ABSTRACT
Nowhere are the pressures of population growth and resource exploitation felt more keenly than at the coast. The majority of the US population lives within 130 km of the coast, with 53 percent of the population living in the approximately 17 percent of the land area that is considered coastal. The resources on which coastal populations depend are threatened by overexploitation and natural system degradation. Mangrove forests that provide essential nursery habitats for fishery species are harvested for firewood. The physical landscape is an underlying control on the location and function of many water-dependent contemporary human activities near the coast, such as ports and resort hotels, as well as the historic communities and cultural resources that have developed in areas both accessible and strategically important to earlier societies. Options for protecting eroding shorelines are many but can be simply categorized as stabilization using hard structures.
