Wilderness from the Empire State Building

John McPhee may one day write a crappy book, but he hasn't done it yet.

This is a small section from  The Pine Barrens:

New Jersey has nearly a thousand people per square mile — the greatest population density of any state in the Union. In parts of northern New Jersey, there are as many as forty thousand people per square mile. In the central area of the Pine Barrens — the forest land that is still so undeveloped that it can be called wilderness — there are only fifteen people per square mile. This area, which includes about six hundred and fifty thousand acres, is nearly as large as Yosemite National Park. It is almost identical in size with Grand Canyon National Park, and it is much larger than Sequoia National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or, for that matter, most of the national parks in the United States. The people who live in the Pine Barrens are concentrated mainly in small forest towns, so the region’s uninhabited sections are quite large — twenty thousand acres here, thirty thousand acres there — and in one section of well over a hundred thousand acres there are only twenty-one people.

The Pine Barrens are so close to New York that on a very clear night a bright light in the pines would be visible from the Empire State Building. A line ruled on a map from Boston to Richmond goes straight through the middle of the Pine Barrens.

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