“A cornerstone of the policy is regional ocean planning – a bottom-up process to address the many competing uses of our ocean. For beachgoers, this provides a unique opportunity to protect special coastal places by steering new potential development, such as wind farms or aquaculture, to less sensitive areas.”
This concept, from the article “Americans Love Our Beaches, But Who Will Protect Them?” really struck me as compelling and thought-provoking. It’s something that seems so understated — there’s a lot that goes into beach and coastal planning that we often take for granted.
This article also made me aware of legislation regarding coastal protection. For example, the BEACH Act of 2000 was put into law to help states pay for water monitoring and public health considerations for beaches across the United States, to the tune of $10 million per year. Since I am entering a graduate program in public health in the fall, learning this was particularly interesting 🙂 I was disappointed to see, however, that this funding is being jeopardized by the same political interests that I’ve talked so much about in other posts.
I was also excited to see in this article that the authors recommendation/discussion of mimicking natural processes when undertaking an effort to protect the coast. I learned so much about strategies to protect coasts this week that I never really thought about but had always seen during trips to the beach. Coastal engineering seems like such a great, rewarding area to work and I am definitely interested in learning more about innovations and emerging strategies to improve coastal well-being both for the coastal systems and for the well-being of people living in coastal areas.
Ultimately, this article made me think about human interaction with coastal processes and how important it is that, while we enjoy the coasts to their fullest potential, we have a responsibility to ensure that our use is as sustainable as possible and to mitigate the negative effects of our actions. This includes the indirect effects, such as the erosive consequences of stronger and more frequent storms related to climate change.
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