spare time available from their second-mortgaged owners. In this context, Lucas
(1970) recognized that:Sea coasts (and lakesides) are under pressure from people seeking to escape from an
urban environment. The tragedy is that those who seek to escape, create another
urban environment and all too often a substandard one. The result is that beautiful
coastal areas are preempted for the benefit of a few...[and that] Key coastal areas
should be retained for the use and enjoyment of the public, and typical examples of
a country’s shoreline should be preserved in as natural a state as possible.What most inhibits conformity to the set-aside ideal is the pattern of freehold
landownership, aided by a narrow ‘painting by numbers’ technique for the ‘trend
zoning’ of land held in private freehold ownership along the littoral. A conserva-
tion vision (indeed a vision for preservation of the coastal heritage) is necessary
because for all nations the coastal fringe is a national asset of fixed extent which,
when obliterated from public use, becomes an asset forgone for public enjoyment,
forever. In terms of this reasoning, public foreshore reservations – say 20 m
minimum – need to be applied as the statutory norm along all of the coast,
expanded upon by ‘foreshore yard’ provisions on designated private land where
this is indicated. In ‘soft and sensitive’ residential-holiday localities a wider – 100
to 200 m – coastal reserve should be retained in public ownership. Another physi-
cal planning matter involves fixing a natural coastal hazard boundary limit in sit-
uations where the rising sea-level factor will lead to ‘coastal squeeze’. In some
situations this reality will eventually trigger ‘managed retreat’ (moving the
building-line inland), ‘adaptation’ (raising building floor levels), or ‘engineered
protection’ (seawall revetments and infill).
Although the coastal fringe ought to be recognized as part of the ‘national
heritage estate’ along with National Parks and other kinds of forest and desert
wilderness, it is mostly treated with less respect. Relative to the larger forest and
wilderness heritage the water’s edge is in fact both potentially more accessible,
more fragile, and of fixed extent.
There needs to be an understanding and acceptance of variable controls
relative to different foreshore situations. This can be incorporated into planning
documents as a ‘zone of vulnerability’ established as a proscribed building limit
(50 metres minimum, inland from the high-water mark) extending to 250 metres
and more in visually, flood-prone and ecologically sensitive contexts. The per-
formance guidelines noted in figure 5.4 are of crucial importance in CZM loca-
tions where building permission has been granted. In some jurisdictions (notably
in Australia and New Zealand, in parts of Canada, but lamentably sparse in the
United States) there are instances of mandatory public-owned littoral reserves
over the band of land – often of legal road width – immediately inland from the
high-water mark.^41
The littoral has been subject to minimum at worst, mixed at best, official inter-
vention in the past. Officialdom – a confused responsibility at the water’s edge –
has often turned a blind eye to amateur building construction, sometimes right
into the foreshore reserve, and has failed to deter rapacious food-plunder prac-222 Practice