, see the acreage, understand the proposed treatments, identify the chemicals, understand the equipment, and know exactly what is being proposed in their backyard.

Instead, important information is spread through technical applications, legal notices, and individual project documents.

The Pinelands Commission currently lists a Forest Service application for forest management and cedar regeneration on 171 acres in Wharton State Forest, with the public comment period closed Sept. 11 and commission action scheduled for Oct. 9, 2026.

That is not what meaningful public participation should look like. Public notice should not mean hiding the notice in plain sight.

If the project is good enough to spend $20 million on, it is good enough to explain clearly to the public.

And if residents and conservation groups want a dedicated public hearing, the state should not treat public participation like an annoying mosquito that needs to be swatted away.

The public comment period should be reopened and the deadline extended, the plan and other materials posted online, and a real public hearing held.

Follow the chainsaw

There is another issue that deserves far more public scrutiny: who defines forestry policy and who benefits from it?

The New Jersey Forest Service maintains an official list of approved consulting foresters. The state says these foresters provide services on a fee or contract basis. It also acknowledges that consulting fees can, in some cases, be calculated as a percentage of gross revenue from the sale of forest products.

The state’s own Forest Action Plan says New Jersey has more than 55 approved professional foresters working with private woodland owners and other entities. And New Jersey’s forestry advisory structure includes representatives of approved foresters as well as an owner or operator of a private forest-products business.

None of that proves that an individual state employee has a direct conflict. The concern is that they are all in the same business, with no biologists or naturalists included.

But it raises a legitimate public question: Is the state’s forestry system independent? Or is it an extension of the timber industry that it regulates?

When the same professional culture is built around forestry management, timber harvesting, forest products, and commercial forestry, the public has every right to ask whether the default answer to a forest problem becomes: Cut it.

This isn’t an accusation of individual wrongdoing. It is a question about institutional bias. If your toolbox is full of chainsaws, every problem starts looking like a tree that needs cutting.

Who speaks for the trees?

Where are the ecologists, wetland scientists, wildlife biologists, and naturalists?

There needs to be an independent review of the plans by scientists whose first question isn’t, “How do we harvest this?” but rather, “How do we protect this ecosystem?”

Foresters have expertise. Of course they do. But a forester’s professional expertise does not automatically make that person an expert in every ecological consequence of clear-cutting wetlands.

A forest is not simply a collection of trees. It is a living ecosystem. It is soil and fungi, birds and amphibians, groundwater and streams, flood storage and carbon, seed banks and understory plants, microhabitats and wetlands.

If the only experts sitting at the table are people trained to manage forests, don’t be surprised when the solution looks like forest management.

That is precisely why an independent scientific review is needed.

Don’t destroy the cathedral while you’re renovating it

John Muir described wild places as nature’s cathedrals. The Pinelands are one of New Jersey’s great cathedrals of nature.

You don’t save a cathedral by knocking down the walls and telling everyone the rubble is part of the renovation. You don’t protect a forest by automatically treating it like a timber plantation. And you don’t honor the public trust by making the public fight just to find out what is happening on public land.

This is bigger than Atlantic white cedar. It is about what we believe public forests are for. Are they ecological systems to be protected and restored with the lightest possible touch? Or are they raw materials to be managed, cut, and commercially harvested whenever someone can attach a conservation label to the operation?

We have seen this movie before. At Sparta Mountain, the argument was that cutting mature forest was necessary to create habitat for a particular species. The response from environmental advocates, including at that time the New Jersey Sierra Club under my leadership, was that public forests should not be sacrificed through industrial logging schemes dressed up as ecological restoration.

One species should not become an excuse to destroy an entire forest ecosystem. The same principle applies here. Saving Atlantic white cedar is worth doing. But saving cedar should not mean sacrificing everything around it without proving that sacrifice is necessary.

Restore the cedar without losing the forest

The state should slow down and make the project genuinely transparent.

It should publish a single, comprehensive restoration plan with maps, acreage, treatment methods, equipment, herbicide locations, environmental safeguards, alternatives, and monitoring requirements. It should hold dedicated public hearings, explain why each proposed clear-cut is necessary, prioritize already disturbed and cleared lands, including appropriate former cranberry and blueberry bogs where restoration can occur without unnecessarily sacrificing intact forest, maximize deer protection, and demonstrate that newly planted and naturally regenerated cedar will actually survive. It should also use the least intrusive methods capable of achieving successful regeneration.

And it should provide a clear accounting of how the $20 million will be spent and how much goes toward ecological restoration versus contractors, machinery, chemicals, and administration.

The state’s own scientific record tells us that cedar restoration is complicated. The Forest Service shows that cedar needs light, appropriate moisture, and protection from competition and deer.

That is a reason for smart restoration—not a license for indiscriminate clearing.

New Jersey already has enough places where we destroyed something and then called the cleanup progress. Let’s not make the Pinelands another one.

You can’t see the forest through the trees if you’ve already cut down the forest. And you can’t protect the public trust by treating public land like a private logging lot.

The Pinelands were saved for future generations. Let’s make sure our idea of restoration leaves them a forest to inherit.