By: centraljersey.com
The weather outside was frightful, but the environment inside was more frightful.
Instead of sitting around a fireplace with mugs of hot cocoa, all the adults hanging around my house and the houses of my son and daughter were sitting in front of their computers, with televisions blaring in the background, cell phones at their ears, iPads or Kindles on their laps, and droplets of coffee and cheese doodle crumbs falling all over the e-quipment.
Even my 16-month-old grandson was running around the house while babbling incoherently (imitating the adult incoherent babble) on his fake phone.
I was inundated by a blizzard of beeps coming to my personal cell phone, my iPad, and my office iPhone alerting me to various event and meeting cancellations, plus I was pelted by the literally hundreds of spam emails inviting me to every business networking event and Webinar being produced around the globe.
Spammers love snow days, because they have time on their hands which land on the computer keyboard. Nothing was on television other than the weather where frozen reporters wrapped up like mummies said they were cold, that it was snowing, that it was snowing and cold, and saying it about 1,000 times an hour. All my family members felt very anxious – not about massive quantity of the ice and snow falling from the sky, but rather about the apocalyptic eventuality of having a power failure.
Having concluded that this snowbound state was unsustainable (I had just received the fifth invitation to a Webinar on using social networking to enhance your business goals), I came across some virtual sunshine, connected to a real person, Pam Mount.
An email sent from the Lawrence Township Council member and former Lawrence mayor Pam Mount expressed her enthusiasm for a proposal to someday get the Province Line Road Bridge officially re-classified as being suitable for bike/pedestrian traffic only, as it seems very unlikely that the existing structure will ever be rehabilitated for vehicular use.
Then, coincidently, a subsequent email arrived from my daughter telling me that my granddaughter had announced in her 4-year-old imperious (Evita-like) manner that next weekend was to be reserved for a visit to Terhune Orchards, the nearly 36-year-old business of Pam and Gary Mount. These Princeton High School graduates mustered their entrepreneurial skills to transform their 200-acre fruit and vegetable farm into a Disney Land of sustainability.
The farm – the first Lawrence Township farm to enroll in the state’s Farmland Preservation Program – features year-’round educational and entertainment events that are completely unplugged and dependent only on a passion and respect for humans, animals and the air and soil that sustains them.
Activities include hayrides; feeding the animals; picking the pumpkins, apples, flowers and berries (the favorite activity of my granddaughter, who picks berries by the technique of one-for-the-basket and one-for-the-picker’s-mouth); wine tasting of Terhune’s wine (a new venture for the Mounts); birthday parties; festivals; dancing; singing; wagon riding; donut dunking, and wassailing, which is toasting/singing to the health of the apple tress (a February event) and a satisfying mid-winter activity that has is a break from electronic gadgets.
Pam Mount’s entrepreneurial brilliance lies not only in the creation of this living monument to sustainability, but in the creation of the tools within the community and local government that are geared at transforming the way we live.
Pam’s connections to the mission of sustainability are seemingly unsustainable for people of normal energy levels, but Pam Mount operates with an unlimited supply of energy. We should harness it and sell it as an alternative fuel. She is chairman and founding member of Sustainable Lawrence; member and founding member of the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail Inc.; vice chair of the Mayors’ Committee for a Green Future of the New Jersey League of Municipalities; board member and former chair of the New Jersey Agricultural Society; chair of Farmers Against Hunger of the New Jersey Agricultural Society; member of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Clean Air Council, and board member of New Jersey Future.
Pam made a most significant contribution to New Jersey’s sustainability scene in February 2009 through her work for the Mayors’ Committee for a Green Future. The Mayors’ Committee was the inspiration behind the official launch of SustainableJersey, a certification program for municipalities that want to go green, save money, and take steps to sustain their quality of life over the long term.
Essentially, SustainableJersey provides municipalities with a tool kit and a road map to sustainability. In New Jersey, 67 communities are certified, including Lawrence Township, West Windsor Township, Montgomery Township, Hopewell Township, Hillborough Township, and Franklin Township. Some 325 communities are registered in the program and working towards certification, including Princeton Borough, Princeton Township, Plainsboro Township, Hopewell Borough, Pennington Borough, South Brunswick Township, and Rocky Hill Borough.
"This initiative in New Jersey has major ramifications for the future of the entire nation. Did you know that one-tenth of the entire population of this country lives within 75 miles of Princeton? We have to be the leaders and set the example for the nation," Pam Mount said.
And Pam is leading as though she were the Pied Piper for sustainability. Last winter, in the middle of a blizzard, when Pam Hersh was probably sitting at her computer deleting her spam, Pam Mount was hosting a conference at The Lawrenceville School that attracted about 200 people who refused to be thwarted by the weather. Frozen ground notwithstanding, the conference attendees planted the seed for Sustainable Lawrence that led the effort to make Lawrence a SustainableJersey-certified community.
"People and often governing officials assume that sustainability programs cost money," Pam said. "In fact, the opposite is true. It costs money not to be sustainable."

