As Labor Day marks the waning of summer and communities up and down the Jersey Shore are facing the arrival of peak hurricane season, we bring you “Shrinking Shoreline,” an NJ Spotlight News special edition on the threats to New Jersey’s Atlantic shore.
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Farmer Brian Arzt checks on some of the cows at the Three Willows Farm in Springfield. The State of New Jersey closed on the purchase of the property’s development rights on Monday, making it the first in the state to be preserved under New Jersey’s new farmland preservation formula.
Three Willows Farm in Springfield Township became the first New Jersey farm preserved using a new state formula to calculate development value.
The 70-acre cattle farm in Burlington County, owned by first-generation farmers Brian and Stacey Arzt, was celebrated during a ceremony on August 25 attended by state and local officials.
The preservation marks the debut of the Statewide Formula Value, which considers both development rights and additional value based on agricultural and natural resource characteristics.
The new formula was signed into law in January 2024 and took effect in April.
“We all agree – this formula is a game-changer for all of us hoping to preserve more of New Jersey’s remaining farmland,” Burlington County Commissioner Deputy Director Allison Eckel said in a statement.
The Arzt family raises cattle and sells pasture-raised beef directly to customers from their property located off Arney’s Mount Road.
Incentives for participation
According to the state, there are valuable incentives for landowners to participate in the Farmland Preservation Program. The program can help them meet their financial goals, providing them with the capital to expand their existing operations, eliminate or reduce their debt load, or further their estate or retirement planning. Participants in the program are also eligible to apply for cost-sharing grants to fund soil and water conservation projects. In addition, they enjoy limited protection from government acquisition of land through eminent domain, public and private nuisances, and emergency restrictions on the use of water and energy supplies.
The Farmland Preservation Program is administered by the State Agriculture Development Committee (SADC), which coordinates with County Agriculture Development Boards, municipal governments, nonprofit organizations, and landowners.
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That cypress tree in the Central Park Ramble that had been a beloved memorial site for grieving pet owners was cut down by the Central Park Conservancy in August.
A spokesperson for the Conservancy told Gothamist that its members had thoroughly assessed the tree, which they determined had died “due to a combination of environmental stress and wear on the landscape.”
According to Gus Saltonstall, the managing editor at the online news site West Side Rag, the tree had been showing signs of distress for at least the past six months. In May, a reader emailed Saltonstall to say that “all the branches were brown and brittle.”
The reader had speculated that the tree’s demise was also tied to pet owners scattering their pets’ ashes around the tree, Saltonstall wrote in his article about the tree’s demise.
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A Trump appointee has proposed rewriting a measure that requires companies to clean up “forever chemicals,” documents show. The new version would shift costs from polluters.
A crew in Parchment, Mich., connected the city’s water pipes to a neighboring system in 2018 after PFAS chemicals were discovered in the local supply. Credit…Jim West/Alamy
Early this year, Steven Cook was a lawyer representing chemical companies suing to block a new rule that would force them to clean up pollution from “forever chemicals,” which are linked to low birth rates and cancer.
Now Mr. Cook is in a senior role at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he has proposed scrapping the same rule his former clients were challenging in court. His effort could shift cleanup costs away from polluters and onto taxpayers, according to internal E.P.A. documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Last month Mr. Cook met with industry groups that are still challenging the rule in court. By the next business day after the meeting, the E.P.A. office that oversees toxic cleanups had reversed its internal recommendation on the rule, the documents show, to advise repealing instead of upholding it.
The change was evident in a presentation being prepared for Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator. The document contained edits saying that the office recommended repealing the rule and that its “cons outweigh pros.” Previously, the document had recommended keeping the rule in place and that its “pros outweigh cons.”
The rule in its current form could require the chemical industry and others to pay billions of dollars in cleanup costs for chemicals known as PFAS, or forever chemicals. The reversal in the E.P.A.’s internal guidance, and Mr. Cook’s role in the policy change, has not been previously reported.
“It’s outrageous,” said Tracey Woodruff, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who studies environmental health, particularly the effects of chemical exposures on pregnant mothers and their babies. “If they overturn this, it would leave the public responsible for cleaning up, not the companies that knowingly polluted the land.”
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Reporter Jason Nark sets off on the Black Forest Trail on Aug. 9. The signpost for the trail says it’s 42 miles, but it turned out to be longer.
By Jason Nark, Philadelphia Inquirer
It was some time after lunch, on a recent Saturday afternoon, that I began to regret my decision to hike Pennsylvania’s Black Forest Trail.
Maybe it was the $1 bag of beef-flavored ramen I’d cooked, or the gnats drinking my sweat, or the 30-pound pack that was digging into my hips.
Mostly, it was the trail itself. The Black Forest Trail is named after the ubiquitous eastern hemlocks that shade the landscape with their dense canopies. It’s widely considered Pennsylvania’s most challenging trail by the state’s hiking enthusiasts. Reviews of the North-Central Pennsylvania loop on the ever-popular AllTrails hiking app attest to that.
“This is without a doubt the hardest trail in PA. The ascents and descents will test your mental fortitude, not just your physical fitness,” one hiker wrote.
That’s where I was after lunch on my first day. I was about seven miles into what I thought was a 42-ish-mile hike (more on that later), and I realized I’d planned poorly and would have to push hard to be home by Monday afternoon.
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By Bloomberg News (Bloomberg) — Off the coast of southern China, a giant, double-headed turbine rises out from among its conventional counterparts, held up by a spiderweb of steel cables and tethered to the seabed below via three bright-yellow mooring points.
The OceanX design pushes the boundaries of engineering, harnessing more wind power than any other floating turbine operating in the world today. It’s also an eloquent symbol of the ambitions of Chinese green technology companies, securing their dominance of yet another clean-energy industry as stalwarts in Europe, the US, and Japan run up against political and economic setbacks.
China, whose reliance on imports means energy security is always at the forefront of its mind, has led the world in using renewable electricity sources — including expansive solar farms in western deserts and rows of turbines built at sea, where they can access reliable and stronger air currents. This year, it will install nearly three out of every four of the world’s new offshore turbines, according to BloombergNEF.
The story is very different elsewhere, particularly in the US, where President Donald Trump has derided wind farms as ugly killers of birds and whales. He targeted wind on his first day in office, halting approvals for new offshore ventures. His administration stopped an almost-complete project, rattling investors and triggering a collapse in the share price of its Danish developer, Orsted A/S, a company that has led the sector for more than three decades since it commissioned the world’s first offshore wind farm.
Now, along with other operators in Europe, the US, and Japan, Orstedis struggling to cope with dwindling government support and costs that continue to push upward, thanks to pricier components, high interest rates, and limited infrastructure.
Mitsubishi Corp. dealt the latest blow on Wednesday, announcing that a group it led would withdraw from three offshore wind projects in Japan, citing tighter supply chains and rising costs since the projects were secured in 2021.
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