The Changing Nature of Ocean Boundaries

It is impossible today to imagine a world without coasts and shores. Even people who have never seen the sea have a vivid image of the place where water meets land. The lure of the sea has never been greater than in the modern era. More people visit the edge of the sea than any other geographical feature, including rivers and mountains. No longer primary sites of work, the touristic appeal of both coasts and shores is enormous. They are today the most photographed and remembered places in the world. Once a scene of shipwreck and death, the place where land meets water, particularly the beach, is now a mecca for physical pleasure and spiritual renewal.

It comes as a complete surprise to know that before the nineteenth century, coasts and shores were not prominent features of world maps or our geographical vocabulary. What we call today the coast or shoreline was not a named linear feature, connecting points in space and time where land and water meet. Maps focused on a series of distinct points—harbors, estuaries, headlands, peninsulas—each with its own name and wholly disconnected from one another, ignoring that which lies between. Today, the old points of interest and their original names are all but forgotten. What focuses our attention now are those lines in the sand which we call shores and coasts.

Our ancestors navigated by points, not lines, by landmarks and seamarks, by close observation rather than by abstract geometry. They did not see coasts or shores as such. Most people still knew the world not through maps but by memory passed on from generation to generation. Before the nineteenth century, we navigated point-to-point, zigzagging or tacking from place to place, rather than following straight lines or the shortest distance between points. As Richard Forman reminds us, nature knows no straight lines. These were the product of Western civilization, which had transformed “the soft curves of nature into the hard lines of geometry.” Native Americans who followed the old ways of navigation avoided the straight roads of European settlers in favor of the meandering trails of their ancestors. Today, we occupy a mental world of lines, which renders reality in terms of a geometry at odds with nature itself. The most prominent features of modern maps are linear. We have our rail and air lines; in sport, we have goals and sidelines; police favor lineups; and industry relies on production lines; schools demand students “line up,” a symbol of good order.

Boundaries are invariably rendered as linear, promising the shortest distance between points. When we approach a place where land meets, we invariably imagine this in linear terms, as a sharp edge rather than as a broad margin that is nature’s reality. Only recently, have we learned to dispute the linear illusion, finally grasping the fact that where land and water mingle, we have what ecologists call an ecotone, a place that is neither water nor land, but a very special interface that needs to be understood on its own terms, geographically and historically.

The terms “shoreline” and “coastline” were not widely used until the nineteenth century. Nor was the term “beach,” a verb turned into a noun and increasingly set apart from the working waterfront and the rocky shore as a special place set apart for healthy leisure activities. The beach grew more important in the twentieth century, disassociating itself from the dangers that had long been associated with both shore and coast.

Coasts and shores are the products of both natural and human history. We tend to think of them as belonging to nature. But they are, in fact, a product of culture, the words, images, and stories that we have learned to interpret nature, to bring order and meaning to the otherwise chaotic material world.

Today’s most sought-after beaches are those thought most pristine, made of a particular kind of white sand mined and imported from other places, sometimes from the interior of continents rather than from the sea itself. Coasts are constituted of a variety of natural features. Some are rocky, others marshy wetlands and estuaries. It is not nature but politics which gives a coast its shape and identity. Coasts are the product of the rise of the continental nation-state, which defines coasts as one of its most significant boundaries. Small islands understand themselves in terms of shores, but continents have coasts. Natural features like rivers and mountains have also been used to anchor territorial states in the modern era, but no border is ever entirely natural; instead, it is often reinforced symbolically by means of cartography, and materially by fencing or walling. Never in human history have coasts been as militarily defended as they are today. In recent years, coasts have been more powerfully etched in the minds of citizens.

The geological nature of coasts and shores is determined by forces rooted in deep-time processes of plate tectonics, but the meaning of coasts and shores is a product of human as well as natural history. Today’s coasts are increasingly anthropocentric, with the human impact having become increasingly powerful in the past two centuries.

Construction of the modern coast is very different than the ancient shore, which was a broad, ill-defined zone rather than a sharply defined edge. Ancient maps paid less attention to shores and coasts than to interior features. They were represented as dangerous terra incognita, to be avoided at all costs. Harbors and beaches, havens and safe landings, were marked and the rest of the shore left indistinct as a warning to mariners.

In the Western world, shores and coasts were first surveyed from the sea for the convenience of mariners and fishers. Early maps focused on two things: perils such as reefs and sandbars are shown, but so, too, are deep-water harbors that were to become ports for military and mercantile purposes. As many early ports lay upriver rather than at the shore itself, there were many blank spots, the cause of much confusion, frequent wrecks, and source of the terror traditionally associated with the sea itself.

