Q. Why is Sterling Forest a critical part of the story?
Frey: Sterling Forest is in New York and is part of the Highlands in New York. It’s a very important part. It's the largest single tract of undeveloped open space remaining in the New York Highlands. It was over 17,000 acres. And in 1990 Congressman Kostmeyer from Pennsylvania had language inserted into the 1990 Farm Bill that mandated a study of the Highlands in New York and New Jersey. The original intent was to provide a context for the Sterling Forest issue, which it did, but it also went beyond that; it studied the Highlands between the Delaware River in New Jersey and the Hudson River in New York. Sterling Forest became a great rallying cry and a lot of groups in New York organized around it. There was pressure put on the federal government to contribute funds for preservation, which it eventually did. New Jersey and Gov. Whitman offered the first ten million dollars to the purchase of Sterling Forest. And that probably helped stimulate federal funding. One of the reasons that New Jersey was interested in Sterling Forest was because Sterling Forest was part of the watershed of the Wanaque reservoir system, which is in Passaic county in New Jersey and feeds 1.6 million people. It supplies more people than any other single reservoir system in the state.

Q. Has Sterling Forest become a model for conservation efforts?
Frey: Sterling Forest is now seen as a model for the federal legislation that was initiated before Congress in late 2003, the Highlands Conservation Act, because it set a pattern whereby the federal government contributed funds. But there were matching funds by the states and also it was federal funds from the Land and Water Conservation Fund going to a state, for a non-federal purchase of land, which was a unique thing. Originally what they call “federal side land and water conservation fund money” would go to help buy more land, new land for national parks, national forest, national wildlife refuges. And Sterling Forest is none of those, it is a state park. So, it was federal funding from the federal side of the Land and Water Conservation Fund going to a state to help it purchase a very important piece, a large piece of land.

It's also true that Sterling Forest has unfortunately not been fully protected [as of early 2004] even though over 17,000 acres have been preserved at a cost of 75 million dollars total, which is both public and private money. There is a hole in the doughnut right a quarter mile from the Frank Lautenberg Visitors Center. It’s privately owned and there is still a plan to build a golf course and around 100 mansions in that area. It's right in the very center of the forest and would have very severe impacts on the quality of the rest of the park.

Q. Describe your connection to the New Jersey Highlands.
Frey: When I came to New Jersey, which was not that long ago -- about 13 years -- I was really amazed by how beautiful the state was. And I think a lot of people like me have only traveled through the state on the turnpike and have seen the gas refineries and so forth, and consequently have a totally warped perspective on what New Jersey is like. So as I drove up to check out the New Jersey Conservation Foundation on Route 287 in May, the dogwoods were blooming on both sides of the road and I thought “Hey, this is a pretty place.” So I moved here. Through the job of working on the Highlands, I was out hiking every weekend. I explored a lot of the state parks and the state forests, and I live in the Highlands now. I live in northern Hunterdon County, right near a little stream that has native trout in it, at least wild trout. And I just think it's an exceptionally wonderful place and that we're lucky to have it. We're trying our damnedest to make sure it stays a wonderful place, which is a big struggle.

I think some of the most important information that came out of that study is that it documented not only in general terms but in acres -- specific numbers. The acreage of important resource value lands in the Highlands: the forests, the water resource lands, the farmland, the wildlife habitat, recreation lands. It showed that not only is a substantial portion, well over half of the Highlands important resource lands, but of those, way less than half the important areas were protected. The threatened part which is not protected ranges in different categories, but it varies from about fifty percent to over seventy-five percent of the area being unprotected at this time (October 2003). So that is a very serious finding and something that we are taking very seriously. And I hope that the decision-making authorities are taking it seriously too. Having those maps and those analyses was extremely helpful for us. And much of that was done by the Rutgers GIS department for the Forest Service Study. And we have been able to rely on that and as matter of fact the Highlands Coalition has constructed its own map using those numbers and applying them just to New Jersey. The numbers in the report of course apply to both states, both New Jersey and New York together.

Q. Describe the relationship between New Jersey’s cities and its Highlands.
Frey: The Highlands supplies the water for half of New Jersey's population, over 4 million people. About 3.7 million people who live outside the Highlands, mostly in northeast New Jersey, but also some in Mercer and Somerset County -- south of the Highlands -- get their water from the Highlands region. And an additional three quarters of a million people live in the Highlands and get their water from the wells that are in the Highlands, either municipal wells or their own private wells. The number of people supplied with water from the Highlands is equivalent to the total number of people in the seven least populated states in the US.

