Nation: America's Abused Coastline

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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.