Human Impacts
The coast is a highly attractive natural feature to humans through its beauty, resources, and accessibility. As of 2002, over half of the world's population was estimated to being living within 60 km of the coastal shoreline, making our coastlines highly vulnerable to human impacts from daily activities that put pressure on these surrounding natural environments. In the past, salt marshes were perceived as coastal 'wastelands,' causing considerable loss and change of these ecosystems through land reclamation for agriculture, urban development, salt production and recreation. The indirect effects of human activities such as nitrogen loading also play a major role in the salt marsh area.
Read more about this topic: Salt Marsh
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or impacts:
“Each man’s private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess ...”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence.... The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)