Q. Are people in the cities aware of this water connection to the Highlands?
Frey: I think some of the people in the northeast know where their water comes from. The Bergen Record has done a very good job over the past ten years publicizing the Highlands issue, writing great editorials about the issues, supporting mechanisms to preserve the Highlands and its water supply. And I think that's because the leadership of that publication understands this connection. So they have given a lot of information to people about this. I don't think the general public really understands this though, unless they are reading that newspaper religiously. We have people from Newark who strongly support Highlands preservation because they know very well that Newark's water comes from the Highlands and so they’re very concerned. Newark actually owns or did own 35,000 acres in the Highlands which it had purchased expressly to protect Newark's water supply.

I think that the more people realize their water comes from the Highlands the more supportive people will be of preserving land in the region and I think we have made considerable progress over the last ten years in getting that message out.

Q. Is buying up land to preserve water a new strategy? What’s the big picture?
Frey: In the early 1900’s that connection was made in the United States. The mountains of the Allegheny-Appalachian range had been largely logged off, and there were terrible problems with water quality, especially with erosion coming down from the mountains. As a consequence the US Congress passed the Weeks Act in 1916 which authorized the federal government to buy up these lands which had been forests. They were referred to as “the lands that nobody wanted” and the Congress authorized the federal government to purchase these lands. That is how the Eastern National Forest came to be established. They had been private land, and they were purchased. So you have the Green and White National Forests in New England, for example, and there's six national forests that surround Great Smokey Mountain National Park. All of those forests were not public land, like the national forests out west, they were private land purchased by the federal government to allow the trees to re-grow. As I understand it the primary purpose for doing that was because the logging had damaged the water resources so badly. So there's a precedent for this in our own country and we, hopefully we don't want the Highlands to be totally logged off and destroyed before we see this similar kind of remedy taken. We would like to preserve it before the damage is done.

Q. What’s different about New Jersey’s water supply situation?
Frey: New Jersey is a small state, and unlike many other states, its water sources are almost entirely located within itself. It doesn’t have major rivers flowing through it that would bring large volumes of water from someplace else. It does have the Delaware on one side, on the west. New Jersey at the point is not drawing on Delaware River water. The rivers it draws on are the Passaic, the Wanaque, the Ramapo, the Rockaway, the Raritan and the Pequannock. And the headwaters for all of those rivers are in New Jersey. So, that's where the water is coming from. It's coming from New Jersey and that is why we have to protect it because it's all we got. You can't make any more of it.

People who live in the cities in New Jersey need to be concerned about what's happening in the Highlands. I think that more people need to realize that that's what they're drinking. The Highlands is where their drinking water is coming from, and that if those reservoirs in northern Morris County or the Upper Rockaway watershed are not protected, if the Upper Passaic watershed is not protected, if the Wyanokie Highlands, the areas surrounding the Wanaque reservoir are not protected … and if the Upper Raritan, which is in southern Morris County and northern Hunterdon counties .... if that would all be developed, their water supply would trickle. It would trickle away and they would be in very bad shape. People really need to be concerned about this.

I think the only alternative is really conservation. You can talk about desalinization or something, but that is quite expensive. It’s not really realistic, so conservation is really the name of the game. And in this case, conservation of water is accomplished by conservation of land from which the water comes.

Q. Is preservation of land for water a “hard sell” in New Jersey?
Frey: I think that people in New Jersey are very much supportive in the concept of buying land. They have supported the Green Acres Bond Act for the last twenty to twenty-five years. Those measures on the ballot often pass with over 60 percent of the vote. Every county in the state has a measure. And then a number of municipalities have new measures for buying land, or re-authorized older ones. Part of the problem: the land is so expensive here that even with the best intentions we won't be able to protect all of this land solely through acquisition. Acquisition is working where people are paid for their land, and are paid a fair rate. But we're going to have to figure out some other ways to preserve land through regulatory changes, through changes in zoning, through “smart growth” measures, and through directing growth to places where it's more appropriate and steering it away from sensitive areas. And developing those measures is going to be the more difficult part of the solution.

