Environmentalists fear the proposed new rule is ‘too little, too late’
By Jeff Pillets | NJ Spotlight
The headwaters of the Black Run Creek in Evesham Township are among the most pristine reaches of New Jersey’s 938,000-acre Pinelands National Reserve.
Only about 15 miles from Philadelphia’s city limits, the stretch of wetlands, streams, and cranberry bogs is an ecological wonderland where threatened species like the bobolink and the Eastern box turtle live and breed amid grasslands and cedar swamps.
“You can’t really appreciate how magnificent it is until you get out on the trails and take it all in,” says Amy Golden, a retired veterinary dentist who leads bird counting and photography outings at the 1,300-acre Black Run Preserve. “You can’t help thinking you’re in New Jersey’s last bastion of unspoiled land.”
The Black Run Creek meanders through the preserve before feeding into the southwest branch of the Rancocas Creek, which in turn feeds into the Delaware River. For more than 1 million people in Burlington County and areas downstream, ecologists say, the Black Run is an essential component of clean drinking water.
NJ Spotlight News first chronicled the preserve in its “Water’s Edge” series in 2023, exploring the threats to the area but also the steps that have been taken to protect it. But two years later, it faces still more challenges.
Trying to protect pristine waters
Developers are now looking to bulldoze some 800 acres of privately owned land in the Black Run headwaters and build up to 270 new homes. Opponents of the plan, who’ve collected more than 5,000 signatures against it, say the threat to the Black Run headwaters is proof that long-awaited reforms to better protect Pinelands water can’t come fast enough.
“Plans for development in this area have been kicking around for decades,” said Jaclyn Rhoads, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit that works to protect the Pinelands and its remarkably pure system of aquifers.
“The good news is that new rules to limit this kind of intrusion are at hand,” Rhoads said, in an interview with NJ Spotlight News last week. “The bad news is that it’s taken way too long. Pressure on the aquifer from drought, from brush fires, from overdevelopment is only getting worse.”
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