The biggest issue in southern New England is urban sprawl, caused by the region’s increasing population coupled with a lack of developable space. The home-rule governments in much of New England routinely squelch any larger regional planning initiatives, along with so-called “smart growth” plans that would cluster population around town centers and public transit. As a result, much of the area around Boston is hampered by a lack of affordable housing and an encroachment on open space that has caused tensions between developers and conservationists. (That may slowly change, however, as Massachusetts has finally pushed through the first major reforms to its zoning laws in 30 years, requiring every town to have a master plan to manage growth.)

At the same time, species that were once seen only in the deep woods have been increasingly spotted in the suburbs, where foxes, coyotes, fishers and other animals have posed a threat to family pets. In northern New England, its not urban sprawl but tourist development that has threatened the wide tracts of open space. With the decline of the timber industry, which generally had a good relationship with outdoorsmen and environmentalists, residents of Maine and New Hampshire have looked for new sources of income from the tourist trade, and struck uneasy bargains to preserve some tracts of land while developing others for roads and resorts.

New England’s regulatory economy has ensured that much of the area enjoys clean air and water, even as efforts have been made to clean up the pollution of the mills and factories that boosted the economy in the 20th century. Isolated chemical factories and power plants continue to cause problems in some specific areas. One of the country’s first nuclear power plants was commissioned at Seabrook in coastal New Hampshire, which became the site of a protest in the late 1970s that sparked the national movement against nuclear power. Despite that protest and periodic rumblings by environmentalists, Seabrook is still an operating power plant and a tourist destination to boot.

One of the most contentious ongoing issues in the region is controversy over how to effectively manage the coastal stock of fish and shellfish. Rampant overfishing decimated the stock of cod, flounder, and other groundfish species by the mid-1980s. At that point, the federal government seized the entire region’s fisheries and began a desperate bid to restore populations using quotas and periodic bans. While the effort has been successful at restoring some species, such as haddock and bluefish, others still languish at severely reduced levels—with cod even less plentiful than in the 1980s. And along with the fish stocks, many fishermen have languished as well. Tensions between fishermen and regulators have led to angry protests and outright flouting of quotas, as well as disputes over the numbers used by scientists and environmentalists to justify them. At this point, the two sides are cooperating in an uneasy peace. And while New England’s fishing community is nowhere near as vibrant as it once was, it has nevertheless managed to survive.