Even the sandy shore, valued today for its beauty and health, was seen as a hazard, ugly and treacherous, satanic realm—a literal hell to mariners. In the twentieth century, its cultural value has been reversed, becoming paradisiacal, its hellish images replaced with heavenly features, a place of peaceful diversions, leisure rather than toil, health rather than plague. It became a mecca for the tourist industry, a sacred place exempt from the corruptions of the industrializing world.

Coasts are the product of the era of the territorial nation-state, which turned the broad soft margin between land and sea into a hard narrow edge. Older conceptions of the shore as something more like a porous membrane than an impenetrable wall have been rediscovered in recent decades by ecologists and environmentally sensitive historians and geographers, who warn us against anthropocentric notions that draw lines too sharply, obscuring the interconnectivity of land and sea, ignoring the ecotone that lies between water and earth, an interface that is different from both and has contributed so much to natural and human evolution, providing mental and physical resources that belong neither to sea nor to land but to the in-between.

Cartography, faithful to its geometric origins, still emphasizes the difference between sea and land by contrasting the deep flat blues of the ocean with the strong variegation of green and gray inland regions. Since the eighteenth century, land and sea have been represented very differently. Earth is seen as three-dimensional and is marked by the infrastructures of mankind—roads, canals, purpose-built harbors, walls of all kinds—but sea maps conceal the impact of civilization, presenting water as a one-dimensional concept. Only recently have world maps acknowledged the depth of the seas or their inhabitants. Everything would seem to operate on the surface, without leaving a trace of human activity.

Land maps are sensitive to history as well as geography, whereas sea charts rarely illustrate the history of the sea itself. The dominant myth is that of the “eternal sea”—the ancient and wholly outdated notion that nothing ever happens in the sea but instead occurs on its surface. We have meticulous geographies and histories of navies, but nothing that documents the natural history of fish and whale migrations. We mark our battlefields and garbage dumps, but make invisible shipwrecks and plastic gyres that have been showing up in oceans around the world. Environmental historians are the vanguard of the effort to dismantle the myth of the eternal sea and its companion illusion of the inexhaustibility of ocean resources.

Shores and coasts present themselves to us as the world’s most prominent and permanent features, but in fact they are among the most fluid and fluctuating. The shore has always been a living thing, moving with the Earth’s tides in the interface between land and sea. Parts of the shore, where rock meets sea, change but little over centuries, but sand and gravel are particularly vulnerable to fluctuation. Beaches in their natural state depend on movement for their life and the lives of the creatures that inhabit them. Left to themselves, beaches naturally replenish themselves. This process made them one of the most fertile and productive of Earth’s precious ecotones, the place where two ecosystems meet and replenish one another. Shores offered a home to mankind rich in resources and stimulation. Carl Sauer was right in describing the shore as the original home of Homo sapiens. And it was from the African shore that our species spread out, hugging shores around the world and populating all the continents, with the exception of Antarctica, in a remarkably short time.

Shores belonged to nature for a very long time. As long as the human population was small in numbers and mobile in character, shores were thinly settled and little affected by human civilization. Until the eighteenth century, ports were few and mainly upriver from the sea. The parts of the shore we now covet the most, namely beaches, were empty terrain. It was not until the eighteenth century that the shore became coasts, its parts conceptualized, surveyed, and mapped.

In the course of the nineteenth century, coasts become ever more clearly defined, and the empty spaces between ports filled in. It was then that the beach became a valued property, first in Europe and later in the Americas. Coasts became political, fortified closed borders around the world. They increasingly defined the territory and identity of peoples living close to the sea. Coasts arrived late in history, ultimately subjecting shores to their geometry. Once settled, shores took on all the features of the land rather than the sea. They lost their fluidity and became fixed property, first of the state and later of private owners. Coasts were not allowed to move. They were now fixed by sea walls and groins, which interfered with not only the movement of the sea but also the sands that constituted the intertidal zone. What had been a fluid combination of land and sea, whose flora and fauna (including humans) were a part of the ecotone whose life required circulation rather than stasis, was now increasingly static.

Earlier, people had preferred to build back from the shore, to create a margin of safety between themselves and the always dangerous sea. Initially, they, like the birds and animals who shared this environment, relied on movement for safety. Their dwellings were makeshift, ready to move at a moment’s notice. In Maine, shore dwellings are still called “camps,” suggesting their original portable transitory character, which constantly shifted, like the shores themselves. As Rachel Carson put it: “Always the edge of the sea (the shore) remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.”

