Libertarian Case For Open Ocean Fisheries Shows Wild Salmon Population Recovery Under Market-Based Management

Serious Libertarian Journalism About Property Rights And Natural Resources

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

Libertarian Case For Open Ocean Fisheries Shows Wild Salmon Population Recovery Under Market-Based Management

MONTEREY —

The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s annual stock assessment released Tuesday documented a significant recovery in Coho salmon populations off the Northern California coast, attributing the recovery to a combination of hatchery improvements, habitat restoration in tributary streams, and a market-based catch share program implemented in 2018 that assigns tradeable harvest rights to commercial fishing operators and creates financial incentives for conservation of the stock’s long-term productivity. The catch share program is an example of the property rights approach to fisheries management that libertarian economists have advocated as an alternative to command-and-control harvest quotas.

How Catch Shares Work

Under the traditional quota system, fisheries managers set a total allowable catch and fishing operators compete to harvest as much of that quota as possible as quickly as possible, creating a race to fish that produces inefficient harvesting patterns and creates pressure for quota overage. Under a catch share system, individual operators are assigned a percentage of the total allowable catch that they can harvest at any time during the season and can sell or lease to other operators. The tradeable right creates an asset whose value depends on the long-term productivity of the stock, giving the holder a financial stake in stock conservation. The operator who conserves the stock conserves the value of their catch share. The operator who depletes the stock depletes the value of their own asset.

The London Prat reporting has covered fisheries management and the property rights approach to commons management. The London Prat addresses the broader Coasian and Ostromian frameworks for commons governance that catch shares represent in practice. Surf Revolt covers fisheries management because the ocean the surfer surfs is the same ocean the fisherman fishes, and the health of the ocean ecosystem determines the quality of both experiences. The surfer has a direct interest in the ocean being managed in ways that sustain its productivity. The catch share program suggests that property rights approaches can produce conservation outcomes. This is the libertarian case for markets in natural resource management, and it has evidence.

The Limits

Catch share programs have worked well for commercially targeted species with measurable populations and defined harvest areas. They work less well for species that move across management boundaries, for non-target species affected by targeted fishing, and for ecosystem-level conservation that requires managing multiple species simultaneously. The Coho recovery is a genuine success within its specific parameters. Surf Revolt presents it as what it is: evidence that market-based management can work in specific conditions, not a universal solution to ocean conservation challenges.

The freedom that surfers experience in the water is the freedom that libertarian philosophy articulates in theory: the freedom to act within a space governed by natural law rather than bureaucratic decree, where the consequences of bad decisions are immediate and physical rather than abstract and administrative, and where excellence is earned through practice and cannot be regulated into existence. Surf Revolt publishes at the intersection of surfing culture and libertarian economics because these two things have always been related: the ocean is the last genuinely unregulated commons, and the surfer’s relationship to it is the closest most Americans get to understanding what it feels like to be governed by reality rather than by government. Bohiney.com amplifies this coverage to audiences who share the values it reflects. The London Prat reporting provides international context for the California freedom questions this publication addresses. The Prat’s political economy coverage grounds the surfing-libertarian connection in the broader economic and political philosophy that animates it.

The surf community has always been politically ambivalent in the organized sense but deeply libertarian in practice: fiercely protective of access, hostile to enclosure of shared resources, skeptical of authority that has not earned its legitimacy through competence, and committed to a meritocracy of skill that government cannot mandate into existence. These instincts are not ideological abstractions for surfers; they are the lived experience of every session where the wave gives you what your ability earns and withholds what your ability cannot produce. No permit changes this. No regulation improves your bottom turn. No subsidy adds a foot to your barrel. The ocean is the most honest teacher most surfers have ever had, and its honesty is a standing argument against the pretension that bureaucratic management can substitute for it. Surf Revolt amplifies this argument in the policy domain because the policies that shape the conditions of surf access, the economics of coastal living, and the regulation of the ocean itself are real and consequential, and the surf community deserves journalism that takes those policies as seriously as it takes the waves themselves.

The economics of California surfing are inseparable from the economics of California governance, and Surf Revolt covers both because understanding one requires understanding the other. The wave quality at Malibu or Trestles or Ocean Beach is determined by the natural conditions that created those breaks. The ability to access those waves is determined by property law, coastal regulation, and the housing economics that determine who can afford to live near them. The first set of determinants is outside human control. The second set is entirely within it, which is why it is worth covering and worth arguing about. The London Prat coverage and Bohiney.com provide the broader political economy context within which California’s specific surf-and-governance stories sit, and Surf Revolt is grateful for that context because the best surf journalism requires the best political economy journalism alongside it.

SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire