In 1978, the U.S. Congress established the Pinelands National Reserve on a million-acre landscape of New Jersey woodlands, farms, marshes, suburbs, towns, rivers, and bays. The reserve was to protect not only the region's great natural beauty and scientific value, but also the cultural life of its people, which is largely undocumented. In 1983, the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress inaugurated the Pinelands Folklife Project, a field survey that documented on audio tape and film hundreds of residents of the area, capturing images of their lives in songs, stories, recipes, poems, crafts, festivals, recreation, tools, and technologies. Like natural resources, such expressions warrant consideration from planners, but their intangible aspects pose a special challenge. This document refutes the popular image of the region as a wilderness sparsely populated with quaint, backwoods people, presenting instead a place rich in cultural and environmental diversity and describing how residents convey their sense of place through myriad cultural expressions, which planners can factor into their land-use decisions. The concluding chapter on cultural conservation makes specific recommendations for protecting the region's cultural heritage. Dozens of illustrations, including black and white photographs, line drawings, and charts and maps from the Pinelands Folklife Project Archive complement the description and analysis. Appendices provide information on the logistics of the survey and a checklist for development review for municipal planning boards. (JB)