In the summer of 1978, New Jersey did something governments rarely do: it stopped. Faced with mounting pressure to open the Pine Barrens to large-scale development, the state imposed a development moratorium on the region. It was a blunt instrument, but time has shown that it was the right one. This decisive action was taken to protect the Pinelands—and we can do it again today to protect New Jersey from data centers.
The moratorium, enacted through the Pinelands Review Committee established by Governor Brendan Byrne, halted major development while planners, scientists, and policymakers worked out what the Pinelands actually were and what protecting them would require. At stake was a million-acre expanse of coastal plain sitting between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, underlain by one of the largest unconfined aquifers on the Eastern Seaboard: the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer. That exercise in deliberate restraint — unglamorous, contested, and temporary by design — made everything that followed possible.
To understand why, it helps to understand what the Pinelands faced in the mid-1970’s. The region had spent decades being underestimated. Its acidic, nutrient-poor soils made conventional agriculture difficult, and its dense scrub oak and pitch pine forests struck developers as an obstacle rather than an asset. But the suburban building boom of the post-war era changed the calculus for developers with a growing appetite for land in proximity to cities like Philadelphia. What they saw was proximity: the Pines lay within an hour’s drive of two major metropolitan areas. Plans circulated for a new international jetport. Residential subdivisions were advancing from the edges. Without intervention, the Pinelands’ fate was likely to follow that of much of the Jersey Shore’s hinterland — absorbed, incrementally and irrevocably, into the suburban sprawl radiating outward from Camden and Trenton and the Shore towns.
The ecological arguments for protection were already well-developed. The Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer system holds an estimated 17 trillion gallons of some of the purest freshwater on the continent. The Pinelands support globally rare plant communities adapted to periodic fire and acidic soils, including several carnivorous species found nowhere else in the state. The region contains habitat for the federally threatened Pine Barrens treefrog and serves as a migratory corridor for dozens of bird species. These facts were documented, but documentation is not legislation. Between knowing what is at stake and building the legal and institutional machinery to protect it, there is a great deal of work to be done. That work requires time that active development pressure does not permit.
This is what the moratorium provided. Beginning in 1978, the development pause created the conditions for two overlapping processes to unfold without the clock running against them. At the federal level, Congress was working to designate the Pinelands as the nation’s first National Reserve. At the state level, Byrne’s administration was assembling the evidence base, the stakeholder engagement, and the legislative consensus needed to create a permanent governance structure. Neither process could have proceeded coherently while bulldozers were advancing across the landscape. The moratorium made the timeline workable.
The New Jersey Pinelands Commission was established by statute in 1979. Its charge was to develop a Comprehensive Management Plan that would govern land use across more than a million acres, balancing conservation requirements with the rights of the region’s existing communities. The CMP, adopted in 1980, was the product of that deliberative window. It established a graduated land use framework, identified Preservation and Protection Areas with the most stringent controls, and created Agricultural Production Areas and Rural Development Areas where economic activity could continue under defined standards. It was, and remains, one of the most sophisticated regional planning documents in American history.
None of that complexity was available off the shelf. It had to be built — through ecological surveys, legal analysis, community meetings, intergovernmental negotiation between fifteen municipalities and seven counties and the state and federal governments, and a level of democratic legitimacy that takes time to establish. A moratorium bought that time. A moratorium, notably, that was itself a form of regulation — not a ban on all activity, but a pause on the specific category of large-scale development most likely to foreclose options before the planning process could establish what those options should be.
The lesson is not complicated, but it bears repeating whenever a comparable situation arises: when the resource at stake is irreplaceable and the pressure on it is immediate, the first obligation is to create the conditions for good decisions. The new generation of data centers being built across the United States, including New Jersey, is adding unprecedented demand to our energy and water infrastructure. They also have major impacts to host communities, that are subjected to the constant noise and pollution of hastily-built data centers.
