♪♪ -This old quarry, near the Pine Barrens in Southern New Jersey, is an active dig site.

They've found fossils here recording the last days of the dinosaurs.

-Back in the days of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, the planet's very, very warm.

There was no ice at the poles, there's little ice in the mountains, all that water's in the ocean.

So it raises the level of the sea hundreds of feet.

So here, in New Jersey, there'd be maybe 70 feet of water over your head here.

-Ken Lacovara is the founder of the new Edelman Fossil Park and Museum in Mantua Township, about 20 miles southeast of Philadelphia.

Here, Dr. Lacovara is creating a window to this area's deep past.

More recently -- about 10,000 years ago -- the first humans arrived on the scene.

They found a newly forested landscape.

-At the end of the ice age, we had a glacier that started at the North Pole that was over a mile thick -- it was 800 feet thick over top of New York City, and then it ended north of here at about New Brunswick, New Jersey.

So this area here was tundra.

-The Pine Barrens of New Jersey are really this periglacial environment, meaning an area right next to a glacier.

It's the kind of land that you'd find in Alaska today, but now it's in a more temperate climate and it's vegetated by the pine forest.

-In 1978, over a million acres of the New Jersey Pinelands -- the largest area of open space left between Richmond and Boston -- became the country's first National Reserve.

President Carter signed the bill, which came with the promise of money to help the state start buying land.

The idea was to save ecologically important areas where people were already living and working, not getting rid of development, but limiting it for a more sustainable future.

A year later, Governor Byrne signed a bill giving this idea real power.

-That controversial ban on building in the Pinelands is now law.

Governor Bryne signed the measure today in a ceremony that reflected none of the bitter debate over the bill.

As part of the ceremony, a passage from John McPhee's book on the Pinelands was read, a passage that predicts the Pine Barrens would ultimately be paved over by developers.

-I told John at that time that I was going to prove him wrong.

We did.

I'm going to prove him wrong.

[ Applause ] -John McPhee's book about the Pine Barrens described a "separate world," one left out of the 20th century's mad rush to modernize and develop.

People and their use of the land were always part of the equation.

With that idea in mind, UNESCO named the New Jersey Pinelands a Biosphere Reserve in the 1980s, one of hundreds around the world.

-Biosphere reserves are not about nature conservation.

They are about people.

They are sites designated by UNESCO that find creative, effective ways for people and nature to thrive together.

-There have been people in the Pinelands for thousands of years.

But today, the forests are fragmented by roads and surrounded by development.

The climate is growing hotter, and sea level is rising.

As big as they are, the forests of the Pine Barrens live in our world now, and they're not going to thrive without our help.

♪♪ ♪♪ -When some of the earliest settlers came to New Jersey and other parts of the Eastern Seaboard, they described almost parklike experiences, right?

They would walk into the forest and see an area that looked kind of like the forest that is behind me, right?

Scattered trees, more grasses in between.

♪♪ For tens of thousands of years before Europeans came, there were things like hurricanes that came through every 100 years or so that would maybe take out 70% of the canopy, you would have fire come through these areas, so in Southern New Jersey, that could be anywhere from 6 and 12 years that a fire would come through.

So there were a lot of different things that were shaping our forests.

-The natural processes of, for instance, fire, which is the big issue of today, can't function like it did actually for thousands of years.

However, even that fire, in large part, was influenced by human beings.

Native Americans were always here, they were always managing and manipulating the forest to get what they needed.

Better forage for game, that attracted game, better reproduction of berries that they depended upon.

And over the millennia, the ecology actually adapted to them and they became one, together.

They sustained the environment.

And that is my view of what we should be doing in forestry today.

♪♪ -Alright, so for today, we're going to be working on permanent plots in the Fire Interval experiment.

And so, probably several of you have been out here.

I know Zack, just yesterday, was out here.

I have my forest measurement class out here today, and what they're doing is helping us with fire effects monitoring.

-And today, we're just measuring a bunch of trees.

There are a bunch of plots out here that were measured some years ago, so we want to see any updates.

How much has it grown?

Are they still even there?

-Measuring these short leaf and "pitch" pine trees -- some as tall as 70 feet -- is part of an experiment taking place over decades on the forested campus of Stockton University.

-And 375.33... -The question is -- how does the frequency of fire change the ecosystem?

What grows?

What thrives?

What disappears?