Q. Describe the Newark Watershed story.
Frey: Newark is a very interesting story. Newark realized about a hundred years ago that the reservoirs it had been using for water supply were becoming polluted. There were the threats of typhoid and cholera, for example. And so, being very far-sighted, they went out and purchased 35,000 acres of land in other counties. They basically purchased the watershed of the Pequannock River, which is a tributary of the Passaic. And this water supply land is located in Passaic, Morris, and Sussex counties. And so over a hundred years, Newark has been a good steward of this land. It has allowed no development in the lands that it has held. The land has about five major reservoirs that collect the water and it’s the purest water that comes out of the Highlands these days because there's no development.

However, about a dozen years ago, there were some attempts by Newark to sell some of their land for development. This was challenged, and as a consequence there was a moratorium placed on the sale of these watershed lands. It was supposed to be a temporary moratorium but it’s still in place because it was only going to be lifted when the state came up with a plan for how the state's water resources were going to be managed. And that never happened in the form that we envisioned. So, the moratorium is still there.

To make sure that this land stays preserved, the New Jersey DEP's Green Acres has purchased some of Newark's water supply land. Some acreage has been added to Wawayanda State Park, and at this point, I believe about half of that land is now permanently protected, but there still is a sizable hunk -- like 15-19,000 acres -- that are still just safeguarded by this temporary moratorium. Now, I'm sure Newark is not going to go and sell the whole thing off, but developments in specific places could have, do great damage.

So, we need to do more to make sure the Newark water supply lands stay preserved. The Newark watershed – part of the larger Pequannock Watershed -- it's really the most outstanding part of the Highlands in New Jersey. It's the biggest piece of contiguous forest and it has the great diversity of wildlife values and natural communities in it as well. So, it is truly a gem. As I might mention, it's twice the size of Sterling forest and it needs to be preserved in its entirety. There are also smaller private in-holdings within those 35,000 acres that need to be acquired or have conservation restrictions put on them, because if these little in-holdings that are speckled about within the watershed, if they were developed and had roads put into them, they too could do severe damage to some of the values of the Highlands.

Q. Are areas of the New Jersey Highlands different from each other?
Frey: The Highlands extends in a band from the Delaware River up to the New York border; looking at a map you could say that it is dissected by Route 80. Route 80 happens to go across the area, along the toe of the glaciers that came down about 10,000 years ago. The terrain north of Rt.80 has different characteristics from the terrain south of Rt. 80. The northern part of the Highlands tends to be more rugged, there’s more exposed bedrock, because the glaciers wore it off. The southern part of the Highlands, which was not glaciated in such recent past, the terrain isn't as rugged; there is a better layer of soils and so it became much more agricultural. So in the southern part of the Highlands half of the open space is in agricultural use. In the Highlands above Rt. 80 there's much less agriculture; there are some small farms, but much less of it is agricultural and a larger percentage is forested.

Even though we think of the Highlands as being a water supply source, the northern part of the Highlands has particularly poor aquifer recharge capabilities, because more of it has fractured rock aquifers which supply very littler water. So, the groundwater supply is limited in Morris County, for example, where they are finding that the well levels are decreasing. The municipality of Roxbury in Morris County put a moratorium on any more attachment to its municipal water system two years ago. It won't allow any more building until it finds out where it's going to get its water from. So, these problems are not in the far distant future, they're really happening already.

Q. What are some key ideas to know about how a watershed works?
Frey: I think one of the fundamental things that people have to realize is that groundwater and surface water are interconnected and they are essentially the same thing. Groundwater percolates into the ground from surface water, and then it goes through the ground and comes out again as surface water in streams, and these streams flow to the reservoirs. The groundwater is what keeps the streams flowing when there is no rain. The groundwater creates conditions to have a habitat in the streams, habitat that will support fish and other aquatic organisms when it's not raining. If you have a stream that only flows when it's raining, you don’t have an aquatic environment anymore. You don't have fish, you don't have little organisms, you don’t have cray fish or water bugs, amphibians or anything like that. Groundwater is fundamental to the preservation of the quality of the surface water and ensures that there's some kind of a continuous, stable flow in streams.

Groundwater is filtered through the ground and that cleans it. So the filtering mechanism of the ground is a very important part of maintaining the quality of water, and that is again not only the quality of the groundwater, but it also determines the quality of the surface water -- when that groundwater returns and supplies a stream.

