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New Jersey’s 2011 black bear hunt will have come and gone by the time you read this. Hours before Dirt went to press, a hunter brought the first bear into the weigh station in Franklin County. In a way, the six-day open season will have been nothing new: the state held hunts in 2003, 2005, and 2010, killing a total of over 1,200 bears. But this year’s hunt will go down in history as the first time in 40 years that New Jersey sanctioned a bear hunt two years in a row.
Bears are New Jersey natives, but by the sixties, hunting had brought them to the verge of extinction in the area. When bear hunting ceased in 1971, the population began to rebound — slowly at first.
“I grew up in Sussex County in the eighties,” said Vernon police officer Sean Fitzgerald (whom Dirt interviewed about his mountain lion sighting in 2006), “and if somebody said they saw a bear, I’d probably say, ‘You’re crazy. There are no bears here.’”
Now, pictures of pug-nosed cubs, swimming or sleeping or climbing trees, appear in local newspapers as regularly as boy scouts. The population has doubled since 2005. Pre-hunt, there were about 3,400 bears in New Jersey, and they’ve been spotted in every county in the state.
Fitzgerald, who since his sighting has become the unofficial mountain lion expert on the police force, sees a parallel – separated by a few decades – between the bear’s repopulation of New Jersey and what’s happening with mountain lions today.
What goes up…
After a very short flight, a hot air balloon clipped treetops and crash landed in crowded Warwick Town Park the afternoon of Saturday, Nov. 26. A fleeing bystander got a picture, but no one seems to have ascertained the identity of the mysterious, cursing balloon operator before he rolled up his balloon and walked off. The Warwick Town Police have no record of it.
Tom Farkas of Hewitt was playing disc golf in the park when “the massive balloon came in very low and crashed into the trees right above the silver basket,” he wrote on a message board. “Several holes ripped in the sides of the balloon and the operator was screaming curses. They flew the balloon out of the trees and back into the air, but with the newly torn holes in it, it came down fast and hard. We literally ran off of the tee and into the road as the balloon crashed. I did manage to get a picture before I had to run.”
Another golfer described the sound of the balloon as it came down as “like a hundred leafblowers.”
The balloon isn’t from any commercial operation in the area, said Chris Healy, of Above the Clouds in Middletown, after seeing the pictures. Healy has flown 80 flights a season for a decade without incident, but “the great thing about ballooning is that something like this can happen, and you can still fly. You certainly want to land shortly thereafter.” To fly a balloon, you have to be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration and follow certain regulations – like maintaining a certain altitude.
Pennings Farm Market is a couple miles outside the village. Otherwise, these solar panels might not pass muster. Photo by MIKE BLOOM
Warwick Village: solar panels don’t jibe with historic district
Warwick Village may not want to see solar panels in front yards, side yards, front roofs, walls – or anywhere, really. The Village Board of Trustees is looking into relegating solar panels to rear yards and behind screens in the name of preserving aesthetics within the historic district.
“I think we have to regulate it but not create extreme costs for the homeowner,” said Mayor Michael Newhard.
Village attorney Michael Meth advised the board to write instructive guidelines, rather than regulations that discourage people from installing solar panels. “Go deep, [and] you could be a trendsetter,” he said.
Jerry Fischetti, who lives on Oakland Avenue, was the first in the historic district to install solar panels three years ago. After putting hot water panels on his north wall above the porch roof, he installed them on his rental property a few houses down. His neighbor across the street followed suit. His solar panels are visible from the street, if you’re looking.
“Tell them to mind their own business, because they’re not paying the bills,” said Fischetti. “Their concern is that this is within the historical district? If that’s the case then we should not use electricity. One hundred years ago, did they have electricity? Did they have all these amenities? Let’s go back 100 years and pay the same amount of tax we had then.”
Gone to the mules
In our summer issue we reviewed a documentary, The Farmer and the Horse, about a movement amongst small, mostly young farmers to use beasts of burden instead of tractors. All the rain has turned their ideological stance into a practical one. Upstate New York farmer Dennis Kelly told the Glens Falls Post-Star that he had to begin his harvest a week early at his farm near Queensbury, for fear Irene’s rains would bring fungus, and he had to rent
mules because the ground was too wet for tractors.
