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Book Review
| New Jersey's Environment: Past, Present, and Future. Edited by Neil M. Maher. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006. vi + 212 pp. Includes illustrations, notes, tables, maps, and index. Paper $21.95.
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| With its prodigiously urban-industrial landscape, New Jersey has much to recommend it as a topic for environmental historians. And because so many other states have been following a similar path of overdevelopment, New Jersey's historical trajectory offers valuable lessons for policy makers, scientists, and activists seeking to establish a viable relationship between densely populated areas and the natural world. Indeed, Neil Maher has assembled this compelling set of essays with the intention of reaching just such a diverse audience. |
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Given the Garden State's reputation as an unmitigated ecological catastrophe, it may come as a surprise that the lessons Maher hopes to impart pertain as much to the healing and protection of the environment as to its destruction. As Maher notes, two-thirds of New Jersey is still farmland and forest, and the state not only sits atop one of the nation's largest and cleanest aquifers but is blessed with a rich diversity of plant and animal species. And even if New Jersey's aggressive plundering of its natural assets has led to repeated environmental crises, residents have nevertheless mounted a surprisingly successful, if fragmentary, effort to defend and restore their state's ecological integrity. As the essays in this volume ably demonstrate, a significant number of New Jersey residents have devoted themselves to "putting the garden back into the Garden State" (p. 2). |
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Maher has organized the book into three sections focusing on the past, present, and future of New Jersey's diverse environments, which range from coastal and freshwater wetlands to the mountains of Sussex County. While these sections are devoted to historical, policy/legal, and scientific analysis respectively, and while the essays themselves represent a variety of disciplines, the authors write from an interdisciplinary perspective that lends the book ample coherence. Some of the more salient themes include the interaction of cities with their natural environments; the inherent limitations of attempting to solve postwar environmental problems without addressing the issue of mass consumption; the efforts of citizen activists to marshal the technical expertise necessary to fight political battles; the environmental injustices borne by low-income and minority populations; and the struggle to prevent privatization from undermining public access to and stewardship of the state's natural assets. One of the more familiar themes concerns the evolution of public perceptions of nature. In a state noted for its prolific wetlands, the prevailing image of which has shifted from wasteland to environmental and aesthetic asset during the last century, this is a particularly fruitful line of inquiry. Finally, the unusual inclusion of scientific essays in a book of this sort, while making for occasionally ponderous reading, highlights a variety of methods and sources useful to scholars and others while providing an opportunity to observe scientists grappling with the social and ethical implications of their data. |
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One of the great virtues of this book is that the contributors consistently place local issues in a national and global context. Consequently, the single-state focus lends the book a powerful concreteness without undermining its broader relevance. In short, this is a book that deserves the wide readership for which it aims. |
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Jordan Kleiman is assistant professor of history at SUNY-Geneseo, where he is revising a manuscript titled "The Appropriate Technology Movement in American Political Culture." His parents spent their honeymoon on Long Beach Island, NJ, when Long Beach Boulevard was still a dirt road. |
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