When the Enemy Is Us: Suburban Sprawl, Toxic Fish, and the Politics of Coastal Pollution in Southern New England and the Northern Mid-Atlantic

During the second half of the twentieth century, suburban sprawl brought growing numbers of Americans within close access to the nation’s coastal waters. While seen as timeless, unchanging, and eternally abundant in the immediate post-war period, the marine waters of the Mid-Atlantic and Southern New England came to be regarded as troubled and toxic by many coastal residents by the 1970s. This transformed perception only partially correlated to the changing environmental conditions of the waters. Rather, the new understanding developed out of growing scientific and public awareness of how habitat destruction and coastal pollution affected ecology and human health. By the 1970s, Americans tuned into Jacque Cousteau’s television series revealing the wonders of the marine environment, but at the same time they confronted dead dolphins and hypodermic needles on New Jersey Beaches and learned of PCBs and heavy metals in many of the region’s most popular game and table fish.
Using newspaper articles, environmental organization archives, and governmental reports, this paper traces how at the same time that a growing number of coastal Americans came to develop an aesthetic conservation sensibility toward the marine environment, many of these same individuals began to fear the safety of swimming in local waters and eating local fish. I argue that this tension, coupled with the invisibility of life within the oceans and the visibility of garbage on coastal beaches, contributed to the relative lack of public interest in maintaining coastal resources outside of improving the aesthetic appearance of nearby waters. Outside of people who fished for profit or for sport, most Americans were not concerned about protecting and improving coastal fish populations. This lack of interest contributed to devastating policies for the marine environment.