Protecting the Coast: river valleys of the Atlantic shore

"The river valleys of the Atlantic shore cut through the coastal plain, creating large numbers of estuaries, many of which are bordered by extensive tidal marshes. These coastal wetlands have been held in public trust since the original colonial grants. Unlike rights in other portions of the public domain, the public rights to fishing, hunting, and navigation on tidal lands could not be extinguished by sale to private concerns."

The terms you need to know and use in essays.

(p. 18.)

2, A Frontier of Estuaries

Review | Key Players | Significant Idea | Summary

Review of Chapter Two's main points:

River Valleys

Seawater is diluted by rivers provides a rich mixing ground of different water densities. There is where nutrients and organic matter are trapped and fish feed, breed, or pass through the area on there way up and down the river.

The Chesapeake Bay

"Richard Hakluyt's three-volume work, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries Made by Sea or Overland to the Remote & Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth . . . ., first published in London between 1598 & 1600. "

fishing and hunting

Concentration of the densest native American populations.
Coastal areas and food
Native American ritual for use of resources

White's fish as food and fire

Earliest landing sites of European occupation.

Florida, April, 1513
1524, Verrazano & Atlantic sites are "commodius and delightful
Arthur Barlowe's paintings of St. Augustine
1609 Henry Hudson expedition to New York Bay --upper and lower bays
Captain John Smith and the mouth of the Susquehanna River

Pomeloc

Two opposing views of the Chesapeake Bay marshes. map

Ship worm infestation made the use of estuaries essential to ship maintenance
Robert Beverly's history of Virginia

Extent of Southern coastal swamps thwarted attempts to drain and reclaim coastal wetlands.

Export or cash crop agriculture developed based on slaves.

New England

11/29/1641 Wharf needs for shipping in Boston; by 1645 mills and wharfs at Faneuil Hall Square.
Boston 1663 - 1710 and the creation of Long Wharf

Water bailiffs as examples of communal control with access of citizens to bays for fishing and fowling.

"filling of tidal wetlands furthered maritime success." Navigability of waterways as a common interest.

Dutch in New Amsterdam, huge and diverse numbers of edible fish.

Filling of Eastern Manhattan
Preindustrial Urban Landscapes
European attitude & Martin Hale marshes show a lack of ambition.

Use of mechanical power

1645 first ladle dredger used in Holland for reclamation.
Using technology to overcome natural hazards, obstacles and nuisances.
Opposition, fishers and fowlers; the Lord of the Fens, Oliver Cromwell. "lay dry the land."

Colonial agrarian economy

Analysis | Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Themes | Thesis | Vocabulary | Dates

| Technology | Population | Preservation | Geographical regeneration | Law |

People who changed our attitudes about land and water.
George Perkins Marsh and geographical regeneration.
Geography of river mouths.
National Estuary Protection Act.
Colonial founding until 1972.
Atlantic and Pacific coastal zone ecology.
Legal, cultural, scientific and ethical ideals applied to wetlands.

Leading Paragraphs

Introduction

Ecclesiastes

"All the rivers run into the sea,

Yet the sea is not full.

From whence the rivers come

Thither they return again."

1 Coastal wetlands and features of estuaries are defined.

"A natural reciprocal nurturing of ocean and earth creates abundant wildlife in coastal wetlands. Here, salt and fresh water flow together in tidal marshes, creating rare shorelines of unsurpassed natural fertility by converting solar energy into food. Swelling tidal fluctuations recycle vital nutrients that encourage rapid vegetation growth followed by quick decay..... Both native and migratory wildlife thrive on the tide-mulched marsh grass fields."

"Coastal bodies of water where streams or rivers flow into the ocean are called estuaries."

(Siry, p. 3.)

Estuaries, or mouths of rivers as they enter the sea, are a geographical unit of enormous, historical importance because of their ecology, cultural transformation and numerous economic values.

"Throughout the nation today a series of state ad federal estuarine refuges exist as quiet testimony to the ideals, efforts and commitment of local conservation groups, planners, engineers, and scientists. These advocates possess a resolute maturity in asserting that some places must be set aside for future generations because, as Rachel Carson once remarked, 'man's way is not always the best.'"

(p. 17.)

| Index for Complete book |

Overview of an important theme:

The emergence of an organic, meaning natural and interelated or systemic perspective originated with observations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in coastal America.

it amounted to a biocentric vision of protection.

That became the biological foundation as a necessary precedent to comprehending (some years later) the ecological integrity of land, air and water.

It started with Thoreau, Marsh, and Olmsted and grew to influence Mumford, Odum, Leopold, Hardin, Commoner, Ehrlich and Carson.

Protection was best defined by five complementary but distinctly unrelated events revealed in publications, actions and the origins of a careful study of nature in a systematically functional way.

1864 George P. Marsh, Man and Nature

Origins of fish and bird preservation,
artificial fish propagation
Lake Merritt estuary protection in Calif, 1870.
John Wesley Powell, 1878, Plan for the Arid Regions

Powell's strategy meant the protection of water sources, that is forests as spring sources, rivers and underground water recharge areas. Where insufficient water sources existed he suggested the creation of reservoirs and aqueducts. He represented a pragmatic philosophy that understood the organic constraints of landscape based on the availability of and proximity to water.

the underlying difference

p. 64.

