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and industrial wastes accumulate, and where the specter of pollution 

 looms the largest. 



The coastal zone is where many of our commercial and sport fish 

 spend at least a part of their life cycles, and where our first halting- 

 steps toward niariculture are taking place. It is where our major 

 marine petroleum resources are found. It is the locus of our coastal 

 shipping and the terminus of our transoceanic shipping. 



It is where many of us want to live, or at least go for vacation. It is 

 where we can get cheap coolant water for our powerplants, and where 

 we can bulkhead and fill to make expensive real estate that can be sold 

 at a profit. 



It is also the location where many of our wetlands, marshes, man- 

 grove swamps, and coastal ecological niches are being singled out for- 

 the establishment of conservation areas. 



Our coastal zone is all of these things, and that is where the problem 

 lies. Each of these is a legitimate use of our coastal zone, but as the 

 activity in each of these use areas increases, it eventually reaches a 

 point where it is out and out in conflict with another use. We have 

 already reached this point in most of the populated portions of our 

 coastal zone. 



I might add parenthetically that again it is a problem of the inter- 

 relationship between man and the sea. It is a people problem. 



Garrett Hardin in his article on "The Tragedy of the Commons" 

 that appeared in Science last December — volume 162, pages 1243-1248, 

 December 13, 1968 — provided the sociological framework for this 

 problem. 



If I may be allowed to put his discussion in my own words, it runs 

 something like this: If a common pasture will support 100 head of 

 cattle, and each of 10 herdsmen has one cow each pastured there, 

 there is no problem. If each herdsman increases his own lierd to 10 

 cows, the commons is then supporting its 100 head, or all it can without 

 degrading the total resource. 



Then one of the herdsmen stops and thinks and decides that if he 

 adds one cow to his own herd of 10, the worth of his own holdings 

 will be increased by 10 percent, but his share of the costs resulting from 

 the degradation of the commons by adding only one cow over the 100 

 the commons can support is only 1 percent, so it is some 9 percent to 

 his advantage to add that one cow. Other herdsmen get the sam.e idea, 

 and cow after cow is added until the commons is totally destroyed. 



The same situation holds for our coastal zone. Take, for example,, 

 the use of our coastal zone for the disposal of industrial and municipal 

 wastes. So long as there are few people and few industries using the 

 coastal zone as a self-flushing disposal system, there is no real problem. 



Then the number increases. The cost for the individual plant to 

 process its waste before disposing of it harmlessly into the coastal 

 zone is many times more than that plant's share of the overall social 

 costs of the ensuing degradation of the receiving waters, which, of 

 course, is shared equally by all coastal zone users. 



Thus, our coastal zone, like Hardin's commons, is doomed, unless 

 some means is found to halt this relentless march toward destruction. 



The coastal zone authority concept proposed by the Commission on 

 Marine Science, Engineering, and Resources is one method of con- 

 trolling this otherwise destructive process. 



