Green Jersey

Shiny, new wetlands not as good as natural ones

Image via the Natural Resources Conservation Service

A $3 million project to rebuild wetlands a few miles south of a new Turnpike interchange is drawing criticism from some environmentalists.

It’s not that this wetlands project is particularly bad — it’s wetlands reconstruction in general they have doubts about.

This particular project, at the Thomas Edison Service Area just south of Carteret, may succeed because it was a wetlands before, according to Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club. However, wetlands reconstruction is something that “looks good on paper,” he told the Home News Tribune. “It takes centuries to create a wetlands,” he said. “You can’t just go out there and engineer one.”

In the case of this site, flow patterns were changed due to construction of the Turnpike in the 1950s, according to the paper — so it will be impossible to make a great replica.

Julie Sibbling of the National Wildlife Federation questioned the fact that New Jersey allows builders to create wetlands outside the area of their project if they can’t locate them near the construction, because wetlands are part of a local ecosystem.

A 2002 wetlands mitigation study found that most attempts to create wetlands in New Jersey failed, the paper notes.

In the report, it says the state lost 39 percent of its wetlands between the 1870s and the 1970s, and possibly 20 percent between the 1950s and 1970s. And then, 1,755 more acres of wetlands per year were lost between 1986 and 1995, more years in which the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act wasn’t fully functioning yet.

Even after the FWPA kicked in, freshwater wetlands were disappearing at a rate of 150 acres per year. The report found that not all the wetlands that were supposed to be restored actually were, and the quality of the ones that were restored varied.

Wetlands are vital to people and nature, providing food to small organisms and the things that eat them, recharging groundwater and preventing flooding.