America's Abused Coastline

By John S. DeMott

A drive is launched to save an endangered natural treasure

Sweeping south from the chilly waters off Maine and Washington to the warm undergirth along the Gulf of Mexico, the shoreline of the U.S. runs for 53,677 miles--and that figure does not include the lengthy coasts of Alaska and Hawaii. But not all is sandy beaches, suntanned bodies, squawking gulls and imposing cliffs. Increasingly, the American coast is becoming a victim of its own magnetism: it attracts heedless development that is fouling its beauty, undermining its ecological importance, and crippling its ability to stand up to nature's winds and waves.

That is the message of the Coast Alliance, an amalgam of environmental organizations and fishing interests that aims to spare the shores from further abuse by man. The Alliance helped persuade President Carter to endorse 1980 as the Year of the Coast, as part of a program to increase awareness of the problems of the nation's abused shoreline.

During a so-called Coast Week last month, would-be saviors of the shores staged several events, among them a "surf festival" in Orange County, Calif., 4-H Club bicycle treks along the Great Lakes in Michigan and Wisconsin, and a sand castle-building contest between Alliance activists and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Bethany Beach, Del. The engineers' castle lasted longest, but all the entries, naturally, crumbled eventually --symbolic evidence of the folly of building on dunes and beaches. It was good fun, but it also helped draw attention to the overdevelopment, worsening pollution and mismanagement of resources, which are combining to foul the coasts.

All these perils are apparent to any shore-bound summer tourist. On Massachusetts' Cape Cod, four-wheel-drive vehicles have deeply rutted broad stretches of beach. On New York's Long Island and the New Jersey shore, vacation cottages overcrowd once pristine dunescapes. From those states southward, the Atlantic shore, with scattered exceptions, seems destined to become a stretch of boardwalk and pizza-parlor tackiness.

Near Fort Myers, Fla., a relatively new barrier island heaped up by the sea has attracted developers who want to link it to the mainland with a causeway; that, says Florida Environmental Consultant Dinesh Sharma, "would ruin the entire key." To the west in Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, landowners eyeing big profits from rich agricultural holdings support a plan that would fill in backwater swamps. Conservationists are fighting the idea, saying it would dry up an ecologically valuable resource.

Along the 7,863-mile Pacific littoral, where "coastline consciousness" is probably higher than anywhere else in the U.S., the Interior Department is planning to open 1.3 million acres on the outer continental shelf to oil exploration. This is sure to set the stage for another classic confrontation between the conflicting needs of safeguarding the environment and extracting vital natural resources. As with most environmental issues, the battle over the coast pits those who would exploit it further against those who would stop fiddling altogether with the littoral and its complex system of wetlands and estuaries. The need for growth, which brings jobs, profits and tax revenues, often argues powerfully for development.

For many of the save-the-coast people, a slender volume titled The Thin Edge, published in 1978 by Environmentalist Anne W. Simon, 66, is something of a bible. The book is an expansion of Simon's earlier No Island Is an Island, which dealt with the environmental ordeal of Martha's Vineyard, the island off Massachusetts on which she summers. In Edge, she writes: "In the last ten years, the coast's magnetic pull has become stronger than ever--more industry, more oil, more people, hotels, motels, boatels, more sewage, more waste. The coast is informing us that there is a saturation point beyond which its natural functions no longer flourish, often diminish, or simply cease."

The book adds little to what a well-informed conservationist may already know. But for the layman, it paints a disturbing picture. The issues, as Simon and the Coast Alliance see them:

WETLANDS. Those low, swampy areas along the East and Gulf coasts are better preserved than drained and built on. They absorb floodwaters and provide food for millions of minnows and shrimp, which in turn feed larger creatures. An acre of salt marsh in Georgia produces ten tons of dry organic matter every year, vs. just four tons for the most fertile hayfield. Nonetheless, 40% of the nation's wetlands have been destroyed by public and private development. Yet this attrition is slowing: as the natural benefits of wetlands become better understood, laws are being passed to protect them. Even the dam-building Corps of Engineers, which environmentalists blame for much reckless destruction of wetlands, now concedes that in some instances swamps control floods better than it can.

POLLUTION. Oil is the biggest offender, and not just in obvious ways like fouling beaches. Lobsters, for example, have a sweet tooth for the rich hydrocarbons they find in glops of oil off the New England coast. As oil spills and exploratory oil digs increase, some environmentalists fear that lobsters' migratory and mating patterns may be affected. Says Coast Alliance Executive Director Bill Painter: "There are thousands of little spills every year that experts think are a great danger to the environment. Those spills add up."

ACCESS. More than 90% of the U.S. coast (excluding Alaska) is privately owned, and some of the remainder is controlled by the military and is strictly off limits. Only about 5% is open to public recreational use, meaning that Americans have available to them just one acre of beach for every 1,450 citizens--roughly the population density of parts of Long Island's jam-packed Jones Beach on a hot summer Sunday. In some parts of the country, the squeeze is even tighter: in the South, there is only one acre of swimming beach for every 3,080 people. The need for open beaches is sure to rise: more than 50% of the population now lives in the counties clustered along the coasts, and some demographers expect that figure to reach 75% by the end of the decade.

SHIFTING SANDS. The environmentalists' ultimate antidevelopment argument, which even Corps of Engineers officials privately salute, is that nothing built by man can stand up permanently against the natural forces at work on the coasts. Beaches are always on the move, which is how they parry the mighty pounding of the ocean. Some barrier islands shift position entirely over the course of a century, while still protecting the mainland beyond by absorbing the force of the waves. Builders ignore this when they erect towns on the edge of the sea. So do those who construct groins intended to stop the movement of the shores. After Hurricane Allen ravaged barrier islands off Texas in August, developers pushed ahead with plans to construct 15 new condominiums and hotels on the southern end of Padre Island.

Making matters worse is the fact that when disaster strikes in the form of storms or floods, Government agencies and the National Flood Insurance Program help rebuild what will almost surely be destroyed again some day. There is some movement, though, to end such nonsense. Well along in Congress is a bill that would cut off Government subsidies for developing barrier islands off the coast. In addition, the 1972 Coastal Zone Management

Act supplies money to states to help them set up programs for their shorelines. So far, though, only 19 of the 35 coastal states and territories have drawn up federally approved plans, which specify what land and water uses will be permitted. Some states are taking stiffer action.

None of these belated governmental efforts really satisfies Environmentalist Simon. Says she: "The original initiative to rescue the shorelines has gotten all wound up in bureaucracy. Unless we quickly find a way to remove the coast as a source of profit, we're not going to have a functioning coast." Simon would like to see the U.S. emulate Sweden, which has protected thousands of miles of shore line for free public use. With so many vested interests, that may not be possible in the U.S. now. It may take the relent less pounding of the sea itself, which knows no constituency, to bring about reform.

Peter Staler and Philip Faflick/New York

With reporting by Peter Staler, Philip Faflick/New York

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