I am a native of New Jersey. I grew up in a small, comfortable suburb with tree-shaded streets, an integrated and top-quality school system, and a train line that let my teenage friends and me get out and about a little, including into New York City, with a minimum of chauffeuring from our parents (though I’m sure they don’t remember it as minimal). No, I don’t know what exit off the Parkway (although we were pretty nearby exit 10 from Route 280).

I became aware of the jokes about New Jersey sometime in high school, perhaps when WFMU played John Gorka’s “I’m from New Jersey” one sleepy Saturday afternoon. "Why does New Jersey have all the toxic waste dumps and California have all the lawyers?" we asked, and we told the joke with a bizarre sort of pride. I was thoroughly up for being from the underdog state—I also played viola, was a lefty, and actually enjoyed some of the books assigned in English class (though I hated the class discussions). I was used to defending things it was popular to make fun of.

But I didn’t really develop the massive chip on my shoulder about my state until I went to college in Ohio and began to meet people who didn’t assume west meant away from New York City, who didn’t know that asking “Which exit?” wasn’t original, and who, if they had been in New Jersey at all, had only been driving through on their way somewhere else.

There are generally three kinds of people who make rude comments about New Jersey in a Jerseyan’s hearing. The first is people from New York City. These we ignore, except for the occasional retort about how much of our air pollution blows over from them. After all, New Yorkers are so provincial they mostly make fun of New Jersey because it’s just close enough by that they have to consider it the real world—they can see it across the river and all, and probably know somebody who moved there.

The second kind is people who’ve never been there at all and imagine it as one big parking lot. “Do you have trees in New Jersey?” one fellow college student from Oregon asked me once. (No really, he did!) “Do you have indoor plumbing in Oregon?” I replied.

But mostly I take some time with this second category. Have they heard of the Kittatinny mountains? Have they been to the Pinelands that cover the largest unspoiled freshwater aquifer on the East Coast, where you can walk for hours on dirt roads and run into neither person nor vehicle, and see species that live nowhere else? Have they picked apples at a farm in central Jersey, seen migrating waterfowl landing in Brigantine marsh, or canoed down the Delaware river? Did they know the World Series of Birding is held in New Jersey? If not, they don’t really know New Jersey, I tell them.

Yes, we have our problems with ugly sprawling subdivisions, strip malls, and highways. And we may have had them first, but show me a state that hasn’t followed in our footsteps. You only have authority to make fun of something if you haven’t chosen to follow suit.

The joke about the waste dumps and the lawyers is clearly not true: New Jersey has its fair share of lawyers. But it is true that we also have that strip of land along the northern edge of the Turnpike, filled with oil refineries, pharmaceutical plants, and truck depots that everyone drives through and that gives the rest of the state its bad name. There are waste sites full of dioxin and radium. And the question of the joke echoes—why does New Jersey have all these things?

The full answer is tangled up in accidents of history and the qualities of ports. But a more simple answer is that they are there because they are fulfilling the rest of the country’s demands. And it’s people who know this but want to ignore it who are the third, and worst, kind of anti–New Jerseyans.

My partner moved back to New Jersey with me after college. When we visited her extended network of family and friends in upstate New York and she told them where she was living now, the most common response was “Why?” and occasionally “I’m sorry.” I felt like Hades who had captured Persephone and taken her away to live somewhere awful and dreary—only we were there all year round.

Many of them just didn’t know better, but there is often something more sinister behind comments like that, especially when they come from people with choices who have chosen to live a rural lifestyle, close to nature, breathing clean air, communing with the non-human world. That is a fabulous choice, and one I find very appealing. But these same folks inevitably trip over the line between enjoying the purity of their surroundings and feeling righteous about it, as if choosing to live in pristine surroundings were a way to support the wilderness, a blow for mother nature against the dirty impurity of urban life . . . or New Jersey’s desolate factory wastelands.

At this point in the conversation I’m always tempted to look out the window to the driveway or the parking lot for the SUV that I know I will find there. Or to wonder out loud how many things they own would have a “Made in New Jersey” stamp on it if we did such things or how much extra diesel fuel it took to get our products all the way out to their local stores. The pharmaceuticals and chemicals that we research and manufacture are not feeding New Jersey appetites alone. They are keeping everyone’s kids healthy, cleaning everyone’s toilets, freshening everyone’s closets. Not to mention that if everyone left densely-settled New Jersey for the country, there would be far less country left.

Now, having an SUV in the country is not necessarily worse than having an SUV in the city. (Of course that’s not saying much.) But if you are going to live in the country without giving up any of the comforts (or excesses, as the case may be) of the consumerist age, then someone else is going pay the price of refining that oil, running those factories, dispatching those trucks. If we all lived more sustainably, and took the responsibility for what we consumed into our own backyards, New Jersey wouldn’t have to pay for the whole coast’s sins.

In the meantime, the least we could get is a sheepish thank you.