The Shoreline between Nature and Society, a Changing Heritage - Vulnerability of Coastal Ecosystems and Adaptation - page 192

has become all the more difficult as technical developments started
accumulating. However, this only shows one side of the argument on
the sustainability of the harvesting of the ocean's living resources.
There are many conflicts, and these are often emphasized by the
media, in which case it is debatable whether the real target is actually
the one being reached or not. When Greenpeace blocks the route (and
the catch) of Japanese whalers, it is easy to forget that the
development of small-scale fishing for many “poor” fishing
communities plays a similar role against the resource in question.
However, other measures can be used to better control the resources
and their use (Couliou in [MIO 12]).
5.3.4. The rise in coastal tourism and its effects on coastlines
More recently, the tourism industry is having a high impact on
the coasts, further into the coastal water where nautical activities are
found in all their forms, with cruise ships being the extreme
embodiment of this development brought about by the very quick
economic growth of the last decades. This is not without
consequences. Various forms of pollution are produced for a start,
which affect the quality of the water and thereby gives rise to conflicts
of uses with on the side of the polluters, the tourism sphere
[BUH 09] and the farmers discharging chemicals in the catchments
upstream. A representative example is that of the pollution of
beaches by green algae, especially in the North Finistere (Figure 5.8).
But, even more controversial is the growing occupation of the
shoreline by individual houses, more or less regular estates, more or
less recent beach resorts, as we see them along the beaches of the
Mediterranean (Spain, the Languedoc Coast, the Italian Adriatic
Coast, the Croatian Coast, etc.). These developments represent an
unoriginal way of unifying often sparsely populated environment,
except for fishing or mussel-oyster growers, and which, as can be
expected, benefits from little economic growth, due to spatial
competition on the foreshore and due to the water quality most
importantly.