Early sea charts marked ports and landing places, but did not delineate what lay between them. The beach was initially of little interest to shore-goers except as a landing and place of work, seen as a dangerous and unhealthy place, to be built well back from. Like the Native Americans that they ultimately replaced, Europeans initially used shores lightly— as a transit point rather than a permanent settlement. The Europeans were oriented as much to sea as to land. Colonial New Englanders were initially more closely connected to Europe than they were to the continent’s interior. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was more a maritime than a continental nation. But when it became an agricultural and ultimately industrial nation, its ties with the sea became increasingly tenuous. Americans continued to live on the sea in increasing numbers, but less for work than for recreation.

That was the trend throughout the twentieth century. In effect, American shores have been colonized three times over. First, there were the people who migrated by foot from Asia, arriving across the Bering Strait from the north to along the western shores. Ultimately, these peoples crossed the continent and created eastern as well as western coastal cultures. The next wave of immigrants arrived by ship from Europe in the wake of the Columbian discoveries. Most recently, the flow from Europe subsided and the coasts were largely settled by inlanders, a surge to the sea which has hollowed out the nation’s center. Today, half of all Americans live within 100 miles of the sea. We have become again a bicoastal, actually a multicoastal, society, with close ties to the sea that are now more recreational than work-related.

In the nineteenth century, it was hotels and boarding houses that encroached on the shore, attracting mainly the very wealthy. Eventually, the automobile age brought urban and suburban middle-class populations. At first, this was only seasonal, but today more and more people are making the shore their permanent residence, especially in retirement. The coastline, once a cartographer’s abstraction, became a very different place, reconstructed on anthropocentric principles, undermining the nature of the shore itself and making it much more like the interior.

In the past, people who made their living from the sea worked with it, knowing its ways and understanding the shore as a living thing. They adapted to nature’s ways much more than the agricultural and urban populations of the interior did. Today, however, most who reside at the edge of the sea have little direct experience of it except when storms and tsunamis bring it crashing into their otherwise very landed existence.

Coasts have come to have great symbolic meaning for most Americans, becoming a defining feature of our national identity, even for those who live far from the sea. Maine touts its Lobster Coast, Jersey has its Shore, and California, defined by its beaches, declares itself the Coast of Dreams.

But the modern construction of coasts as hard, fixed edges, sea-walled and concreted over, is now evidently in conflict with the natural ecology of shores, few of which are any longer pristine. However, through the efforts of naturalists and conservationists, we have protected what pure nature is still left at the edge of the sea. Natural sand beaches are disappearing, and protective wetlands are long gone. Native species of fish, birds, and animals are endangered, but so, too, is Homo sapiens, which began its evolution as a shore species 200,000 years ago at the caves on the southern tip of Africa. Anthropologists tell us that “we are made for—and made by—that thin world where land meets sea.” We still feel most at home when near water, and some would go as far as to say that we have a “blue mind” that is part of our genetic and evolutionary makeup, which compels us to move back to the sea. Institutions like the beach provide an opportunity for an intimate connection with the sea that other parts of the coast, built up industrially and residentially, do not. Much of seaside development actually distances us from nature and commercializes it. In many places, it is said we are prevented from “seeing the shores for the stores.” John Cheever has noted that we have constructed what he calls a “second coast . . . of gift and antique shops.”

Having substituted man-made coasts for natural shores, we have cut ourselves off from our history as a maritime species. We cannot afford to be walled off from the sea, for, in doing so, we alienate ourselves not only from the natural world but also from our own humanity. Today, coasts and shores are in conflict, competing for that thin space that is too small to accommodate the needs of both civilization and nature. We must find a way for nature and urban and suburban civilizations to coexist, but this can only happen when we understand their respective origins and the diverging histories that have brought us into conflict in the first place. John R. Gillis.

Further Reading:
Carson, Rachel. 1998. The Edge of the Sea. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Corbin, Alain. 1969. The Lure of the Sea. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gillis, John R. 2012. The Human Shore: Sea Coasts in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hamilton-Paterson, James. 2009. Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds. New York: Europa. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.

Paine, Lincoln. 2012. The Sea & Civilization. New York: Knopf.
Pilkey, Orrin H. and Rob Young. 2009. The Rising Sea. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

The Shipping Industry. History of shipping