A Very Different Highlands
If you were back here in the Highlands two hundred years ago you would have seen the start of iron mining. Incredible amounts of iron existed in the Highlands, and that was mined. Now to get that iron they had to dig huge holes as well as cut down most of the forest to make charcoal to power the forges. So the Highlands one hundred and fifty years ago was much different than the Highlands we see today. A hundred and fifty years ago, the forests were repeatedly cut over for charcoal, so looking out across this landscape you would've seen bits and pieces of scrubby woods. In some of the more fertile lands there might have been farms, but in the northern Highlands it was kind of tough land, rocky land to farm, and so those areas were abandoned as well during the nineteenth century. Then in the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth century we begin to see the forest really starting to come back.
Rick Lathrop

The Cities and the Highlands
Back about a hundred or so years ago, Newark used to get its water from the Passaic River. The Passaic was getting very polluted. Newark leaders were looking for an alternate supply and where they wound up getting their water was the Pequannock watershed in the Northern Highlands. It was very much like New York City getting its water supply out of the Catskills. Jersey City would eventually do the same thing and so on down the line. So you had all these series of reservoirs built in the Highlands, and essentially all the water surface water supply yield that's available in the Highlands is dedicated to the cities. So our entire northeast corridor along the Hudson River and the lower parts along Bergen County, Essex County, Union County, they are all supplied by Highlands reservoirs. So there is a very direct link between the cities and the Highlands, but it’s one that most of the people in the cities don't recognize.
Dan Van Abs

What Does Society Want From The Highlands?
If it wants natural resources, well a lot of those natural resources are coming back and are actually looking to be in pretty good shape. We have a lot of trout production streams, a lot of threatened and endangered species that are finding good homes in the Highlands. If we want to keep that we can, but it will take time, effort, political will, money … all of those kinds of things. I think it's critical to recognize that that Highlands will always be a managed resource. We're always going to be doing things with it. We've always been doing things with it, whether its for water supply or some other purpose. After all there were wooded valleys, where the reservoirs now exist. Those wooded valleys are no more. We decided that that was appropriate, so there they are. We have to make sure that we know what we want from the Highlands. There's an old phrase that I like to use: “if you don't know where we're going, all roads will take you there.” Once we know where we're going, we can figure out how to get there. But if we don't know where we're going, no map will show us.
Dan Van Abs

Segmenting Forestlands
Development has definitely contributed to forest fragmentation. We're seeing more and more partialization … tracts of forestland that are divided by these developments. We're breaking down the infrastructure of forest. We’re segmenting things off to a point where it lessens the overall value of what these forestlands provide. When it comes to any kind of planning, whether it be local or regional planning, we have to help make that connection. We're never going to stop development, but we have to make conscientious decisions and educated, scientifically-based decisions on how we're going to maintain some corridor, on how we're going to lessen the impact of that fragmentation and partialization.
Heather Gracie

Highways Provide A Way For Development
When you look at the Highlands, especially as a remote sensing scientist, when I look at a satellite image and I look across the entire region, you can see the amount of development that goes right up to the edge of the Highlands and then you have a green wall. Over the past twenty or thirty years, as the larger highways have cut through the Highlands, those highways then have provided a way for development to get in and spread out through the system. Within the last forty years an area that was very rural, unbroken forest is now starting to be developed and that development is throughout, in terms of being scattered throughout the Highlands.
Rick Lathrop