All drama is local
Unspool the yarn of the property that was the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility and you’ll get a pretty good approximation of the history of our country. You’ll find Indians, farmers, rampant alcoholism, Prohibition, a reform school, a prison, and now…
That’s the $64,000 question. After the men’s prison closed this summer, the Warwick Town Board rezoned the site off Kings Highway to office/ industrial. Town Supervisor Michael Sweeton wants to see the 772 acres become an agricultural park, not a dense residential development.
“The future of this huge site will fundamentally shape the direction of our community for decades to come,” said Warwick Historian Dr. Richard Hull. So will it be farmland or condos? As ever, the property is a microcosm playing out our national drama.
Come Together
“Farmers are tough,” said Vinny D’Attolico of D’Attolico Farm in Pine Island, post Irene. “We take beatings and we don’t ask for help, because if there’s a good year, we’re not standing on the corner passing it out, either. This time we’re asking for help. September and October, that’s when we start to break even and make money on a good year. That money pays for the seed order for next year. I know of a bunch of farmers who are done. That’s it. Finished.”
So far they’ve seen less than their fair share of the help they asked for from the government. Most farmers spit at the idea of the low-interest loans on offer. When, pray tell, would that loan be repaid?
But help did come, in one unexpected way after another. When Jeff and Adina Bialas, of J&A Farm in Goshen, had little to give to their CSA members, their neighbors at the Corn Shak pitched in six ears of corn per CSA member, and some extra for Adina to make corn bread.
All hands came on deck to make T-shirts, book performances, solicit auction items, and set up for the Warwick Valley Farm Aid fundraiser. The goal was to raise $25,000, to be split equally amongst Town of Warwick farmers
who applied. The whole town turned out that Saturday, raising $60,000. And a sign in a local deli read: “Flood damage? No house? No job? No food? Come on in and have an egg on a roll.”
There’s a movement afoot in the Village of Warwick to bring back backyard chickens. The debate started when Warwick teen Raphael Cox requested a waiver to a 1976 local law that bans keeping barnyard animals within village limits. The appropriately named Cox, whose ambition is to become a Warwick farmer, wanted to raise chickens in his yard, along with vegetables and fruit trees.
The village board decided to take a look at amending the law with a special use permit for a backyard chickens pilot program. The program would be a joint effort with the Middletown Cornell Cooperative Extension, a community outreach arm of Cornell University.
At a recent board meeting, talk was of food insecurity, finding sustainable food sources in a changing world where fuel is expensive – and property values.
Linda Matheson, a 27-year Warwick resident, is worried that her neighbor’s chickens will lower the price of her land. After that meeting, nine people, including three of Cox’s immediate neighbors, wrote letters to the mayor opposing the rule change. Only one wrote in support. The jury’s still out.
Cracking up
Unless you managed to be out of town for this summer’s record heat wave, you heard about the four-alarm blaze that shut down the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Harlem, spewing tons of raw sewage into the Hudson. It was a headline grabber, but it wasn’t a freak event: leaks and cracks have been turning up in a number of serious pieces of infrastructure.
The major natural gas pipeline that stretches across southern New York and passes through Warwick, Greenwood Lake and Tuxedo could be at risk of rupturing, according to federal regulators. A Tioga County worker found a leak caused by a faulty weld in the Millenium Pipeline in January, when he noticed bubbles emerging from a creek. Millenium Pipeline Company responded by reducing pressure on the line. The feds are worried that the Millenium Pipeline could be riddled with such faulty welds. Millenium Pipeline Co. has until the end of the year to fix the problem.
Meanwhile, Warwick has shored up all but one of the leaks that a survey revealed in its water lines, but the village is still losing about 4,000 gallons a day – about a thousand toilet flushes’ worth – from the remaining leak around West and John streets. Last summer, 208,800 gallons, or enough water to serve 2,000 tap-happy Americans, were seeping out of 11 leaks in village water mains every day.
