Anne W.Simon
Wherever we turn on the coast we confront the awful destruction of its magnificent natural system. We can no longer escape the results of years of short-sighted use but must, for the first time ever, witness the dying coast and wonder if we can still save it. The Thin Edge, 1978.
Anne Simon is also the author of No Island is an Island.
Knowing what we know makes ours the crucial generation. Ibid.
Survival on land and in the sea depends on a functional coast. Ibid.
The end product, rock's irreducible minimum, is sand. Hold it in your hands and you are in touch with the planet's essence. Each grain has been part of the Earth's solid crust at one time or another, eventually to be freed from rock to exist as a grain again, its particular structure intact. Ibid.
Fewer species exist in the ocean than on land: no insect, for example, no highly developed plant forms, but vastly more abundant life. Five sixths of the planet's total living matter is in the sea, most of it in upper ocean levels, although countless varieties of habitats are available. Ibid.
The most specialized species are the most vulnerable to changes in their environment, according to Roger Peterson. At present, less specialized birds - crows, jays, sparrows, finches - are thriving in cities and suburbs, adaptable and capable of further evolution, "and that," Peterson says, "is what counts." Ibid.
The sea concentrates its riches in marshes, swamps, and mud flats. Here, by virtue of its moon-regulated , twice-a-day tides, it fertilizes and cultivates its version of a garden, bringing in nutrients on the rising tide, mixing them with the sediments of the marsh, the mud of the flat, pulling out what the garden has produced as the tide ebbs. Ibid.
The 31 million gallons of oil from the immense Tory Canyon spill killed 40,000 to 100,000 birds&endash; 20,000 of them guillemots, a species of seabirds, and 5,000 razorbill auks. Ibid.
Oysters, clams, mussels&endash;filter feeders&endash;are easy oil victims. Ibid.
Concentrations as low as 10 parts per million reduces oysters' growth rate. Ibid
Offshore oil is a short story for all the money made and damage done. In less than a century we invented the skill to find it and extract it, and in another century,, we will exhaust it. Ibid.
By the 1970s, there were 17,000 wells off the shores of California. Ibid.
One part per million&endash;it would be an ounce of vermouth to almost 32,000 quarts of gin&endash;is a deadly drink for fish eggs and larvae. Ibid.
Our vision is not clear enough to see that further disturbance of the still elusive, still less than understood coastal character in any one of its parts will afflict the indivisible whole and soon end its functioning. Ibid.
Big money and big government listen to a different drummer from the one Thoreau had in mind . . . Ibid.
. . . as the judicial branch continues to interpret constitutional power, our culture moves toward the notion that the nation's rights may supplant those of the individual, the town, even the state, and that owning land cannot guarantee the untrammeled freedom it once did. Ibid
For this .indivisible whole we need an indivisible solution. Ibid.