New Jersey is a fascinating state, and New Jersey politics is a fascinating business. The state is Newark, Camden, Jersey City, and aging urban areas typical of the northeast. New Jersey is also the Pinelands preserve, a fragile environmental area the size of Rhode Island protected by the state from indiscriminate development. New Jersey is the expansive beaches of the Jersey shore, the rugged beauty of the Delaware River Water Gap, and comfortable patrician estates whose owners continue to devote weekends to fox-hunting. New Jersey is valuable farmlands which still make New Jersey the Garden State, and it is the Hackensack Meadowlands, the Sports Complex and Atlantic City as well. New Jersey is a diverse state, and its political life reflects both that diversity as well as the state's changing political traditions and developing political institutions.