He helped save the Pine Barrens in 1968. Now his help will never end.

Long before John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens was published, New Jersey’s vast, dreamlike swath of sand and scrubby pines was seen as a wasteland by the unfamiliar, a place full of pirate lore, monsters, and recluses.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Princeton native is credited for first painting the Pinelands as a place worth preserving with his 1968 creative nonfiction book, however, inspiring both everyday readers to canoe its tea-colored waters and elected officials to save it. Today, the Pinelands National Preserve covers about 1.1 million acres, the largest body of open space on the East Coast between Boston and Richmond, a biological island of sorts, filled with unique flora and fauna.

McPhee, who is 94, was always modest about his book’s impact, telling the Philadelphia Daily News in 2013 that he “didn’t go there on a mission.”

“I went to find interesting people in interesting places and tell some stories,” he said at the time.

This week, the nonprofit Pinelands Preservation Alliance announced that McPhee’s book will continue helping the landscape, long after he’s gone. McPhee, the alliance wrote on Instagram, is “donating all current and future royalties from all versions and editions of his book” to the organization.

“I was born in New Jersey, grew up in New Jersey, was educated in three public schools and a university in New Jersey, and had never heard of the Pine Barrens before 1966, when I first went down there at the age of 35 to see what they were,” McPhee told the alliance in announcing the gift. “They were a state treasure. They were vast, vulnerable, and a cache of lore and legend, not to mention sui generis characters.”

At the time McPhee’s book was written, the Pine Barrens were being scouted as the location for a major airport, where a bustling city would rise up between Philly and New York. The airport would have been the largest in the nation, but after then-governor Brendan T. Byrne read McPhee’s book, the scales tipped in favor of preservation.

A state forest in the Pine Barrens was named after Byrne.

The Pinelands Preservation Alliance was founded in 1989 with a mission to preserve and protect the ecosystem there through public awareness.

“We are amazed by the generosity and appreciate John’s care for this very special place,” the Alliance wrote.

McPhee, who’s been nominated for the New Jersey Hall of Fame, has long been a fan.

“Months ago, when I was 92, I thought the least I should do was turn over to the Alliance all current and future royalties from the book I published in 1968,” McPhee wrote.

The Pine Barrens is available in the Pinelands Preservation Alliance gift shop in Southampton, Burlington County, and everywhere else books are sold.

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