The Pine Barrens, A Million Acres of Strange

From the air, New Jersey looks like two different states. The north and center are cities and suburbs and highways, one of the most densely settled landscapes in the world. And then, roughly below a line from Toms River to Vineland, the color changes: a vast, flat, dark green expanse stretching almost to the coast.

That is the Pine Barrens, and it is one of the more quietly astonishing places in the eastern United States. One point one million acres of pitch pine and scrub oak, of cedar swamps and cranberry bogs, of sandy trails that lead miles from the nearest paved road, all of it sitting within fifty miles of Philadelphia and eighty miles of New York City. The soil is acidic and nutrient-poor; the European settlers who tried to farm it gave up and called it the Barrens, which became the name.

What they could not grow was wheat. What the land could support were over eight hundred and fifty species of plants, including native orchids and carnivorous plants. The Pine Barrens hold the purest large aquifer in the northeastern United States: the Kirkwood-Cohansey, seventeen trillion gallons of essentially untouched fresh water sitting just a few feet below the sandy surface.

The Lenape burned the Pines regularly to manage game and berry production, understanding the fire ecology of pitch pine in ways European settlers did not. The colonists did eventually find uses for the Barrens: iron furnaces operated here through the Revolutionary era and beyond, and the ghost towns of Batsto and Atsion preserve the bones of those early industries. Cranberry cultivation took hold in the eighteen hundreds and continues.

In nineteen seventy-eight, Congress designated the Pine Barrens as the nation's first National Reserve, and the United Nations followed with an International Biosphere Reserve designation. The place is protected, for now. In a state that has paved over more of its land than almost any other, the Pines remain a fact that the suburbs cannot quite explain.