Key reiteration of the protectionist philosophies in the development of a conservationist impulse arose out of a concern for diminished wildlife and fisheries, a rising population and technologial pressure on land, water and scarce resources (renewable as opposed to inorganic metals, salts, gases or fuel oils).

preservationist	conservationist
traditional	utilitarian *
scenic beauty	irrigation surveys
recreation and contemplation	reclamation and reservoirs
fisheries and non-game wildlife	hunting and game management
quality and functionality	zoning and distribution
public trust and access	persistent use and reuse
perpetuating past purposes	future needs & rate of regeneration

A life-centered approach to protecting fish and bird habitats arose from this tension between preserving the beauty (aesthetics) and conserving the use (functionality) of natural resoutces.

* Utilitarian is the greatest good for the greatest number; in conservation it means the wisest use for the largest number of users over the longest period of time.

The Origins of Ecology

ecology (1856) used by Henry David Thoreau, in his notebooks as a naturlist's form of field observation.

oikology (1866) invented by Ernst Haeckel -- a German Darwinian scholar based on Darwin's (1859) distinction between the organic and inorganic conditions of existence.

Federal surveys of water in rivers and streams began before the war but burgeoned after the war, rivers, fish, birds, geology.

Addison Verrill described fresh, brackish, and salt water fish.
Organic ideal of fish and (bird) wildlife protection.
John Marshall's Gibbons vs. Ogden decision, 1826
Colonial wildlife preservation

Santa Rosa Island, Florida utilitarian conservation of live oak trees and forests for naval shipbuilding and defense. (1828)

page 66.

The public domain & public trust in sovereign lands

Tidelands as a public trust for purposes of navigation, fishing and hunting.

Hydrodynamics of scour for channel maintenance
legal opinions of the public trust doctrine and inalienability of submerged lands
Common benefits of navigable waterways.
Public domain defined

Swamplands acts 1848-1850 made reclamation or drainage and levee building a federal priority, an early utilitarian focus on the functional conversion "wasteland" into agricultural land, was eventually a boondoggle for the conveyence of public trust lands into the possession of private holders. Public expense mounted because the removal of floodplain or over flow lands forced that water downstream and the land -- in the absence of water-- shrank because it became compacted and decreased in height or altitude with respect to the adjacent river bed.

• upland and upriver swamp reclamation aggravated flooding downriver.
• removal of water and spawning areas, nurseries or feeding grounds fostered a decline in fisheries.

• conducted by Charles Ellet, the 1852 Mississippi River Survey, revealed the extent to which deforestation of upland, drainage of flooded swamps, and levee construction along vulnerable flood plains all aggravated the displacement of water upstream leaving it nowhere to go except to wreak havoc downstream, because he recognized the river as a tightly coupled inorganic system that nourished organic relations among fisheries and habitats.

Ellet had a watershed and multistate perspective to solve the river's siltation and flood problems. A watershed is an inorganic and systemic conceptualization of the unitary character of how surface water shapes the contours of the landscape.

rivers

Ellet proposed a technological remedy to correct the impacts of settlement, deforestation, swampland drainage policy, and badly written and administered laws.
California rivers had similar problems of flooding due to drainage and due to deforestation carried greater amounts of silt and sediment, whose deposition actually raised the bed of the river. The raised river bed actually displaced water ever higher against naturally occurring and constructed levees.

Levees were essential to prevent flooding on the Sacramento River.

Levees required coordinated efforts which were often lacking.

Water pollution due to poor sanitation and dumping of manufacturing wastes adversely affected people's health.

Cholera epidemics swept through in 1832, 1849, & 1866, pointing up bad water quality

Flood control planning and public health protection required a comprehensive view.

Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. (landscape engineer) and George Waring (sanitary engineer) had such a vision.

Urban parks and sanitation reform both advocated a communal vision.

Olmsted and organic constraints of urban and wild parks: NYC & Yosemite.

Technology of sewers, parkways and parks was the instrument of civic rejuvenation
George Waring and sanitary engineering as a civic duty

State police power to protect and promote public health

George Perkins Marsh, understood the local ties that make up both regional and international sense of place

Marsh, Man and Nature, 1864, was a pioneering work on how humans alter the geography often to their own demise.

Recognized the need to engineer in order to restore "disturbed harmonies" induced by population, settlements, industry and waste.

p. 79 - 80.

The Organic Revolt

Marsh, Ruffin, Ellet and Olmsted form a powerful organic approach to understanding human impact on natural features and the limitations these impose on societies.

"Marsh's appeal for geographical regeneration significantly altered the attitudes of specialists toward land legislation, river policies, and wildlife conservation laws.
"Their ideas reflected a systemic understanding of land as a series of biotic communities, and these ideas appeared before such attitudes were commonplace among scientific specialists."

p. 82

Most important theme?

Sources

Protection -- to prevent the destruction, if not repair the damage, or maintain the intrinsic value of a person, place, or thing from undue stress leading to a decline in the functional responses inhernet in the desired circumstances, organisms or systems that promote existence or sustain dependent conditions.

Sovereign lands, those areas of ungranted land (tidelands) belonging to the monarch's estate or states having public access for the protection of their inherent reources; forests, fisheries or hunting wildlife.

J. Siry, Marshes of the Ocean Shore.

Coastal study guide

What is a natural asset?

How large are hurricanes?

Date: 19 March 2008