Tide pools deserve protection

I want to thank you for your excellent editorial and cartoon in support of tide-pool protection. Those of us who are in the trenches appreciate your spreading the word. Our tide pools are unique areas of rare biological diversity and truly singular beauty. In fact, the state of California has deemed them ? and indeed, much of the Laguna Beach coastline ? worthy of protection by law.

The tide pools at Heisler are part of the Heisler Park State Marine Life Reserve. In enacting the Marine Life Protection Act, the Legislature declared, “Marine-life reserves are an essential element of an MPA system because they protect habitat and ecosystems, conserve biological diversity, and provide a sanctuary for fish and other sea life.”

We live in extraordinary times. Twenty years ago, the idea of marine ecosystems having to be protected by law would have seemed unreal.

Yet time and the cumulative impact of human access and exploitation have made it necessary. To ensure we preserve our precious marine ecosystems not only for our age but all future generations we must adjust to a new paradigm. Our marine resources are finite. Every pool, shell, rock, wave ? and, yes, even the sand ? form part of the fragile web that sustains life in the tide-pool environment. Just as the ocean gave life to earth, the tide pools nurture and protect species whose lives are a part of that same great chain of existence.

To live in Laguna Beach is to be blessed. However, to live in Laguna Beach is also to be charged with a higher standard of duty when it comes to protecting those rare natural assets that provide us with this “city of gracious refuge.”

As a tidewater docent, my gratitude to those of this city who support and understand the reason we are on the beach has no end. There can be no consideration of life without the ocean, and we only have one. Let us be good guardians of it, and, if in doing so you see a docent on the rocks, know that you share the beach with a kindred spirit.