JERSEY’S rich and varied coastline is perhaps its most important natural asset.

With sandy beaches in the south, the east and the west and rugged cliffs in the north, our coast offers all the scenic and recreational features that any resident or visitor could wish to find. In addition, coastal environments provide habitats for wildlife of all sorts.

Assets require protection, and it is clear that although we might tend to take our bays and headlands too easily for granted, they are no exception to this rule.

Our signing of the Ramsar Convention on the protection of wetland areas, significant parts of the Green Zone and the recognition of a range of special sites suggest that the issue of protection is, in fact, being taken seriously.

Nevertheless, many will have welcomed the National Trust for Jersey’s ‘Line in the Sand’ initiative, which will encourage Islanders to demonstrate their active support for coastal preservation by joining hands on the sands of St Ouen’s Bay on 4 October.

That said, the National Trust’s attitude to coastal development is more complex than the symbolic hand-holding initiative might suggest. As Trust president Mike Stentiford has made clear, some developments on the coastline can pass the test of environmental acceptability.

Indeed, well-placed buildings of true quality are capable of enhancing the appeal of a landscape which, we must remember, has been steadily transformed by man ever since the Island was settled by our prehistoric ancestors.

The trick here, of course, is for our planning authorities and those who might influence them politically or at the grass-roots level to succeed in separating the wheat from the chaff at the earliest possible stage.

In some cases this will mean rejecting developments which make sound economic sense on the grounds that financial benefits for individuals and the community would be outweighed by environmental damage.

Potential redevelopment at the Watersplash and controversy over what should happen on the Plémont headland are cases in point.

It is, meanwhile, of vital importance that neither established residents nor wealthy immigrants are permitted to buy their way onto parts of the coast which manifestly must not be sullied by development. The tax contributions of the very wealthy are of importance – especially in the current economic climate – but they must not be valued above the Island’s precious and irreplaceable natural attributes.