Fatal Attraction

The United States needs a strong, comprehensive ocean and coastal protection program because, in effect, Americans are loving their coast to death. In testimony to a Senate committee, Deputy Administrator A. James Barnes of the Environmental Protection Agency said: “In our desire to be close to the water we are slowly destroying some of the marvelous habitats and living resources that make it valuable to us.”

By 1990 an estimated 75% of all Americans will be living within 50 miles of a coastline, including the Great Lakes. In a recent year nearly a third of the nation’s productive shellfish waters were restricted or closed to harvesting because of contamination. Beach areas have been shut down because of health hazards. Wetlands are being destroyed by development. Marshes are being dredged, drained and filled. Some waters are succumbing to the same sort of oxygen starvation that recently has decimated marine life in the North Sea.

The losses are not just ecological. The degradation of coastal areas threatens economic losses to the fishing, recreation and tourist industries. Barnes added: “And there are yet other impacts-- unquantifiable perhaps, but equally as important--such as the loss of singular aesthetic experiences and the thoughtless destruction of unique and irreplaceable habitats and the species that inhabit them.”

Barnes’ eloquent comments highlighted inconsistencies within the Reagan Administation’s attitude toward the coast. Secretary of the Interior Donald P. Hodel repeatedly has scoffed at Californians’ concerns about the aesthetics and visual pollution of offshore oil platforms. The Interior Department has glossed over possible damage to the tourist industry by oil activities. And only Thursday it was revealed that Interior officials had intervened to tone down grave concerns expressed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over proposed drilling off the Northern California coast.

Over at the Commerce Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has dragged its heels in establishing a marine sanctuary program as directed by Congress in 1972. Much of the delay has occurred over the question of whether oil drilling should be allowed in some sanctuaries. NOAA officials dropped their earlier proposal to make Monterey Bay a sanctuary because, they said, it did not offer anything that could not be found in two existing sanctuaries around the Channel Islands and the Farallones.

In his Senate testimony Barnes said that critical coastal land-use decisions have to be made by state and local government and not by Washington. But the Interior Department, allied with the oil industry, has challenged the authority of state agencies and local governments to put conditions on oil activities that affect their shorelines.

A new Santa Monica-based organization called the American Oceans Campaign is at work drafting a proposed national oceans and coastal waters protection policy. Congress should give this and other ideas serious consideration, if for no other reason than as a means for the reconciling of development-protection differences within the federal establishment.