CARLSTADT, N.J. - For generations, people traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard have known where to expect the dirtiest, ugliest, most stench-filled stretch of their trips - here in the Meadowlands of northern New Jersy.

Since European settlement of this region three centuries ago, New Yorkers and New Jerseyites have been dumping things they don't want in these soft marshes, creating a mess of almost incomprehensible proportions. For several decades, large swaths of the area were on fire.

But largely unnoticed in recent years, the Meadowlands have begun to come back, and, in a backhanded compliment to their progress, they are now the focus of a fierce battle over whether to bend federal wetlands policy to allow new development, including construction of a huge new mall.

The battle is becoming a flashpoint for one of the big environmental questions of the era: Should the nation permit some development of damaged natural areas, like many of those in the Meadowlands, in return for agreements to save others, or should it insist that all land covered by environmental laws be strictly protected? The answer is of burning interest both to landowners and to environmental activists, and could influence projects from Massachusetts to California.

Model or disaster?

"The Clinton administration touts the Meadowlands as a national model for how to strike a balance between the environment and property rights. But if the development plan that allows the mall goes through, it would be a national disaster," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the namesake son of the assassinated New York senator and the chief attorney for the National Alliance of River, Sound and Baykeepers, the group that is spearheading opposition to further Meadowlands development.

"We're told we have all the makings of a tremendous lawsuit if the decision is not in our favor," said Victoria L. Jenkins, an executive with Mills Corp., an Arlington, Va.-based developer that is awaiting federal permits to begin work on a $1 billion mall called Meadowlands Mills. The company wants to build a similar mall in South Weymouth on the South Shore.

"If we can't balance the envionment and development interests in the Meadowlands ... it will be a major setback for preservation efforts across the country," warned Bradley M. Campbell, deputy director of the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House agency that entered the fight earlier this year to try to broker a compromise.

To some, the idea that the Meadowlands is attracting so much attention seems odd. After all, this is a place that was allowed to collect more hazardous-waste sites (three on the high-risk Superfund list), more landfills (27, or about one every square mile) and more serious pollution over the years than almost any similar-sized tract in the nation. To others, the notion that all the hubbub is over a shopping mall is downright laughable.

"Let's face it, we're not talking about virgin land in the middle of Kansas," said Chip Hallock, president of the Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey, a business trade group. "This is the shopping mall capital of the country."

Perhaps. But at least a few people have begun to dream about a very different future for the Meadowlands and have been encouraged by recent changes in the land. For between the area's parking lots, amid its spaghetti of highway interchanges, alongside its strangely squared-off hills of garbage, herons and egrets have returned, the spartina grass has started to grow again, and the marshes have begun to mend.

"If nothing else, the Meadowlands is a testament to nature's resilience against long odds," said John R. Quinn, a local naturalist and author.

Vantage points

For those driving south out of New England on Interstate 95 across the George Washington Bridge today, the Meadowlands still come as a giant anticlimax, a flat industrial landscape that lets travelers know they have made it past New York but gives them almost no clue about where they have made it to. "A place that people rush past on their way to the rest of America," according to Robert Sullivan, whose recent book, "The Meadowlands," has attracted attention to the terrain.

Biologists consider the area, together with Newark Bay, to be one of the East Coast's great tidal estuaries, as important as the Hudson River and New York harbor. But that's not how the Meadowlands look from behind the wheel on the Jersey Turnpike.

From that vantage point, all that is apparent is a desolate expanse, one that has often been home to strange and not always pleasant occurrences.

In July, when New York heiress Irene Silverman disappeared from her Manhattan townhouse, police were told the prime suspects had been seen driving into the deep reeds of the Meadowlands in Carlstadt. A search failed to produce a body, but did turn up a bag full of fake Social Security cards. Three years ago, officials had to evacuate hundreds of guests from a Meadowlands Days Inn when an industrial yard next door blew up.

But if events like these have convinced turnpike travelers that the Meadowlands are an urban desert best left quickly, they have not had a similar effect on the streets of Kearny, Secaucus and Moonachie. Here, some residents behave as if they live at the very edge of a wilderness.

Quinn, the naturalist, has canoed the Meadowlands for decades and has published a book about the area called "Fields of Sun and Grass." "Not everybody has had the experience of camping in the nocturnal glow of Giant Stadium," he said.

Anthony Just, the mayor of Secaucus, takes off occasional afternoons to go out to Snake Hill, the blasted and graffiti-covered outcropping that is the Meadowlands' tallest, and just about its only, rise. "It's a beautiful sight," he said of the view. "You can see the river bend around to Jersey City."

Don Smith, a naturalist with the state commission established in the 1960s to clean up and develop the Meadowlands, and Bill Sheehan, an environmental activist who works as a taxi dispatcher in Union City, run rival boat tours along the Hackensack River, which runs through the marshes. As school children gape at the passing shoreline, they expound their drastically different views of how to protect the area, views now on a collision course over the Meadowlands Mills project.

