July 4, 1993

It was high noon last Saturday and weekend drivers who only hours before had jammed the New Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Parkway were hopping out of cars and into boats. "They operate their vessels the way they drive their cars, only with less knowledge and skill," said Michael Yannuzzi, the New Jersey Marine Police officer at the helm of a 40-foot patrol boat cutting slowly along the Manasquan River near Point Pleasant.

HIKERS, walkers, joggers, horses and riders, naturalists and bicyclists are fighting for their shares of the thousands of acres of nature trails that wind through public and private lands in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Groups like the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference and the Nature Conservancy have long fought to keep such lands free from commercial development, promoting the use of nature trails through them to increase residents' stake in preserving the environment.

AN enormous pile of dirt alongside Route 34 near Grassy Hill Road in Orange is patiently being scraped from the cornfields of Field View Farm by a large yellow bulldozer. That mound symbolizes just how difficult the business climate is these days; Walter Hine has made a decision to sell the soil off his farm, the very earth his family has cleared, encircled and cultivated for the past 354 years. The farm is considered to be among the the oldest continuous farming businesses in the United States. In the mid-1600's, the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam had a derogatory name for the Connecticut dairy farmers who brought products into the big city for sale. "Johnny-cheese," they called him, "Jan-kees." Thomas Hine was one of the original Yankees, having been given a good deal on the land in 1639 by Indians in return for his support in a tribal war.

High-tech and research companies are transforming a neglected industrial area on the southern shores of a 6,718-acre lake a mile north of the downtown into a desirable workplace. One of them, the fast-growing ZymoGenetics, planning to expand its biomedical research, is spending $25 million to restore the landmark Lake Union Steam Plant, Seattle City Light's first powerhouse, which produced electricity until 1983.

When the Rev. Ernane Baptista de Lima moved to this working-class Rio de Janeiro suburb in 1966, the Protestant pioneer worried about finding a hall for his 40 worshipers in Santo Antonio, a district named for a Roman Catholic saint and dominated by a hilltop Catholic church. Today, Pastor Lima's sermons echo electronically through his three-story Assembly of God, the largest church in town. With his flock approaching 1,000, the pastor once again frets about keeping all his parishioners under one roof.