Critical
EdgeNavigating the site:
The Seashore like any shoreline is the critical edge and test of conservation & development.
“A strange and beautiful place.”
Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea, p. 1.
Carson writes about the rocky shore, the coral coast, the sandy beach, and within each of these coastal areas she delineates even more zones such as the maritime forest, sea grass meadows, dunes, intertidal rocks, mangroves, marshes, and mud flats, among many others. Each area requires different ecological design aspects and thus, solutions to how one lives successfully beside the sea grow from each of these individual places.
Thesis | essay | overview | book's contents | Ecological problem's three components | sense of her text
The shoreline of the ocean is not exactly land, but not exactly water either. Along the sea’s margins water moves as the tide ebbs and floods water moves land and land obstructs the flow or littoral drift. Littoral drift is the movement of water that is also carrying sand and debris along the shore; also called the "long shore current."
In California the long shore current moves from south to north even though the offshore deeper California Current moves from north to south. Similarly the Gulf Stream moving deeply along the Atlantic from south to north setting up a long shore current dragging water from north to south. Here is a palpable example of Newton's first law of motion; that "to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." The water rises and falls as waves, is pulled under the gravitational influence of the sun and the moon generating the tides, and isThus what we might expect is deceptively different along the marginal boundaries of the sea and the land.
The "edge effect" is an example of the anomalous character of the shore. Where land and water intimately intermingle we expect the unexpected. Some organisms called barnacles plant their heads down cemented to the rock and throw their legs in the air, among the rocks where waves crash. Barnacles, mussels, or bryozoans are but one example of how the unexpected life form thrives in areas where we might otherwise expect life to be sparse, because of the stress of the salt water, the tides and the pressure of the crushing waves. The edge effect implies that creatures from the land, such as the Galapagos iguanas, mingle, even depend on marine algae. Normally a land creature, marine iguanas of the Galapagos Islands take to the sea to survive and even thrive. The edge effect generally occurs wherever an overlap between one ecological community and an adjacent neighboring community exists; the overlap produces a greater array of creatures inhabiting these edges, than either of the adjoining communities.
313 words
“No man is an islande, entire unto himself,
everyone is a piece of the continent and a part of the maine”John Donne
A testing ground of conservation & development.
All ecological problems have three parts:
Physical components, Biological components. Social components.
- high density centers of human population.
- pathways for migratory fish and birds.
- active margins of sand, rock and water.
- original places for evolution?
Contents of Carson's 1955 book.
The Marginal World
Patterns of Shore Life
The Rocky Shores
The Rim of Sand
The Coral Coast
The Enduring Sea
- Concept, related ideas.
- Essay about conserving biological wealth.
- Trace elements can have more than trace effects!
- Protection of the global commons.
- Marshes of the Ocean Shore
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