For Immediate Release
Contact Jeff Tittel, 609-558-9100
Today the Christie Administration is making the 125th anniversary of the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife. New Jersey Sierra Club Director Jeff Tittel released the following statement:
“The New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife is celebrating their 125th year but their management has hardly changed since then. Within the DEP, the Division of Fish and Wildlife has been unfunded and unable to modernize. Instead of having their mission move forward with the time and dealing with issues like biodiversity, invasive species, and climate change, their primary mission is still hunting. They still manage lands to encourage higher deer populations despite the overpopulation. They’re more concerned with hunting rather than managing species and ecosystems. The world has changed in the past 125 years but the Division has not.
“The Christie Administration’s cuts to DEP funding has crippled the Division’s ability to do their job. Christie has gone after the DEP’s budget with a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ tactic. Before he came into office, DEP’s budget was close to $400 million and now it is $274 million. The NJDFW also can’t properly function or evolve without enough staff. Without staff, enforcement isn’t done either. Under Governor Christie, DEP staff is down by 40 percent and enforcement is down 60 percent, while our parks are falling apart. Without funding and staff, the Division has not been able to manage the wildlife or wild place of New Jersey in a way meant to conserve and protect them. Instead, we’ve seen the Christie Administration push to destroy wild places and ignore science for political science.
“In the funding they do have, the DEP has included land stewardship. It is defined as ‘an activity that goes beyond routine maintenance to restore and enhance lands for recreational and conservation purposes.’ These stewardship activities will actually be logging and other things that undermine the protection of natural resources in our parks. For example, the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife cut down trees to create grass habitat. We could be clear-cutting the Pinelands to create habitat for invasive species. They proposed clear-cutting in the Pinelands to create quail hunting habitat. All this has done is open the area up for deer and invasive species overpopulation.
“We’re seeing this come into play as the Division works alongside New Jersey Audubon to allow logging of the environmentally important Sparta Mountain. The DEP has been trying to de-list the site in order to move forward with their Forest Stewardship Plan that will turn the Mountain into a field for bird habitat. They are just using the Golden Warbler habitat as an excuse to clear-cut an environmentally sensitive forest in the Highlands. Under the Christie Administration these lands have been subject to abuse of so-called forest stewardship.
“Since being controlled by the Christie Administration, the Division’s Fish and Game Council is making dangerous and anti-environmental rules. Their regulation to allow leg-hold traps in New Jersey violates the law and legislative intent. We need to manage our lands in a holistic way and leghold traps are irresponsible and dangerous. The Fish and Game Council are supposed to be stewards of the land and leghold traps are not stewardship. Stewardship is an ethic that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources. It is not good stewardship of public lands if you have traps that can maim or hurt hikers or pets. It’s also not good conservation policy to over-trap species or hurt innocent or even Endangered Species.
“We call them the Division of Fish and Kill Wildlife since they’re more concerned with killing animals than protecting them. They keep increasing beer hunt numbers, times, dates and weapons to kill more bears. Instead of more hunting, we need a real management plan, one that includes strong education and uses warning signs in the region, education materials at trail heads, enforcing not feeding bears, and garbage management. Hunting bears is doing nothing to reduce these incidents and instead the state needs to put in place a real management plan with education. We know that increased education works better to decrease bear incidents than increased hunts, but the Division is too stuck in their ways and without enough funding from the Christie Administration to make it work.
“The job of the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife is to manage the wildlife in our state by balancing recreation and conservation protection. However, under the Christie Administration, the Division has had neither the funding nor the leadership to do this. Instead, they continuously sell out to polluters, developers, and hunters. We hope that under a new Governor, the Division can be restored. Then they can once again work to protect our wildlife, manage our wild places, and keep New Jersey green for generations to come.”