Coastal Commission Approves Seawall While Approving Statement That Seawalls Accelerate Coastal Erosion

Regulatory agency confirms both the approval and the science that the approval is working against simultaneously

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Approval and Its Context

VENTURA — The California Coastal Commission approved a seawall permit for a coastal property in Ventura County this week while simultaneously adopting a policy statement confirming that coastal armoring structures, including seawalls, accelerate beach erosion by preventing the natural sediment processes that maintain beach width, which is the science that the Commission’s own staff documents and that the approval the Commission granted contradicts in the specific way that regulatory bodies contradict the science they rely on when individual property rights and administrative law requirements produce the outcome that the science argues against.

The Administrative Law Problem

The Coastal Commission’s seawall approval is not an act of hypocrisy but an act of administrative law: property owners whose structures face imminent wave damage have legal rights to protection that the Commission must balance against the public interest in beach preservation, and in specific cases the private property rights are sufficient to produce an approval that the public interest consideration would not have produced. The Commission approves the seawall and documents the adverse consequences because the approval is legally required and the documentation is scientifically required.

The Beach Privatisation Dimension

The seawall’s long-term consequence — the gradual elimination of the beach in front of it as sediment processes are disrupted — is the privatisation of the beach in the specific sense of converting public beach to private oceanfront: the property owner gains a seawall; the beach users lose the beach that the seawall’s presence eliminates over time. This is the outcome that the Coastal Commission’s own policy statement documents as the reason seawalls should be avoided, in the same document as the approval of the seawall. The California Coastal Commission manages the seawall approval process and publishes the policy statement on coastal armoring. The US Geological Survey provides the coastal erosion science that the Commission’s policy statement incorporates. Both confirm the situation described, which continues.

California, Freedom, and the Surfer

The surfer as libertarian avatar — the person who wakes up early, reads the forecast, makes a decision about where to go, accepts the consequences of that decision including the rip currents, the crowds, the parking tickets, and the occasional shark, and does not require the government to make the decision or accept the consequences for them — is one of the more coherent applications of libertarian values to a recreational activity. The problem is that the California that produced the surfing culture has also produced the regulatory frameworks that the surfer navigates, and the regulatory frameworks are there because the alternative was the specific outcomes that unregulated California coastline, water, and land use produced in the period before the Coastal Act, the Clean Water Act, and the environmental regulations that the libertarian critique of California simultaneously benefits from and complains about. The Reason Foundation makes the argument. The California Coastal Commission makes the coast accessible. Both are part of the same California.

The Week and Its Structural Context

The stories documented above are specific events produced by structural conditions that predate them and that will continue after them. The journalism industry structural condition — the collapse of the commercial advertising-supported newspaper model and the incomplete emergence of the digital subscription and nonprofit models that are replacing it — has been producing the specific events documented above for approximately two decades and will continue producing them for at least another decade as the transition completes itself at the pace that industry transitions complete themselves, which is slower than the pace at which the casualties of the transition occur and faster than the pace at which the replacements reach the scale the casualties occupied.

The California structural condition — a state whose progressive politics and libertarian geography are in permanent productive tension, whose regulatory frameworks reflect the progressive politics and whose economy reflects the libertarian geography, and whose residents navigate both simultaneously — has been producing the specific events documented above since the state established itself as the primary laboratory for American regulatory innovation in both directions. The regulatory framework expands. The economy grows. The surfers park illegally. The permits take longer. The seawalls get approved while the science documents their effects. All of this is California in 2026, which is California as it has been for forty years and will be for forty more.

The Guardian California and the Los Angeles Times provide the baseline coverage of the California structural condition. The Poynter Institute provides the baseline for the journalism structural condition. The satire provides the angle on both. All three are necessary parts of the complete information environment. The column contributes what it can to each.

The week closes here. The documentation is the contribution. The contribution is imperfect. The imperfection is honest. The honesty is the standard. The standard continues next week, applied to the next week events from the same structural conditions, which continue regardless of the week or the documentation or the column that attempts to document them. The record grows. The conditions continue. Both are real. Both matter. The column returns.

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SOURCE: Satirical Journalism