PART I. INTRODUCTION 



This place without all question is the most pleasant and 

 healthful place in all this country and most convenient for 

 habitation * * * 



It aboundeth with all manner of fish. The Indians in one 

 night will catch thirty sturgeons in a place where the river is 

 not above twelve fathoms broad. And as for deer, buffaloes, 

 bears, turkeys, the woods do swarm with them, and the soil is 

 exceedingly fertile. From the Journal of Gayt. Henry Fleete^ 

 the first tohite mem to sail the Potomac Biver, Washington, 

 D.O., 1632. 



Man has had a long and intimate association with the sea. It has 

 borne his commerce and brought food to his nets ; its tides and storms 

 have shaped the coast where his great cities have grown ; the broad 

 estuaries have provided safe harbors for his ships ; and the rhythm of 

 its tides has taught him the mathematics and science with which he 

 now reaches for the stars. 



Throughout recorded history the sea and its estuaries have been used 

 as a limitless resource ; now, however, the impact of man on his environ- 

 ment has taxed the resources of many estuarine zones to the limit of 

 endurance and reached into the depths of the ocean itself. 



For 300 years the estuarine zones of this continent have provided the 

 harbors through which a growing Nation's commerce moved and 

 around which great centers of population and industry developed. The 

 fisheries of the estuaries and neighboring oceans yielded a variety of 

 staple and exotic foods to feed the burgeoning population, while the 

 adjacent farmlands benefited from equitable temperatures and seepage 

 of water throughout the estuarine zones. 



These 300 years of unrestrained exploitation have seen the 

 world of the estuarine zone evolve into three distinct but interacting 

 environments. 



There is first the natural ecosystem, a dynamic 'biophysical environ- 

 ment of land, water, and life, which follows a steady evolutionary pat; 

 tern of its own, except when man has changed it. Its elements taken 

 together comprise the total ecology of the estuary. 



The second is the socioeconomic environment, the user's world, a 

 system of social and economic pressures directed toward exploita- 

 tion of the natural environment, either by ignoring what happens 

 to it, modifying it deliberately, or using it in its natural state. 



Third, there is the institutional environment. This is the realm of 

 law, a system composed of those devices man has created in the form 

 of law and organization to regulate his activities. 



Increasing use and misuse of the Nation's estuaries have created 

 and intensified many problems. Once productive shellfisheries have 

 been completely smothered by sedimentation or closed by pollution; 

 once deep and beautiful harbors are silted up and unnavigable, except 



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