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This is an old story.

First, take a pretty part of the country, advertise its charms, bring in the visitors, build an industry around the mixture and love the place nearly to death.

Second, be aghast at the changes, decry the damage, blame the visitors (and, in this case, the farmers), but keep the tourist industry because the region now needs it, and try to maintain all life forms.

It's all quite simple enough - except for the last bit which, short of putting a wall around the whole place and charging extortionate entry fees - is very hard indeed and will not get much easier. Consider a few statistics:
The Broads (a singular noun - it denotes an area) has 200km of unhurried and lock-free navigation. There are five rivers and 40 broads though not all of the broads are navigable and some are landlocked. Collectively, they have a water area of about 3,640 hectares (9,000 acres), the rivers accounting for nearly 80% of the total.

Sharing that space are about 13,000 registered craft of which perhaps 20% are hire craft, the rest privately owned. That total is slightly below the peak of the early 1990s but some 200,000 people spend a week or more on cruiser holidays each year while the Broads receives over a million visitors annually who collectively pass 5.4 million days there.

The conflict is obvious. On the one hand, the Broads is home to many rare plants and animals and, in a Gulf Stream-insulated part of western Europe, a vital wintering place for birds.

On the other, it is a niche tourist market which accounts for a substantial part of Norfolk's GDP. At Potter Heigham, say, in high summer, you can share the water with every man and his hot dog; at Horning, when club regatta meets novice cruisers in great numbers, the M25 seems like a doddle. And when that intensity ripples out to the farthest backwaters, as in high season it does, the delicate is invaded by the indelicate and the damage is all on one side.

This is a situation which was probably unavoidable if only because it was at first slow to develop. Recreation on the Broads goes back at least to the 'water frolics' of the early 19th Century when workers joined gentry in sailing races. The arrival of the railways in the 1880s brought tourism proper but still the environmental impact was insidious rather than spectacular.

Early diagnoses of deteriorating water quality came in the 1960s at a time of rising wealth and car ownership among the punters which meant that by the time that it was obvious which way the environmental tide was running, it was already running very hard.

Now, the 'breathing space for the cure of souls' as the naturalist, the late Ted Ellis, described the essence of the Broads, is a commodity, a finite resource ever more in demand by ever more souls in need of a cure who can be assuaged by less and less breathing space - because, down on the M25, less space is what they are used to. Thus has the very essence been watered down. And still some argue for a complete dual carriageway link with the rest of the country.

Nor is it merely a question of overcrowding affecting primarily those who would holiday quietly; it is equally one of that physical damage affecting the very fabric of the place.

Riverbanks, weakened through phosphate and nitrate enrichment of the water from sewage treatment and agricultural run-off respectively (ie the more intensive use of the surrounding land) are at the mercy of the unthinking. That enrichment encourages algae which starve aquatic plants of light; reduced plant life makes rivers more vulnerable both to silting and to bank erosion from boat wash and mooring damage.

Add in then a few ten berthers full of teenies and twenty somethings, complete with captain's hats and Jolly Rogers, churning - or even frolicking - their way from pub to waterside pub, or simply those day boats whose hirers often seem bent on breaking the distance record in their allotted time, and the banks' resistance can quickly crumble in the backwash. Flooding, perhaps by highly damaging saltwater, is now one of the more daunting threats to the ecosystem, particular in this time of climatic change. Understandably the Broads Authority is policing speed limits and mooring restrictions much more firmly these days.

For it is to the Broads Authority that the maintenance of all this falls. Born of a forerunner organisation of the 1970s after the recognition of the extent of water degradation, the Authority from the outset has had to reconcile the demands of tourism with the safeguarding of the habitat. But it gained statutory powers in 1988 and, with the Environment Agency whose brief specifically embraces flood defence and water environment, continues the task of maintaining - or, more properly, restoring - the condition of this place. It cannot limit the number of craft; more legislation would be needed for that. And anyway, the impact of tourism is only one of its concerns, though the major one.

And yet this is not a tale of wholesale degradation with great swathes of the network already reduced to the level of a municipal waterpark. Even for high season visitors, moored outside a waterfront pub in the evening with the scent of a dozen on-board barbecues wafting down stream, there can be peace and quiet if not pure solitude. And for solitude, they could try a dawn sail down the Bure across Halvergate marshes, or a walk on dew laden towpaths beside the Ant or the Thurne where the only sounds will be the moorhen, the coot and the snoring twenty somethings at their moorings. Or they could even visit in spring or autumn.

But those charged with maintaining the balance have a long term job. 'The area requires intensive care and management for the next 20 years - a marathon, not a sprint' said the then Broads Authority chief executive, Aitken Clark.

Residents and visitors alike need to bear that in mind.

This article originally appeared in the magazine, Norfolk Journal, 01284 701190