Preface and Acknowledgments

economic, and transportation infrastructure, as well as its rich traditions of agricultural resources, land preservation, and fisheries management. The Garden State is one of the smallest states in America but has the highest population density. It also encompasses a wide range of natural resources extending from its ocean beaches to the high Appalachian ridge. It is this dichotomy that creates unique challenges for environmental managers. This book will show how disparate physical and social sciences have been blended by necessity into one science of the environment, how public policy is married to legislation and litigation, and how headlines and public debates can speak to issues that transcend the region. I decided to write this book because of what I see missing in the environmental literature—the stories and faces of those thousands of professionals who tirelessly work to protect the environment at the elemental level of daily crisis management. They include emergency responders, scientists, policy analysts, and even neighborhood activists who fight the negative impacts of unregulated sprawl or industrial growth. My hope is that this book will present my career experiences as surrogates for theirs, describing a chosen way of life and at the same time showing what may be at stake for public health and natural resources in America. More important, I hope this book will reveal why the crowded little state of New Jersey became a critical ecological landscape in the growth of environmental protection. I would like to acknowledge the New York Times for generously allowing me to reprint the introduction to this book, which previously appeared in its entirety in that newspaper. I would also like to acknowledge the New Jersey Pinelands Commission’s Science Office, which supplied me with many of its photographs; the Patrick Center for Environmental Research at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia; and the many professors at Rutgers