To fight rising wildfire danger, New Jersey turns to tree thinning in the Pinelands
Last April, a pair of teenage boys kibitzing in a remote stretch of Ocean County known as the Forked River Wilderness set fire to wooden pallets someone had dumped in the woods.
Within a few hours, spring winds whipped the bonfire into one of the fastest-moving and most destructive wildfires on record in the New Jersey Pinelands. By the time it was brought under control three weeks later, about 15,000 acres of preserved forest were destroyed, and thousands of people were forced to flee their homes and businesses.
Most official accounts of what became known as the Jones Road Fire attribute its ferocious power to the intensifying cycles of drought and heat linked to climate change that continue to affect coastal areas. But forestry experts in New Jersey point to another cause.
“The fact is that the woods in the Pinelands are just too thick in many places,” said Jason Hoger, a fire warden and naturalist with the Ocean County Parks and Recreation Department. “We need to manage our preserved forests just like we’d manage any other natural asset. If we don’t, we’re just going to see more and bigger fires like Jones Road.”
Last month, on Sept. 18, the New Jersey Pinelands Commission took a big step toward more aggressive management of the state’s million-acre Pinelands National Preserve when it voted to substantially thin out a 12,000-acre stretch of pine and oak woodland in Ocean County adjacent to the wildfire site.
The 10-year plan, scheduled to kick off next spring, will create a web of breaks to stanch the march of wildfire through the canopy of pitch pine, maple, and oak that dominate the Pine Barrens forest. It also calls for a series of small prescribed burns to strip out fuel on the forest floor and an ambitious plan to reclaim Atlantic white cedars withering under invasive flora.
But the centerpiece of the program is cutting down trees — a lot of them. The thinning will reduce the average tree count from 4,114 to 2,700 per acre, a 34% reduction.
The state is also considering an even larger thinning project in the 122,000-acre Wharton State Forest, which spreads across Atlantic, Burlington and Camden counties — a huge chunk of the Pinelands and the largest single tract of land within the New Jersey State Park System.
Forestry experts say the two projects, taken together, mark an important turning point in the management of state woodlands at a time when drought-driven wildfires pose an increasing threat to New Jersey.
“We’ve got to get away from this idea that preserving the forest means not touching it,” said Bob Williams, founder of Pine Creek Forestry, the South Jersey firm that will oversee the Ocean County project, in an interview with The Jersey Vindicator. “If we had been managing our forest land more wisely, we almost certainly would not have seen the level of wildfire destruction we’ve had recently.”
For hundreds of years before the Pinelands Preserve was created in 1978, the woods were routinely thinned by Native Americans and, later, European settlers who used timber and wood products as the basis of a homegrown agricultural economy. But for the past half-century, the Pines have remained largely untouched.
“All that fuel represents a huge threat to human health and safety,” Williams said. “A hundred years ago, a wildfire in Ocean County might have burned out without affecting many people. Today, tens of thousands of people live in communities built at the edge of the forest.”
Some past efforts to thin out the Pinelands have met resistance from critics who argue that removing trees is an unnatural process that would inevitably lead to commercial logging and other forms of profiteering.
Commercial logging promoted in some Western forests by the U.S. Forest Service, especially in California’s Sierra Nevada range, has come under attack by environmental groups such as the John Muir Project.
Muir, a pioneering naturalist who founded the Sierra Club, attracted a large following of conservationists who saw Gilded Age corporate interests exploiting America’s forestland. Their efforts helped create the National Park System.
“There’s a very good reason to keep close watch on any firm looking to cut trees in the Pinelands or any other protected forest,” said Jeff Tittel, former head of the New Jersey Sierra Club, who has fought for stronger protections of New Jersey forests. “History has shown us that corporations will exploit these lands if they get the smallest toehold.”
Tittel and other environmental leaders also point out that the 15-member Pinelands Commission, whose activities are overseen by the governor’s office, is subject to the political whims of Trenton. Under the administration of Republican Gov. Chris Christie, for example, the commission promoted the construction of gas lines that conservationists said would destroy pristine woodland and threaten the Pines’ remarkably pure system of aquifers and wetlands.
Long-needed reforms of the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan, which seeks to restrict development within the region, took decades to complete, thanks to political and bureaucratic interference from Trenton, critics say.
“With the Pinelands, we need to be as vigilant as we can, or we will lose this precious natural asset,” Tittel said.
The spirit of vigilance emerged last month when the Pinelands Commission met to consider the Ocean County forestry plan. The commission staff had already reviewed and approved details of the plan, including prescribed burns and thinning of trees. But longtime Commissioner Mark Lohbauer wasn’t entirely sold.
Citing a number of anti-logging studies compiled by the John Muir Project, Lohbauer asked staff if there might be some more “natural” way of protecting the forest than stripping out trees. Would logging actually exacerbate the risk of wildfire, he asked. Wouldn’t limited burning or some other method be better? Would cutting trees have prevented another disaster like the Jones Road Fire?
“I have reservations about the thinning portion that you propose,” Lohbauer said. Wouldn’t limited burns “more closely assimilate what Mother Nature does?”
Hoger, the Ocean County official, told Lohbauer he was side by side with firefighters as they struggled to control the Jones Road blaze. Their biggest obstacle, he said, was finding a clear path into the woods to reach the burning edge of the fire.
Time and again, frantic firefighters looking to outrun the blaze were stymied in their attempts to gain access. It was only when the fire reached an area of the woods that had been cut in an old thinning project that they gained an edge on the fire.
“The woods were simply too thick. It was an extremely dangerous place for these firefighters,” Hoger said.
Lohbauer was convinced, and he ended up voting for the thinning project, which was approved by the commission in a 12-0 vote with one abstention. Next spring, work crews will tramp into the Ocean County Pinelands and begin the 10-year project.
“I’ll be there every step of the way,” Hoger said.
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Jeff Pillets is a freelance journalist whose stories have been featured by ProPublica, New Jersey Spotlight News, WNYC-New York Public Radio and The Record. He was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008 for stories on waste and abuse in New Jersey state government. Contact jeffpillets AT icloud.com.