Goshen, plagued by century-old sewer pipes that regularly regurgitate their contents after a rain, is also trudging into modernity. Village workers are opening every manhole to find and fix the problems that lie below. Eighty feet of sewer main have been replaced, including a cracked main that was taking on stream water, and a manhole on Erie Street, notorious for its spew, has been removed. This summer, Goshen officials okayed an approximately $200,000 project to replace the 1914, 18-inch terra cotta pipe that brings all the sewage into the treatment plant. The 600 feet of old pipe are a major bottleneck, which was only going to get worse as Goshen grew.
“We’ve done more in the last two to three years than in all the 30 years that I’ve worked here,” Goshen Public Works Superintendent Mike Nuzzolese told the Goshen Chronicle.
This Bud’s for you, but we’ll take the can
The recycle king, West Milford Recycling Coordinator Dave Stires, would like your empty cans, old bicycles and gutters. In return, you just might get lower property taxes.
The town gets 50 cents per ton of comingled recyclables, but $940 per ton of aluminum scrap. Stires, who earned his crown as recycle king when he went around shaking residents’ garbage bags looking for misplaced recyclables, is spreading the word through free presentations. The Pinecliff Lake neighborhood, population 1,500, took note. Picnickers separated their post-party aluminum and delivered it to the recycling depot, netting the town $60.
Like gold, aluminum can be infinitely recycled by re-melting. If aluminum recycling takes off like it did during World War II, it might be worth sending recycling trucks on separate aluminum pick-ups.
Questions? Stires has answers: 973-728-2850.
Carmen Abrazado's wedding gown, of cotton silk and hemp, was handmade by her mom
Carmen Abrazado and Mark Tedesco looked at inns, parks and farms. So why’d they end up getting married next to their eight-of-an-acre West Milford potato patch?
“It’s who we are. It’s just the way we live our lives. I would not feel good about doing a normal wedding, one that would cause so much extra environmental stress,” Abrazado said.
Guests brought plants to the bridal shower. Abrazado’s wedding gown was handmade by her mom out of cotton silk and hemp. The lace overlay, not natural, was one of a few compromises. The table covers were made of recycled Kraft paper which will be used in their garden afterwards. The bride made placemats of shredded paper, decorated with fallen palm leaves. After dinner, the plates were tossed into the compost heap. The utensils were made from biodegradable polylactic acid (PLA), a corn plastic that can be disposed in a commercial composting facility.
The stemmed wine glasses for 90 guests were trickier, but Abrazado found a company in Australia that manufactured strong PLA goblets. By chance she has a friend down under who shipped her a case of the glasses.
Even the music was earth friendly. Solar Jam Productions from Connecticut came with a solar paneled truck to run the microphones and amps.
Could your car run on garbage?
Anyone who composts knows that garbage has value. Goshen is planning to tap that energy source by heating solid waste to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and turning it into gas power.
The proposed $145 million Taylor Biomass Energy facility is expected to be up and running in Montgomery by 2013. It will process only organic waste; non-organic waste will be recylced or go to a hazmat landfill. Most of the energy produced will be sent to the Central Hudson Gas and Electric grid for consumer use, the rest will be retained to run the facility.
The hydrogen the plant will produce is “one of the cleanest gases that could be used as transport fuel in the future,” according to James Rollins, vice-president of business development at Taylor Biomass Energy.
Michael Edelstein, president of environmental group Orange Environment, is an outspoken skeptic. Taylor “may emerge as a major polluter,” he said. Goshen needs to do its homework “before they hitch themselves to a risky process.”
Good enough to eat
You’ll never go hungry on South Street in Warwick. The eight planters that lend that village charm are filled with edibles this year, to complement the nearby Sunday farmer’s market, according to Sally Scheuermann of Warwick in Bloom. A brand new ornamental edible popcorn will be surrounded by dill, rainbow-stemmed Swiss chard, golden sage, red mustard, lavendar, kale, and Nasturtiums.