To find out, they're burning 21 plots at different intervals.

-Every year, every 2 years, every 3 years, every 4 years, every 5 years, and then every 10 years and every 15 years.

This is kind of a classic example where sometimes you don't need statistics to show you that something is having an effect.

So in this case, just by looking at the shrub layer and some of the differences between the shrub layers in these different units, we can start seeing some of the effects that the fires are having.

So for example, over here, we have a unit that's burned every year -- Well, we try to burn it every year.

It's burned 6 of the last 7 years.

And so, in this case, it's really reduced the shrub cover.

-Some other types of native warm-season grasses are starting to grow in the understory again.

We're seeing a lot of bracken fern starting to come back.

-An increasingly rare native plant of the Pine Barrens has also appeared -- the pink lady slipper orchid.

-And I haven't seen them really anywhere else on that study.

Seems too coincidental for it not to be related to that frequent fire.

-This is one of the most unique ecosystems in the world.

Pitch pine for example, which is so abundant here, it's resistant to all kinds of fire and it's not as scary as people think it is.

-They get this damage, but that makes them thrive, like it's just such a weird phenomenon.

I think it's very cool that it's just -- it does what it wants and it -- like, it bounces back all the time.

♪♪ [ Laughter ] -Every year, between January and March, Forest Fire Teams are out doing prescribed burns all over the Pinelands.

Their goal is 30,000 acres.

But New Jersey has a lot of roads and houses, even in the Pine Barrens, and it's not easy to make the decision to light a fire.

-I woke up at 6:00 this morning, looked at the weather, and made the decision at like 6:00 this morning that we were going to burn it.

We have to go by a pretty strict burn plan.

Wind speeds, relative humidity values, temperatures, things like that.

-'Cause the wind's gonna shift to the east.

-Yeah, it's pushing east a little bit here also.

-So having people go from the plow line to Pomona Road, leaving the right-hand side.

-Okay.

-Alright?

-Sounds good.

-Because it's been used here for so long, like, people are just accustomed to seeing it.

Like, it's been sold, in a way, to the public in a way that it's beneficial.

And that's really the essential kind of primary objective behind the burns, is to reduce those hazardous fuels, to prevent the really big wildfires from causing a lot of damage.

♪♪ -The unburned forest is at very high risk of wildfire.

Heavy fuel loads, heavy fuel ladder, fire will spread quickly through there and not be controllable.

And this situation is common throughout Southern New Jersey.

Most forests are fire excluded, they've not been allowed to burn.

In many cases, because we've done such a great job at putting fires out, we now have a lot of forests that you can't even risk a prescribed fire that would reduce the fire hazard because the risk is too high.

That fire's going to get out of control.

And in those cases, we need to go in, mechanically, and remove trees and brush and what have you, to get the forest back on track.

-It's a tricky problem.

The Pine Barrens are fire-adapted, but fire can get out of control and be dangerous, especially in overgrown forests near where people live.

That's why many restoration efforts begin with mechanical cutting and thinning.

It's what New Jersey Audubon did in their Hovnanian Sanctuary.

-This forest was, like many other forests in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, very heavily overstocked.

That required bringing in machines, bringing in chainsaws, taking out some of the trees, and then following it up with prescribed fire.

But really, what that has done is it's opened up the canopy, it's given more sunlight to the forest floor, it's then also kind of sparked this whole regeneration process that the forests do just naturally.

We're seeing grasses come in that we wouldn't have normally seen, the trees that are growing here are growing nice and big and strong and they'll be able to withstand these stressors for years to come.

-All over the world, trees are being stressed.

They're vulnerable, and out of control wildfires, beetle infestations, and sea-level rise are killing them.

They're called "ghost forests."

-First time I came upon the term "ghost forest" is out in Southwestern Colorado.

We're losing vast stands of trees.

-Best known for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Maya Lin focuses much of her work on the environment.

In 2021, she created a ghost forest in Madison Square Park in Manhattan, using Atlantic White Cedars that were victims of climate change.

She found these giant trees in a cedar swamp in New Jersey.

They had died because of salt water inundation.

-The first time down, when we were driving through some of the stands that were really hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, I took pictures.

It was haunting.

Areas closer to the coast, it is just gone.

These areas are now kind of way too marshy to even begin to try to regenerate.

We have very little time.

But I am going to be absolutely an optimist.

