Think Like a Seashore, Ever Changing : The real limitation to our ability to manage our environment well is our view of nature as rigid and permanent.

In the 1990s, our coastal environment will come under more and more pressures: more people using beaches for recreation; more sewage outflows as the California population increases; more pressures to harvest fish, to drill for offshore oil; less habitat for endangered marine mammals and breeding grounds for shellfish. How can we wisely use these resources under such growing pressures?

We tend to believe that our ability to solve environmental problems is limited by facts--how many tons of pollutants flow from sewage pipes to the coast? How many sea otters remain? But the real limitation to our ability to manage our environment well, even when we want to, is our deep-seated beliefs about nature.

Anyone who goes to the beach in California is aware of changes: a wave crashing against the shore; sets of waves following one another; twice daily changes of tides; unpredictable fogs; days of high winds and days of calm. These changes are ancient. Watching the waves on a sea beach, we share in this ancient relationship. The changes themselves take on a kind of permanence.

But when we are asked to devise a plan to use and conserve--to manage--our coastal resources, we tend to lose this duality of change and permanence. We forget what we see at the beach and fall back on the ancient myth of the permanence of all nature. We set our environmental goals as if the ocean and the fish and the sands existed in the past without change; as if in the future we could force them into a single, permanent condition, like that on the post-card picture we buy on the pier.

The policies that underlie fish harvests assume that, without harvests, the populations of fish will reach some single, permanent carrying capacity, that we can harvest fish at a constant, sustainable rate. Policies that determine how we manage the sea otter and the porpoise--endangered species--make the same assumption. Undisturbed, those species are supposed to attain a nature-knows-best single abundance, best for them and best for us. Changes in these populations, we believe, are only the result of some undesirable and unwanted human act. If change is the enemy, we must be the culprit. This approach to environment is based on a misunderstanding of how nature works, and it leads to rigid and unrealistic policies that are dangerous to the living things we attempt to conserve.

In engineering, we have learned the dangers of rigidity and the value of flexibility. Ever look out at the wings of a wide-bodied airplane? They move up and down, sometimes in scary fashion. But safety lies in that flexibility. A rigid wing would remain straight until it broke--and break it would. The San Francisco buildings that best survived last October’s earthquake were those set on pilings of steel and rubber: They flexed and moved with the quake.

Since the 1960s, when environment became a popular word, we have reacted strongly to the negative effects our modern technological society has had on our surroundings. Rightly so. But we have tended to react rigidly to threats to the environment. Seeing that changes we have wrought have led to disasters, we have tended to reject all environmental change as bad, forgetting the simple lesson that the sea and the shore tell us. An environmental policy based on the belief that nature must be in a fixed condition will, like a rigid airplane wing, snap and break.

To suggest that change might be OK is frightening to many people. It seems to open a Pandora’s box of misuse of the environment. If we admit that some changes are necessary--even good--how can we prevent any changes? By admitting that change can be natural, we can look at the environment and ask what are natural rates and natural kinds of change. Nature can then provide rules that are hidden from us as long as we believe that all change is wrong.

Management of the environment that leads to changes at natural rates and in natural ways is likely to be benign. Management that leads to unnatural rates--too fast or too slow--or unnatural kinds of changes--additions of many new kinds of chemicals into the coastal waters, for example--is likely to have undesirable effects. If we are going to use our coastal resources wisely, we must pace that use so that the changes are natural.

If pressures for offshore oil drilling continue, we must make sure that the amount of drilling leads to changes in the near-shore waters that are natural in rates, and that these activities keep the introduction of novel chemicals to a minimum. With this approach, we can begin to seek a rate of exploitation that is suitable to biological conservation and useful to our economy.

We have caused marine mammals to become endangered by forcing their numbers to change too quickly, by hunting them at too fast a rate, by altering too many of their habitats too fast. The first step in correcting that mistake is to allow recovery of their numbers and their habitats. The next step is to allow these numbers to vary within natural limits and at natural rates. The way to conserve our coastal resources--to use them wisely and keep them for future generations--is to think like a seashore, and find permanence in change.