A feature common to all coastal zones is their attraction for human habitation,
which means competition for space on the landward side for buildings, recreation
facilities, transportation and utilities structures, and waterside industries, and on
the seaward side to fit in the ports and storage facilities associated with maritime
harvesting, water-sport recreation and water-based transportation. The coastal
strip to the landward side is the locus of maximum property investment and
development intensity.^26
A foreshore should contain only the artifacts and structures
that belong or need to be there. It is also the place where water-
carried waste disposal is concentrated, where commercial fishing
and fish farming terminates, and where water surface trans-
portation and offshore oil and mineral exploitation is based. What
further complicates matters is that the landward edge is suffused
with cultural sentiment and attachment as well as being the pre-
ferred place of habitation. And a further complication for seaside
margins is the phenomenon known as ‘coastal squeeze’, the inexorable sea-level
rise, first recorded during the twentieth century and expected to accelerate over
the twenty-first century.^27
A primary issue is the indigenous first people’s rights of use and access to the
foreshore and the water beyond. This has brought about an emotionally charged
complexity whenever indigenous first people and settler people are drawn
together to consider coastal policy. Some settler stock people exhibit remorse over
their forebears’ acts of littoral theft, despoilation and commodification, not that
the original indigenous populations were overly sensitive about resource deple-
tion, for when fish stocks declined or seal populations dwindled they moved on
or adapted to some other food source.
Individual freehold rights are expected, from the indigenous peoples perspec-
tive, to give way at the foreshore to common property ‘interests’ and indigenous
‘rights’. Along the littoral, the historical privileges of indigenous first peoples are
never fully extinguished, embodying spirituality and food-economy roles of his-
torical significance. But along the intensely humanized sections of coastlines this
recognition has been mostly subsumed: obviously so where reclamations have
been made and port authorities have been empowered.^28 It is the suburbanized
and rural-humanized sections of the littoral, where the shoreline has been less
dramatically modified, that the traditional havens, food-gathering camps and164 Practice
Figure 4.5 Coastal marine zoneThe often quoted worst
case sea-level rise is
0.88 m by 2100 – but
half a metre is
considered the more
likely maximum.
International Panel on
Sea Level Change, 2001