When I finished filling the jerry can from Fred Brown’s pump, I took another drink, and I said to him, ‘You’re lucky to live over such good water.’ — John McPhee, The Pine Barrens

A few months ago I stumbled across the website of a new micro-brewery in my home state touting its unique terroir and connection to the land.

Eh, I thought, who needs another craft beer named for its locale.

And then I looked more closely: this beer actually does have a reason to emphasize its hometown and local ingredients. It creates beer from what might be the purest water source in the United States. The punchline, of course, is that the water source is in New Jersey.

The Pinelands Brewing Company was started last year by a couple of Pine Barrens natives, born and raised in the Grand Canyon-sized forest that sprawls over the central and southern part of the state. Pinelands natives make up only a small percentage of New Jerseyans, and since they live deeply ensconced in the forest and disconnected from all the major New Jersey towns of Trenton and Newark and Jersey City and Bergen county, their voices aren’t heard on the national/political/media stage all too often.

But that’s too bad, because what the founders of Pinelands Brewing Company know is something that everyone in the country should know. The Pine Barrens, and the 17.7 trillion gallon aquifer beneath it, make up one of the last great tracts of pure wilderness in the uber-developed, crammed-full, overdeveloped Northeast.

If there is any value at all to having places preserved as wilderness — for water quality, species diversity, recreation and refuge, and for resources that we might need in the coming centuries—this place encapsulates it.

John McPhee wrote all about the Pinelands and its tremendous reservoir of fresh water in his famous 1960 book, The Pine Barrens. It’s an intimate and immense portrait of what life was like in the forest back then, and still is like for the most part now. The controversy on which he hung his story then was a proposal to build an enormous airport in the middle of the Pinelands. The public outcry from the book spurred the state to protect the land and kill the airport project, and led to the eventual creation of the Pinelands Commission in 1979. The group’s main charge was to protect the land and not be political about it.

But you can’t really have anything in New Jersey that isn’t touched by politics at some point or another. It’s just the nature of the place. Too many greedy people grabbing for a slice of such a small pie.

That’s why, as I’ve watched Chris Christie and other New Jersey politicians methodically stack the deck in favor of running a gas pipeline through the Pinelands, I’ve felt like shouting to the national media: look! help! This is worse than Bridgegate! But it’s not a sexy story of political retribution — though, like any Christie story, it has that element—and it doesn’t affect wealthy New Jerseyans who donate to campaigns or commute into New York City. Or maybe it’s just too small-potatoes, one pipeline through a little-known forest in the southern part of a state most people have already concluded is one giant oil refinery. What’s all the fuss?

If I had to sum it up, the fuss is this: politics and money shouldn’t always win out. They shouldn’t always be able to team up to beat the system. And here, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Tim O’Brien via Flickr

The proposed $90 million pipeline is a small but integral part of a larger $400 million project to turn an old coal-burning plant in Cape May County into a natural gas plant. The plant is owned by a company from Texas called Rockland Capital, which, as it goes, is represented in New Jersey by the law firm Samson and Wolfe. Until the Bridgegate scandal erupted, David Samson was Christie’s pal and chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Unsurprisingly, Christie, along with the state’s Board of Public Utilities, backed the proposed pipeline, even though it was strictly banned under the Pinelands comprehensive management plan.

The decision about whether to allow the 22-mile pipeline, which would run beneath the surface along highway easements and pump gas from Pennsylvania, rested with the Pinelands Commission, made up mostly of conservationists and enthusiasts and local residents. Before the vote, one member had expressed skepticism about the project. Ed Lloyd, an environmental professor at Columbia University, was pressured by the Christie administration to recuse himself; the rest of the board voted 7–7 on the plan.

Christie then vetoed a salary raise for the commission staff.

After that, the commissioners who voted against the Pipeline were picked off one by one. Leslie Ficcaglia*, described in one news account as “an artist and volunteer conservation worker” who “ spent much of her career working to preserve the Maurice and Manamuskin river basins in Cumberland” was replaced one night at an otherwise unremarkable Cumberland County Freeholders meeting. A resolution replacing her with a politically-connected real estate agent was one of a batch of resolutions voted through at the meeting.

“That was a total surprise. I didn’t expect it. I’ve been on the commission for 18 years,” Ficcaglia told the Courier Post. “I don’t know where this pressure comes from.

“Commissioners have to feel free to vote their conscience and uphold the plan. This is really chilling.”

It’s not just Christie. Prominent South Jersey Democrats, including State Senate President and Christie ally Steve Sweeney, whom the Courier Post* described as having “close ties to construction and utilities labor unions” are in favor of the Pipeline. State Sen. Jeff Van Drew has argued that the area needs the jobs the plant would create, and that it also needs another source of natural gas in case the one existing pipeline is compromised. Northern Democrats and Republicans have shown much greater skepticism than those whose districts the pipe would run through.

On Tuesday, the latest salvo came. While Christie was giving his budget address, demanding the attention and attendance of most Jersey political reporters, another Pinelands commissioner was quietly replaced. At a mostly-empty Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, Sweeney worked the room while Van Drew’s friend and Cape May Democratic organizer Robert Barr was approved as the new member of the commission. Barr told legislators he had no particular knowledge or experience in land conservation. Robert Jackson, who had voted against the Pipeline, was replaced.

It took three attempts for the politics to work on this one. In two previous hearings to have Barr replace Jackson, State Senator Ray Lesniak voted against it. But Lesniak missed the meeting on Tuesday; he was on vacation in Florida. Sitting in his place, as a temporary replacement just for this vote, was Van Drew.

“I don’t think the administration would want to manipulate the Pinelands Commission for the benefit of one Texas investment firm. It would look so bad,” Carelton Montgomery of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, a non-profit group that monitors the commission and other state agency actions, told the Courier Post back in May of 2014. “Even if they got their eight votes (for commission approval) that plan has serious legal liabilities” and opponents would mount court challenges that could take a year or more to resolve, he said.

And yet.

This is one small issue, I realize. A small, treehugger-y specialty issue. But this is the way Chris Christie operates, his standard MO for getting what he wants, and he’s running for president of our country. It’s easy to shrug at something like that — at least he’ll get shit done—but it’s less easy when it’s something you love that he’s undermining to get shit done. It’s less easy when it’s the best natural resource your state has to offer, and you love your state.