Philippa Stevenson: Call of the sea lures us all - even academics

COMMENT

As many of us return grumpily to work after the first of the summer's great treks to and from the beach, we can at least recapture some of the feel of sand between our toes by thinking coastal.

Some people live at the seaside year-round - a national and international trend that is predicted to mean 75 per cent of the world's population will live within a few kilometres of the coast by 2025.

But that shift is putting huge pressure on many of the things about the coast we hold dear.

Increasingly, the key question for local bodies, planners, environment guardians and researchers will be how three-quarters of us can live within a stone's skip of the sea without destroying the magic ingredients we went there to enjoy.

Waikato University, though inland, has strong coastal and marine research functions - so strong that it, too, is thinking of setting up house at the beach.

Terry Healy, the university's internationally renowned research professor of coastal environmental science, recently advanced its eight-year dream of a coastal marine research institute by setting out the case for its establishment in Tauranga.

The fundraising Waikato University Foundation has made raising the money to build the institute - at a cost of around $10 million for the building alone on a prominent harbourside site at Sulphur Point - its top priority.

Healy, who has been doing marine science at Waikato for 30 years, says staff and a research base are well-established and need only to go over the Kaimai Ranges to take up residence.

His coastal marine group, the university's International Global Change Institute and its demography research unit - initially at least 30 staff - are likely contenders for the move.

And he says the growing interest in coastal development is a worldwide phenomenon, so if the university builds an institute national and international students will come.

Support is already strong in the Bay of Plenty, including from the Port of Tauranga, which sponsors Healy's chair and has supported 22 graduate students on research projects.

It would be Tauranga's first leading national and international institute - one which Healy says would attract visitors and residents to the city and show that it was a burg that had come of age.

The university will pitch the institute to the Government in the next science funding round as a centre for research excellence in inter-disciplinary marine science, a move which, if successful, will net it a bag of money.

But if it is to be Tauranga's baby, companies and organisations in the Bay of Plenty will be hit up for much of the rest of the required lucre.

Besides a status symbol, what will the town - known because of its wealth of retired folk as "God's waiting paddock" - get for its outlay?

Being a fast-growing coastal region, the Bay of Plenty is feeling the pressure of rising population.

Researchers at an on-site institute would be able to examine coastal population dynamics, environmental planning, resource management law, climate impacts and so on.

Locals interested in the various areas of academic study would have it in their own backyard, or seashore, or harbour.

Healy calculates that after being set up the institute would benefit the regional economy by $5 million to $8 million a year.

We can but wait to see whether the Bay of Plenty responds to the university's initiative.

Meanwhile, I can't help wondering why we are all so hellbent on living on the coast, particularly in the stretch nicknamed The Big Banana.

The Big Banana, incorporating Auckland, Tauranga and Whangerei and supported by the inland areas of Hamilton and Rotorua, is where all the country's population growth is happening.

It contains half New Zealand's population, but is less than 10 per cent of its land area.

Town planner and resource management consultant Brian Putt told a planning conference early in the year that this coastal stretch was symbolic of our intrinsic link to the coastal environment for most aspects of our lives: economic, social, cultural, recreational and physical.

He put the attraction down to genes. We are descended from ethnic groups with strong maritime histories.

Polynesians, Celts, Scots, English, Dutch and so on roamed coastlines and oceans for centuries.

We can call it urban drift or northern drift in terms of the move of the population within New Zealand, but it is the manifestation of a natural attraction to the living environment of the coastline.

This attraction has become a fundamental foundation of our environmental psychopathology as a nation.

If we do all want to live on the coast, then I suspect we need to start now to take better care of it.

* Email Philippa Stevenson