A dangling question
A mama bear and her cubs dangle away a hot afternoon in Highland Lakes, near Wawayanda State Park. They’ll be all over the news soon. New Jersey is planning another bear hunt for December, after 590 were killed in last year’s hunt. What do you think? We’ll discuss it in our next issue’s “debatable.”
gone to pot
Medical marijuana is legal in New Jersey — sort of. Since the legislation was born, the list of conditions that qualify a patient to use cannabis has shriveled to a handful of diseased like terminal cancer and multiple sclerosis. That means a lot of sick people who thought they were going to qualify have had to readjust to a new reality.
Darrell Milligan, of Sussex, suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in addition to chronic physical pain and constant muscle spasms. As a marine, he helped with post-earthquake body recovery in Japan in 1995. All the news about Japan right now is bringing back a flood of memories.
The veteran health care system put Milligan on an ever-increasing dose of Wellbutrin, Pristiq and Xanax. “I was literally taking handfuls of pills,” he told Dirt. But the drugs rendered him non-functional.
Then he discovered marijuana. It worked. But his ailments won’t get him a medical marijuana ID card in New Jersey, and so notwithstanding a doctor’s note, his pot use makes him an unfit father in the eyes of a custody judge. For now, Milligan is only allowed supervised custody of his kids. He can pay $150 an hour to see them at a government building, or not see them at all.
“It’s incredibly painful to be here,” he said. “The way things stand is I just have no recourse at all.” When we reached Darrell in April, he was packing his bags and heading to Oregon, where he plans to get his medical marijuana card and grow pot.
2,800 acres of farmland preserved in Warwick
An iconic working farm managed by several generations of the Wright family since 1912 will be forever protected as open space and agricultural land under an agreement reached this spring between the Wright family and the Town of Warwick, Open Space Institute and the Orange County Land Trust.
Development rights to the historic 118-acre farm located along a stretch of Kings Highway will be purchased by the town and OSI, ensuring that the land will be forever undeveloped.The plan will also will protect a tributary that feeds directly into Wickham Lake.
About 78 acres of the farm are devoted to field crops, 25 acres consist of pasture for livestock, with the remaining acreage in woods, brush and wetlands. Summer and fall visitors purchase mixed produce and grass-fed beef and participate in autumn and winter festivities such as pumpkin picking and Christmas treeshopping.
Since 2001, John Wright Jr. has practiced no-till corn planting and, more recently, no-till pumpkin planting as well as other sustainable techniques to reduce fossil fuel usage and soil erosion.
The town’s share of the $908,600 purchase price was $590,590, with the Open Space Institute making up the difference.
The barter system makes a comeback
Teach mandolin for an hour, get an hour’s worth of window repairs. And forget that green paper stuff.
Sustainable West Milford is getting onboard with the newest incarnation of an age-old concept: time banking. Thirty people showed up at a recent informational meeting.
Three hundred communities in 22 countries are already using the system. Why? Time Banks provide an infrastructure for neighbors to get to know each other and an incentive system for neighbors to take care of each other.
How? A Web site is created where neighbors list the types of things they can do for each other and where they can log in the number of hours spent helping. For every hour spent doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. You then have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It turns strangers into an extended family. That’s the idea, at least.
West Milford plans to start paying it forward June 1. Who’s next?
Have boat, will bust polluters
Riverkeeper Patrol Boat Captain John Lipscomb puts in about 6,000 nautical miles a year traveling the Hudson River between New York Harbor and Troy. While he’s at it, Lipscomb collects water samples from 75 locations and tests them for sewage contamination levels with his onboard incubator. For this and other services to the river, Lipscomb was honored in April with an environmental Quality Award from the federal Environmental Protection Agency in Region 2.
Gasifier under scrutiny
“I don’t think it’s a good idea… Whether incineration, gasification or even if you snap your fingers and [garbage] disappears it’s not a good thing because the stuff is very valuable.” – Neal Seldman, Institute for Self Reliance, on proposed Taylor gasifier that would convert garbage to electricity
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