This is the time when you absolutely don't give up.

This is when you work even harder.

Anything we can all do.

♪♪ -Too much saltwater kills them, but with open space and the right amount of freshwater, Atlantic White Cedar regenerates quickly.

Forester Bob Williams worked with artist Maya Lin to find the trees for her "ghost forest."

He also works to restore cedar swamps.

-I think this young forest is the solution that Maya Lin is trying to talk about.

It's great to be concerned, it's great to get upset from some of the negative things we see happening to the forest because of climate change.

But there are solutions.

All these trees are natural.

We didn't plant any trees here, which is amazing.

Cedar is a prolific tree when given the right conditions to grow and regenerate.

Here we see 5 or 6 trees.

Most of them are small, dying, because the dominant tree is taking over this area of the forest.

And that's the nature of most species.

You start out with a lot of trees.

The superior genetics of some trees start to dominate in the canopy, they shade out these, these die off, and trees will be dying off in here for the right reason for decades to come, not the wrong reason.

And these dominant trees are the trees that will become your 100 or 200 year old Atlantic White Cedar forest.

♪♪ It grows on mucky ground.

There are places where you can walk and you think you're floating.

They're unique in that they're almost a monoculture, but if you walk into them, they're aesthetically magnificent, and I think spiritually.

-Atlantic White Cedar was once a major presence on the Eastern seaboard.

Now, less than 10% of these forests remain.

The largest stands left anywhere, about 25 thousand acres, are in Southern New Jersey.

Most of these forests are in the area covered by the Pinelands Protection Act, including a few owned by farmers like Bill Haines.

-I'm a 4th generation cranberry grower on this property.

It was started by my great-grandfather, Martin L. Haines, in about 1890.

The reason we have so much forest land is that we understood that to protect what we did, grow cranberries and then blueberries, we needed to protect the water supply.

We still are all about the water, all about the water.

And so, over the 130 years, we've acquired close to 14,000 acres of land.

Some ways, that's not as impressive as it sounds because nobody else wanted it!

When we started, you'd buy it for 50 cents an acre, you'd get it at a tax sale.

I'm talking about in my grandfather and my dad's day.

-...requiring that if we are gonna preserve the Pinelands, and again, I emphasize... -The Haines family farm was one of many private properties swept into the Pinelands Protection Act in 1979.

-...build around the fringes of it... -I mean, to be honest, cranberry growers, and farmers and landowners, and we're all of those, were opposed to it.

Because we didn't think it was fair.

We agreed that all of this should remain the Pinelands and not be paved over, we were all on that same page, but we felt we were being asked to bear the burden of that for the benefit of everybody else.

-The Pinelands Protection Act includes both a "protection" area, where some development is allowed, and a stricter "preservation" area.

That's where Pine Island Cranberry is located.

-In here, in the preservation area, we can only grow cranberries or blueberries, do forestry and keep bees.

So we better be good at what we do, 'cause there's not really an out, unless you want to sell it to the state.

But at the same time, it's probably the best place to farm in the state of New Jersey.

It's a mixed blessing, I guess is the best way I can put it.

-For Bill Haines, it's helped to find the right people to work with over the years.

-Most recent example is New Jersey Audubon.

You know, we probably don't agree on everything, but we agree on stuff that we can work together on that.

-For a few years, New Jersey Audubon released bobwhite quail at Pine Island Cranberry.

It was a study to see if this once-common bird could be reintroduced to New Jersey.

-Yep.

Go for it.

That was cool.

-That was pretty cool.

-In 2019, there was a report that came out that said, since 1970, we have lost almost 3 billion birds.

And that is a staggering number.

That's just North America.

Part of the reason behind that decline is habitat loss.

Habitat loss could be actual conversion, so a habitat that was suitable that is now a housing development or a shopping mall, but it could also be a decline of suitable habitat.

Young forest disappearing or grassland habitat disappearing.

-The open savannah and grasslands at Pine Island Cranberry are rare in New Jersey, even in the Pinelands.

They're also intentional, part of a mosaic of forest types created with management techniques like thinning and burning, even clearcutting.

-As a kid, you know, exploring the cedar swamp and finding the old corduroy roads, when the cedar was cut before, probably 80 or 100 years ago.

The cedar swamp is a beautiful place, so quiet and so peaceful.

And ours was, you know, some of it, in areas, was going backwards.

