After spending two hours walking along the perimeter of a 120-acre forest in West Orange, Jay Butler, a biology professor at the College of New Jersey, saw 20 species of birds. But he believes even more inhabit the trees there, including rarer species.
“I think there’s at least 100 species that could be found at this site,” Butler said.
The forest Butler was observing is the site of the controversial West Essex Highlands, Inc. proposal, where the Wilf family from Short Hills plans to build a 496-unit apartment complex.
This project has proven immensely unpopular not only within the township’s borders — the West Orange Environmental Commission just issued a letter opposing it — but also in surrounding towns. The Town Council of Verona, which borders the forest, drafted a resolution denouncing the plan for dangers it poses to stormwater management and traffic. Others fear the construction less than 100 feet to the edge of a cliff — in defiance of West Orange’s updated steep-slope ordinance — could destabilize the mountainside.
But at the May hearing, We Care, the nonprofit opposing the development, brought experts to make a case for the environmental issues related to losing a forest of this size. What we learned from Butler is that the health of a forest is not determined by trees alone, but by the species that inhabit them. Butler believes the development will “destroy” an important habitat and contribute to the further biodiversity loss in the region.
“We don’t have a lot of patches of forest this size, especially in this part of the world,” Butler said.
In a somewhat Orwellian move, Robert Bagoff, chair of the Planning Board, banned Butler from using the word “destroy” when describing the plan to bulldoze through the center of the forest, leaving behind only patches of trees. The word “destroy,” Bagoff claimed, seemed to make a judgment about the effect the development would have on the forest.
The exact number of trees that will be cut down is the subject of debate. Wayne Defeo, the township’s environmental compliance officer, estimates that more than 6,000 will be lost. Another study that the same developer commissioned in 2010 put the number at three times that amount. However, Defeo called the opposing report “garbage data.” “I do not give any credibility to this report because the data is flawed, the methodology is flawed, the survey area is flawed,” he said.
Defeo, who appeared before the Planning Board in December, claims that the forest is dying because of the overabundance of deer, which consume the leaves of smaller trees and prevent them from growing into mature ones, therefore ensuring that forest will stop regenerating and eventually die. Defeo argued the best way to protect the forest is to build deer fences around the remaining woodlots after the apartment complex is built at the center of the forest.
But the center of the forest where the complex would be built — which experts call the “core” or “interior” forest — is precisely what makes the forest so valuable and rare. “It has a different biology than what happens on the edges,” Emile DeVito, manager at the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, said at the May hearing.
The core forest is where hawks, great-horned owls, box turtles, and wood thrushes live — all of “special concern,” according to Emile DeVito. While they may not be endangered, per se, they are the “next in line,” precisely because of developments like the West Essex Highlands that are consuming their increasingly rare habitats.
In contrast to Defeo’s claims, an interior forest cannot simply be restored in the span of a human life. It takes too long. DeVito said the soil and root systems in the West Essex Highlands forest took thousands of years — since the end of the Ice Age — to form. Old forests have special properties of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and being resistant to invasive species, DeVito said.
“So the deer-fencing will not address this problem at all?” asked Bruce Afran, We Care’s lawyer.
“No, not one bit,” DeVito said.
“If a forest is 600 feet deep, it’s not really a forest,” said Lee Klein, a Planning Board member.
“That’s exactly right,” DeVito said. “There’s no forest there at all.”
There is a scenario, DeVito said, where the project could proceed and still preserve the forest — and that would be if the apartment buildings were constructed at the edges of the forest instead of the center. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead the complex is being proposed at the most vulnerable part of the forest — at the center or the core.
“If you’re interested in protecting biodiversity in your municipality then you should be trying to protect your core forests,” Devito said.
There was a memorable exchange halfway through the meeting that came from the board’s chairman, Bagoff, when he posed an open-ended question to DeVito.
“What would you do?” Bagoff asked.
“I would find the money and save it,” DeVito said.
“It’s not for sale,” said Mayor Susan McCartney, who sits on the board.
“Everything’s for sale — all the time,” DeVito said.
