only in a crisis. Man's increased power to exploit the environment, and 

 to destroy it, has brought an end to the era in which societal decisions 

 could be based on a frontier philosophy. We no longer deal with un- 

 limited resources of energy and materials. The shoreline is not unlimited. 

 Species can be made extinct by over-zealous exploitation. Once we could 

 fire a pistol that sent the settlers rushing to fill the vacant lands. Today, 

 the ocean frontage is overcrowded, the pioneers have no new lands to 

 conquer, but we still make decisions as though they did. 



The established procedures for determining social actions do not re- 

 fiect the new realities; and the deficiencies can often be traced to a 

 failure to use available knowledge. The system should therefore address the 

 need to keep information about the realities of our environment ever before 

 the decision makers, be they legislators, city managers, governmental execu- 

 tives and, ultimately, our citizens. The system should also guarantee that 

 those who gather data about the environment do so to support the infor- 

 mational needs of decision makers. The results of decision making should 

 square with the realities; data gathering should be responsive to needs. 



Each system for decision making should incorporate a system of checks 

 and balances, permitting decision makers the opportunity to influence 

 those who develop the information, and to give those who develop the 

 information an opportunity to review and influence the decision making. 

 Any system which does not display the characteristics of candor and 

 consistency necessary to popular support will not be efTective. 



The pattern that should be adopted is clear. Its absence can be dis- 

 cerned as a reason for failure of existing attempts to reconcile competitive 

 uses of common resources. This pattern emerges from the common sense 

 observation that you cannot manage something you do not comprehend 

 and you do not appreciate what you need to know until you try to manage 

 something. 



Some of the decision problems are highly decentralized, such as shore- 

 line protection and development or estuarine development and conserva- 

 tion. Others are highly centralized, as is the case with Law of the Sea 

 negotiations or severe storm modifications. But each resource problem, at 

 whatever level, requires the close integration of fact finding and evalua- 

 tion of alternatives. 



To guarantee that these processes are carried out with integrity, it is 

 necessary to provide for the generation of national policies. These policies 

 should define the national interests and should provide guidelines for the 

 resolution of conflicts which arise in pursuit of these policies. To make 

 these points explicit, NACOA strongly urges that: 



• legislation establish, in every case, both a focus of policy responsi- 

 bility and a center for assembling the information upon which de- 

 cisions can be made — and explicit provisions to see to it that these 

 interact with each other; 



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