Almost 20 years ago now, we decided to get serious about it, and created a plan and got it approved by the Pinelands Commission.

-Actively managing their land meant thinking critically about the health of their forests.

It didn't mean just letting them be.

But for the Haines family, it also had to be sustainable.

-It pays for itself, okay?

When we cut the cedar, it pays for the rest of the stuff we do for forestry.

Like, if we weren't in the cranberry business, forestry would not save us.

Alright?

So it's not about that.

It's about taking care of the land.

-From the 1700s on, the Pinelands were clear cut over and over again, to supply wood to help build the nation, and to make charcoal to fuel it.

The last original forests in New Jersey were cut in the 1860s, yet they continued to regenerate, providing a way of life for many.

In his 1967 book, John McPhee described this world as one where people would rather "live than make a lot of money."

A series of short films made in the 1980s told some of their stories, including the story of this father and son pair of cedar farmers.

-It'll make you old fast out there in the woods.

It's like you're walking on a mattress.

Brush is up and down, and you go out there and work a day, you're tired when you come home.

-So this is the regeneration of another forest, another cedar stand.

And it takes so much sunlight and so much moisture for it to germinate.

And the conditions are just right for the tree to grow.

So this is the beginning of another cedar stand.

In another hundred years, we'll cut it off.

[ Laughs ] [ Saw buzzing ] -The Schairer Bros.

Saw Mill has been in operation since the 1930s.

-We use the trees that grow locally, Atlantic White Cedar mostly, some white pine, white oak.

We're using the native product.

We're not taking oil and converting it into plastic fencing.

We try to use every part of the tree.

-Schairer Bros.

Saw Mill produces shingles for historic houses, some in Cape May.

They also make the parts for the channel markers used throughout the waterways of New Jersey.

-It marks the channel so you know where to basically drive your boat so you don't end up running aground on a sand bar.

-But staying in business is a problem.

Local mills, once common in South Jersey, have almost disappeared.

There just aren't enough trees being cut to keep them running.

That's especially true for Atlantic White Cedar.

-Taxes in New Jersey are not cheap, and even on swampland, it's still an extra cost.

The state is one of the few people who buys cedar swamps and swampland, so the state now owns, I guess, a larger percentage of our swampland.

-And wood is rarely ever cut on state land, partly because of public opinion.

-You know, we own the land, don't touch it, don't cut the trees.

-The priority is restoration first.

Let's get it back.

I feel like on public land, we should be getting it back and primarily leaving it alone and grow it for centuries.

Along the way, there's a lot of cedar stands that have fallen down, they're rotting away.

We could be salvaging and using that wood while restoring those sites to make sure that cedar comes back.

So you have a real opportunity to bring economics and ecological restoration together.

-The climate is changing, and Atlantic White Cedar near the coast is dying.

But inland, it can still be restored.

Pine forests in New Jersey present a different picture.

There are more of them, for one thing, and most of them are middle-aged, with fewer younger or older forests than in the past.

-We have such an incredible opportunity to be able to do something with those 80 to 100 year old forests, right?

In some instances, we can leave those forests be.

That's an important piece of that.

We can also use this as an opportunity to create early successional and young forest habitat.

-It's really about, almost like collaborating with nature more than anything else.

But it's about basically creating opportunities for other organisms to exist because they have just as much right to this planet as we do.

The science is there, and I think it's really -- it's our responsibility to step in.

-Science is helping us better understand and emulate natural systems.

People are also learning to build more sustainably with wood.

It's exactly what they're doing at the new Edelman Fossil Park and Museum.

-This is the largest public building to be a net-zero facility in New Jersey.

And the use of wood is important because wood is also a renewable resource, it is also a carbon sink.

It takes carbon and CO2 out of the atmosphere embeds it in the trees, and while it's used here, all that carbon is still held in that material.

-Ecological forest management is a way that people are collaborating with nature, not exploiting it.

Keeping the Pinelands, the unique, vast forests of the Pine Barrens, means working to insure their future, and ours.

-Right now, the earth is flying into a number of existential climate crises.

We have the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and we can see in the fossil record that things can change, things can go off the rails quite severely, and have in the past.

And there's nothing in science, there's nothing in the record of the past that says the earth always has to be like we want it to be in the future.

That's a future that we have to fight for, and that future is not going to happen unless we recognize the contingencies of the past and work together to make the future that we all want.

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