Over the past several centuries we’ve managed as a society to cobble together a fairly effective land use ethic. Supported by a complex of laws and regulations, and supported by applied common sense and a lot of compromise, we have a system today that’s reasonably effective at balancing various, and sometimes competing, interests. As a result, we usually end up with farms, subdivisions, generating stations, strip malls, schools and factories all located in appropriate areas. In short, we’ve got our land use act together.

Unfortunately, we can’t say that about our use of the oceans. We have far too many conflicts, and far too often they are decided not on a best use basis, but rather by focused “political” pressure. While it might be somewhat of an oversimplification, this is in large part due to the complexity of both ocean issues and ocean ecosystems.

Compared to what’s going on in the average chunk of ocean, terrestrial ecosystems are quite easy to understand. Save for climate and weather effects, they’re confined to two dimensions, they’re easy to study, and air is a mostly uniform medium.

Not so the oceans. They are abundantly three dimensional, they are largely out of our convenient reach, and as anyone who has slogged through an introductory oceanography course can attest, the physical and chemical properties of ocean water can vary all over the landscape. While land use impacts tend to be concentrated locally, “upstream” in the ocean can be several continents away.

Confounding the issue even more, virtually all ocean uses are at this point land-based, and that generally means they are based on land that, because of other development pressures, is prime real estate. Today inflation of waterfront property values because of escalating residential demand is making it increasingly difficult for docks and marinas to remain in business in many areas. To their credit, New Jersey’s coastal communities have used various mechanisms to impede this.

The current boom in the residential development of Florida’s coastline is a glaring example of what can happen without adequate controls on development. Solid rows of high-rise beachfront condominiums are blocking increasing numbers of people from what used to be free and unfettered beach access. Large portions of Florida coastline are already or soon will be the exclusive domain of the “snowbirds” who migrate southward every year or those who have taken up year-round residence.

In Florida, as in most coastal areas, migration is the crux of the problem. Each year an increasing number of us move to – or near to – the coastline. While this is hardly news to many New Jersey residents, according to a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2004 (Crossett, Culliton, Wiley and Goodspeed (2004, Population Trends Along the Coastal United States: 1980-2008), “five of the 10 most populated watersheds are located from southern Virginia to New England. The Hudson River/Raritan Bay and Chesapeake Bay watersheds were the most populated overall, with over 13 million and 10 million people, respectively.” Compared to the general population, the number of people living in the coastal counties is increasing disproportionately.

This increasing population makes our coastal areas more reachable by more people every year, but, as is abundantly clear in Florida, every year more of that coastline is being made inaccessible to those same people through various forms of “privatization.” And the upstream development, habitat loss and environmental degradation sometimes have negative impacts on our inshore and coastal ecosystems as well. Unfortunate and unintended consequences of our mass move to the coasts could be red tides, sea nettles, and fewer fish and shellfish, exacerbating existing use/access conflicts. Unless we as a society adopt a far more comprehensive view of how we manage our coastal waters, the trend might easily be more and more people with less and less access to decreasing coastal resources.

At this point we have a complex of overlapping regulations determining what can and can’t be done in and to our coastal areas. Varying levels of control can be exerted by local, county, state, federal and sometimes international bodies, and the results can sometimes be less than optimal from the perspective of the public. Then there’s the problem of determining who “the public” is, and what its best interests are.

The issue of appropriate ocean use has received some significant attention in New Jersey over the last two years because of offshore energy development. Proposals for offshore “wind farms,” made up of networks of large wind-driven generators (think windmills, only really, really big) located off the New Jersey and Long Island coasts have been under review by a number of agencies as well as an expert panel (the Blue Ribbon Panel on Offshore Wind, whose interim report is available on the web at http://www.njwindpanel.org/, and whose final report should be out momentarily) convened by Acting Governor Codey.

The members of this expert panel attempted to balance to “costs and the benefits,” in both the monetary and non-monetary sense, of offshore wind development in New Jersey. They considered a host factors and attempting to maximize public input during their deliberations. The makeup of the panel and the way it operated might well serve as a model for similar efforts examining “conflicts” in other ocean uses.

In the last several years, the use of so-called marine protected areas has attracted significant public attention. Being supported by several of the larger environmental non-governmental organizations and the foundations that fund their programs, these MPAs, as they are called, would be large areas of ocean from which particular activities would be banned. These activities would usually involve the commercial and recreational harvest of fish and shellfish, with the “upstream” activities that have proven so detrimental to our coastal waters in particular instances being ignored.

Is anything wrong with protecting particular areas from fishing? Emphatically no. In fact, recreational and commercial fishermen have enthusiastically supported areas closed to fishing for generations. If a piece of ocean or bay bottom has characteristics that are unique and vital to particular species, either seasonally or permanently, then environmentally aware fishermen will support its protection. As a matter of fact, there are thousands of square miles of ocean off the mid-Atlantic states in which fishing is either restricted or prohibited, and many of the protected areas were established with the fullest cooperation of recreational and commercial fishermen and their organizations.

However, fishermen tend to oppose arbitrary proposals to “protect” large areas from fishing that ignore other, and potentially more harmful, factors. And many of the proposals for MPAs do exactly that, being written with the underlying assumptions that fishing – particularly where the fish are – is inherently bad, and the more it can be restricted, the better.

At this point issues such as marine protected areas are the basis of quite a bit of dialogue, but it’s dialogue between fisheries managers, fishermen and zealous environmentalists. The one group that is largely left out is the general public. Numbered in the hundreds of millions nationally, and with well over 13 million in New Jersey (assuming that 90% of the population enjoys a seafood meal on a somewhat regular basis, and that an equivalent proportion gets to the shore at least annually), this is the largest group of coastal/ocean stakeholders, and it is the one that is totally left out of the decision making process. The Blue Ribbon Panel on Offshore Wind convened by Governor Codey successfully brought some of these people into their process, and their resolve to do this should be emulated by other such bodies. We’re only going to have ocean policies reflecting the interests of all of the user groups if they are all brought into the process.