Q. What are the “headwaters” of a watershed?
Frey: Headwaters is a concept that people have recently begun to focus on and identify. The headwaters are the very upstream part of a stream system which, where the streams are so small that they probably don't show up on any maps. They're little tiny streams, they may be in a park, they maybe in your backyard. Little swails, little trickles that run down to other little trickles that eventually find their way to a stream. They may be alongside roads, but anyway, these are the areas that we must protect in order to protect the water supply. It's particularly important that we protect the forested headwaters because that’s where the recharge is the best, it's where the water quality is kept the cleanest by the materials on the forest floor, so preservation of headwaters is very important.

Headwaters also includes seeps and springs for which there are many in the Highlands, some of them are on level ground, some of them are on sloping hillsides. Normally people think of swamps and wetlands as being in flat low areas, but in the Highlands there are many hillsides that are in fact wetlands and those are seeps, where water is coming out of the hill and coming out of the rocks.

All those things are the headwaters. Those are the waters that are feeding the major tributaries and those are the areas that really have to be preserved. In many cases they're not even defined on maps. I know in our town, we've gotten ourselves a little project to map the tributaries, the headwaters in town, because these are streams that are too small to even show up on your US Geological Survey maps. But they're very important and people have begun to recognize the importance of that. The headwaters are a very important part of our water supply system and we really need to make sure that they are preserved.

Q. How does development pose a threat to a watershed?
Frey: As development comes into a region, more of the land becomes covered with what is called impervious cover. Impervious means water can't go through it. Impervious cover may be buildings and their roofs. It may be asphalt roadways, or driveways. It may be tennis courts, and it may be swimming pools. Even though the pools have water, it's considered impervious cover because it doesn't allow the rainfall to come through and get into the groundwater.

Water experts have determined that when ten percent of any given watershed -- that is, any area a stream draws on for its source -- when ten percent of that area is covered with impervious cover, the water source becomes degraded. The quality of the water that comes off is degraded because of things like pesticides or herbicides applied to lawns, or salts or oils that come from roads. And the actual quantity of water that goes into the ground is also decreased. Ten percent is an approximate tipping point; up to that point, a very small amount of development in a watershed will not impact water quality. It may impact other things: it may impact wildlife, or the habitat of certain species that need interior forests, but not water quality. When that watershed gets to over ten percent impervious cover, water becomes degraded. And one of the things the USDA Forest Service Highlands study found was that right now (2002), only a small percentage of the watersheds in the Highlands are degraded from that much impervious cover. But if one looks at the amount of development that could take place over the next ten to twenty years, up to three-quarters of the watersheds in the Highlands could have that sort of degradation.

Q. Is the Highlands nationally significant?
Frey: The Highlands were identified in the 1992 Forest Survey, a federal report, as “a landscape of national significance.” It was given this recognition based on its forest values, its water supply values, and its recreation values. But perhaps most of all, it's nationally significant because the Highlands region surrounds the most populated, most populous area in the entire United States -- the New York City metropolitan area, as well as extending up along to the west of Hartford and to the west of Philadelphia. Essentially the Highlands is the green belt to megalopolis.

Q. How did this green belt around the cities survive?
Frey: It is amazing that the Highlands has survived thus far as well as it has, but its geology is what has protected it. The Highlands is basically granite, Pre-Cambrian rock, and if you go out and tromp around there you can see it's rugged, it has some steep cliffs, it has huge glacial erratic boulders lying on tops of hills. Most of it is not good farmland, but some of the areas in the southwestern portion of the New Jersey Highlands that is not glaciated have some good farmland. The part that's the closest to New York City, for example, is the Ramapo Mountains, and the Ramapos have provided sort of a wall to the development that was stretching westward to New York through Bergen County, throughout Rockland County and New York. If you drive along Route 202 in New Jersey, that essentially defines the eastern edge of the Highlands in New Jersey.

Q. Is the Highlands at a turning point?
Frey: I think we're at the last possible point in the Highlands to try to preserve it right now. I think that unfortunately the decisions that were made to construct Interstate 287, Interstate 80 and Interstate 78 were a turning point that allowed the development to come in and take over the region. If those roads had not been there, I don't think we'd be seeing the kind of development pressure we're seeing today. Those roads have made access to the Highlands easy and fast enough that people can go to work in Manhattan and Newark and still go back home to the Highlands at night.

