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Go ahead and break laws? No. My complaint is that laws are not followed. NJPB members that I know are concerned law-abiding citizens who have keen interest and deep appreciation of this special place. I am suggesting it is in our best interest that due process be obeyed by everyone and that...

Maybe this will help you to understand what is going on. Pinelands Commision Executive Director Nancy Wittenberg worked as a lobbyist (“environmental affairs director”) for the New Jersey Builders’ Association for 12 years before she became an Assistant Commissioner at the NJ Department of...

OK, I think this is how the scheme works. The State had an agency that guided where and how development would take place, first through the Department of Community Affair’s Office of Smart Growth, then via its replacement the Office of Planning Advocacy. Planners worked hard to create a unifying...

Al..., Al, Look to your left, (tap, tap on the screen). Here's a classic pine knot, Al-beit a small one. The term's usually used to describe the resin-rich rock-hard branch collar of pine that is so dense it even has the the weight of stone. Along with old (bull)pine roots, it made up the...

Johnnyb, Thanks for the sage advice. It would be a long and protracted fight. Lawyer fees were ~$7 k just on my side to secure a video tape copy of a public meeting. “Judge says court security video must be disclosed to public.” New Jersey Law Journal, December 1, 2014...

I miss the days when property lines were marked by stones, white oaks, and double-trunked pines! Those delineations were unambiguous, even tactile. I understand why this group loves old survey stones. You knew just where your land began and ended by sight alone. Now we have to put trust into...

The first excerpt is what the railroad used as its survey. The second excerpt is what Buena Vista Township used as its survey for a permit to its redevelopment project. I added annotations in red for interpretation.

Coffee won't help. This vignette is an based on a survey that the Pinelands Commission paid $35,000 for, and was here replicated for Pinelands Application #2009-0089.001. The original survey funds came directly from mitigation money earmarked for protecting Pinelands water quality when the...

OK, this location is about 2 miles from the Cumberland County border, but it demonstrates an interesting surveying enigma. Any care to guess as to what is going on here?

Pretty darn good, but not "great." Beers 1872, Topographic Map of Atlantic County, New Jersey, from recent and actual surveys.

Johnnyb, Is there cast iron pipe conduit at any of the branch crossings? If so, maybe this could be its namesake. We too have a sand track that is sometimes referred to as an iron pipe road, so named for the embankments with old cast iron pipe water conduit. It was also called an ore road...

Spung is Piney speak for the thousands of intermittent pools of water that dot the Pine Barrens. Rhodehamel (1970) estimated that 2% of the Pine Barrens surface is covered by these closed basins. Everyone who grew up in the Pines knew what a spung is – a pocket of water. The name’s origin is...

I’ve been a card-carrying member of the NJ Farm Bureau since 1984, so receive their newsletter. Agriculture is in my DNA. This Week in the Farm Bureau (July 31, 2015, p.1) contained a note Candidate Christie excerpted from the national blog Agri-Post. This is what Christie recently told Iowa...

Here's a new paper by a dear colleague—a friend of the Pleistocene—that helps explain why NJ's sea-level-rise rate appears twice that of other areas. Not only did that rampageous thug the Laurentide Ice Sheet freeze-dry the Pine Barrens, that behemoth sunk the Earth's crust north of us and we...

Bob, the periglacial domain is a difficult concept! Large areas of the Earth's land surface have been dominated by cold, dry, windy, and dusty—periglacial—conditions for much of the last couple million years. That's the planet's normal. Icebergs floated off the North Carolina coast. Europeans...

The term ‘periglacial’ was coined in 1909 by Walery von Lozinski to describe the intense weathering of sandstone in the Carpathian Mountains of Poland. The Carpathians is where my mom’s side of the family is from (Lemko people, a Ukrainian sub-group). Lozinski noted cracked boulder fields like...

A lot of lichen-dominated open areas in the Pinelands are are windblown sand piles like dunes or coversand (flat sheets of sand). These landforms were generated under cold, nonglacial (periglacial) conditions during the Pleistocene when an immense ice sheet parked in North Jersey. My house is...

While making tea this morning a piebald deer appeared right outside my dining room window. The wife and I scrambled to find a camera, only to have the flash go off and ruin any chance of a close-up. Boots went on and I was able to salvage the opportunity with a distant photo (piebald marked by...

Hats off to Pat Martinelli, Tom Kinsella, Jerseyman, the Vineland Historical Society, and Stockton University's South Jersey Culture and History Center for a job well done. Charles K. Landis, founder in part of the Pinelands towns of Elwood (1854, including New Germany – today Folsom – and...

Bucky, Route 40 was laid out at 3-rods wide between Downstown and May Landing in 1817 (Gloucester County Book B, Page 207). The old Egg Harbour/Cohansey trail was its predecessor. The name Buena Vista Avenue was used on the 1870 Landisville survey, a proposed county seat for a new county to be...