Large scale

For most of their history, the Meadowlands have had built-in protection against overdevelopment. People couldn't figure out how to build on the area's soggy soil. But with construction advances, the land that once seemed useless has suddenly become attractive to developers such as Mills Corp.

Almost everything about Meadowlands Mills would be gigantic. It would be the largest shopping mall in New Jersey. Together with an adjacent office center and 1,000-room hotel, it would include more than 5 million square feet of space. It would have parking for 17,000 cars.

The environmental aspects of the project are equally massive. It would require filling 206 acres of the Meadowlands' already diminished marshes, an amount federal officials say would be one of the largest fills since the 1972 passage of the Clean Water Act, the law that protects wetlands from filling and dumping.

In itself, the proposed fill's size - about one-third of the full 600 acres slated for the project - is not the principal reason it is controversial. The company and its experts argue that the area was so mistreated in the past - cut off from the Hackensack River by the turnpike, filled up with trash and overrun by phragmites, a sort of monster crabgrass that can grow to 15 feet - that it barely functions as a wetlands anymore, and virtually everybody involved in the mall battle agrees.

But the company goes one step further. It says that the area can never recover on its own, but can only come back with human help. And it makes this offer: If Mills is allowed to fill and build its mall, it will spend up to $25 million repairing an adjacent 300 acres of similarly damaged land.

The offer has driven a huge wedge between environmental groups, between federal agencies, and, as if they weren't already at odds, between Smith and Sheehan.

Friction within

Spend time with either man and it becomes clear they don't like each other. But more is at work than a simple personality clash. The pair represents the poles of compromise and confrontation that are at center of the Mills controversy and have tugged at the environmental movement from its inception.

At another time, Smith and Sheehan's disagreement might not have attracted much attention. But today wetlands are a hot topic. In February, President Clinton made them the centerpiece of his new environmental initiative with a promise to add 100,000 acres a year to the nation's stock.

Smith and the state agency for which he works, the Hackensack Meadowsland Development Commission, believe the only way to protect wetlands is to cut deals like the one Mills is offering. In fact, they have spent more than a decade trying to sell environmentalists, developers and government officials on a similar development-for-environmental protection deal that would cover the entire Meadowlands.

Trudging across the marshes on a recent afternoon, the commission's senior naturalist summed up his agency's view of the region this way: "We broke it; we've got to fix it. This is not a pristine area. There are a lot of things that are not going to get better and go away."

Sheehan concedes compromises may have been necessary when the commission started its cleanup in the late 1960s. But he argues that with development having claimed almost two-thirds of the Meadowlands' 23,000 acres, the time for deal-making is done.

With the help of Kennedy's group, which recently named him a kind of chief advocate for the Hackensack Meadows, Sheehan has lined up impressive opposition to both the Mills project and the Meadowlands-wide plan. In an unusual move, leadeers of virtually every major environmental group in the country wrote the White House in February saying that in return for their politically crucial support of the president's environmental initiative, they want Clinton to fight the project and the plan.

Sheehan's idea of how to resolve the dispute is simple: Mills should build the project elsewhere, either on an irreparably damaged tract in the Meadowlands or in a nearby city like Newark.

On a recent tour of the Meadowlands that featured egrets lifting off a marsh pond, but also garbage oozing from a riverbank and the steady hiss of traffic on the New Jersy Turnpike, he was asked: Do you really think this is beautiful?

"Being a native of this area and being of limited means," he explained, "the Meadowlands are my Everglades, the Hackensack is my Mississippi."

Bobbing in his boat along the banks of the flat, featureless site one day recently, he expressed confidence that, with time, the area will again become a rich green marsh. "The river will decide what it wants that area to be," he said. "Whatever it decides, whenever it decides it, that's good enough for me."

But a new threat appears to be bearing down on Sheehan and on the environmental movement generally, one that could make it much harder to fight projects like the Mills proposal.

New legal landscape

The threat is a string of Supreme Court cases that have expanded the notion of "takings," the constitutional prohibition against the government taking a person's property without "just compensation."

Until recently, a government agency could generally limit an owner's use of his land through zoning or other rules without violating that prohibition. However, beginning in the late 1980s, property owners and conservative legal groups succeeded in convincing the high court that a broad array of government actions that were not considered violations in the past are in fact takings.

If the trend continues, officials worry that the government could end up having to pay property owners to impose almost any restriction, something that it is unlikely to do in budget-balancing times such as these.

White House officials and regulators are scambling to avoid that outcome by devising news ways to strike compromises with landowners with property in environmentally sensitive areas like wetlands. And they think that they have found the model for such deals in, of all places, the Meadowlands commission's development-for-environment plan.

Under the plan, some owners, such as those who own the Mills site, would be allowed to develop part of their property in return for pledging to keep the rest natural. Others would be prohibited from developing at all, but would be compensated by payments from those who could develop.

"If we can reach a reasonable compromise [over the commission's plan] we will have shown that this type of comprehensive planning can be used to protect the environment across the country," said Campbell, the White House environmental aide.

Without a compromise, officials fear that Mills will file a lawsuit that could result in the Supreme Court expanding its notion of takings even further.

Pub Date: 9/27/98