Q. Have the Highlands historically been overlooked?
Frey: In some ways I think people often were not aware of the Highlands, because many of the parks were not state parks, they were county parks. Morris County has a lot of parks, some wonderful parks which have great hiking, but unless you get a county map, you may not be aware of it. People have hopscotched over the Highlands and have gone to the Delaware Water Gap. Or many people have the feeling that they have to go someplace far away and they get on a plane and go some place, when they could be having a perfectly wonderful hiking experience within an hour or two of where they live. And they could be also saving gas that way, saving energy which would benefit the total environment. So the Highlands probably will become more heavily used in the future as number one, as more public lands are acquired, as more public access is made available, and as people decide they do want to save energy and do their recreation closer to home.

Q. What about bird migration through the Highlands?
Frey: One of the most important things about the Highlands is that they are not only nationally significant, but -- from a wildlife point of view -- they are internationally significant because the Highlands is an important migratory area and breeding ground for birds that fly up here from central and south America. There are dozens and dozens of species of birds that do this: warblers, thrushes, vireos, tanagers, to name a few. They spend their winters down in central and South America and come up to breed. So bird watching is one of the many wonderful recreational pursuits in the Highlands.

Q. What are the key words to describe the Highlands?
Frey: Forests equal water equal wildlife. That kind of sums up the Highlands in a nutshell. The preservation of forests in the Highlands means the water will be preserved. Preservation of forests in the Highlands means the wildlife will be preserved as well. That is really the key to preserving the most significant aspects of the Highlands.

The forest floor allows water to percolate. It filters the water, it replenishes the groundwater supply, and it maintains the quality of surface water streams and reservoirs. If we preserve the forest in its natural condition with the shrub layer, with the natural native plants, that's what the wildlife needs to survive as well. There's more natural diversity, more natural communities in the Highlands than anywhere else in New Jersey. Most of them are forest types -- not all -- but most. But birds that need interior forests, that's what they need, forest that's not fragmented, that's not chopped up into little pieces, that doesn't have roads going into it all over the place. Forest that doesn't have houses built in it. So, if we manage to preserve large contiguous areas of forests, that will be the best possible way that we can preserve both the water supply and the extraordinarily rich biological resources of the region.

There are other aspects we want to preserve as well. We want to preserve the farmland, and the wetlands, and the recreational and the historic resources. Historic resources mean a lot to people who live here. This area was settled in the 17th century in some parts, and the 18th century. There are many old houses around, some beautiful old buildings, and these are an integral part of the fabric of the region. And we need to make sure that those are preserved too. We have found that with development sometimes not only are the natural resources destroyed, but the cultural resources are destroyed as well. Historic preservationists care about the Highlands too.

Q. What will the Highlands look like in another fifty to a hundred years?
Frey: When I think about what the Highlands will look like in fifty to a hundred years, I imagine different scenarios. If things continue as they are, it will end up being much more urbanized. There will be little patches of parks here and there, nice little pieces saved, but it would be more like Essex County, or Bergen County -- a very suburban place.

What I hope will happen is that there will be regional planning mechanisms instituted that will develop a plan for the region, that will ensure that only the amount of development that's appropriate for the region to permit the water supply to be preserved will be allowed and it will be directed to the most appropriate places and directed away from the inappropriate places. Directed away from places where it would destroy the water supply, or fragment contiguous forests. So that development wouldn’t be spread all over the place in the fashion it's happening now. How the Highlands is going to look in fifty to a hundred years really depends a lot on policy, and what people decide to do, the actions they decide to take about this region.

Q. What have you learned about land preservation issues in the Highlands?
Frey: I think I have found the Highlands to be a very beautiful place and I think beautiful places have always moved me. I was trained as a landscape architect, I went into that because of an appreciation for beautiful places and wanting to create them. As it turns out, I would rather just save them then create them. So I found it very beautiful and I think there are a lot of people that live here that share that sentiment. And sometimes people demean people who fight development, they say those are Nimbies, you know, not in my backyard. But if we didn't have people that were committed to fighting to preserve the best about where they live, we would have lost a lot of this area already. We're trying to put our finger in the dyke and hold on to these places until a broader, more comprehensive plan emerges that will ensure a better chance of preserving the region as a whole.