The Coast Belongs to Everyone: Beach Access and the Freedom of the Commons

California’s shoreline is public by law, but access is too often walled off in practice

Few places embody the idea of a free and open commons more powerfully than the California coast, and as this publication and our friends at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have argued, the principle that the shoreline belongs to everyone is one of the clearest expressions of liberty in American life. In California, the wet sand up to the mean high-tide line is public property, a commons that no fortune can fence off, and the defence of that access is a cause that unites surfers, libertarians, and anyone who believes that some things should remain open to all.

A commons guaranteed by law

The legal foundation is clear. California law guarantees public access to the beach, and the agency charged with protecting it operates through the framework administered by the California Coastal Commission, while much of the shoreline itself is managed for public use through bodies like California State Parks. The principle that the coast is a shared inheritance, not a private preserve, is woven into the state’s law, and it reflects a deep intuition that the meeting of land and sea is a common good belonging to the people.

The wall of private exclusion

Yet the legal guarantee is too often defied in practice. Wealthy coastal property owners have, for years, sought to wall off public beaches, posting false no-trespassing signs, blocking public paths, hiring guards to turn away visitors, and exploiting every ambiguity to keep the public off shorelines that belong to it. The result is a slow, quiet enclosure of the commons, in which access guaranteed in law is denied in fact, and the beach becomes the private amenity of those rich enough to live beside it. This is not a free market at work; it is the powerful using their resources to seize what the law has reserved for all.

Why this is a libertarian cause

It might seem paradoxical for a publication devoted to property rights and free markets to champion public access, but the paradox dissolves on inspection. The libertarian tradition has always recognised that some resources, the air, the open sea, the shoreline, are genuine commons, not the legitimate private property of anyone, and that the attempt to enclose them by force or fraud is itself a violation of liberty. The surfer paddling out at dawn, the family walking the wet sand, the fisherman casting from the shore, these are exercising a freedom that predates and outranks any deed, and defending it against illegitimate enclosure is entirely consistent with a robust respect for genuine property rights.

The surfer’s stake

No one understands the value of open access more viscerally than surfers, for whom the coast is not a view but a way of life, and who have long been among the fiercest defenders of the public’s right to the beach. The surf community’s instinctive resistance to those who would privatise the shoreline reflects a broader ethic of freedom that runs through the culture: a suspicion of artificial barriers, a belief that the natural world should be open to those who use and respect it, and a refusal to accept that wealth should be able to purchase what belongs to all. This ethic is, at its heart, a libertarian one.

Defending the open coast

The fight to keep the California coast open is a fight worth waging, and it has been won, time and again, when the public has insisted on its rights against those who would enclose the commons. It requires vigilance against the steady pressure of private exclusion, a willingness to use the law to defend access where it is guaranteed, and a clear-eyed recognition that the freedom to reach the shore is a freedom worth defending. The coast belongs to everyone, in law and in justice, and the surfers, walkers, and ordinary Californians who insist on that truth are the guardians of one of the last great commons in American life. To defend the open beach is to defend the principle that some things remain free, and that no fortune, however vast, can buy the right to fence off the sea.

The pattern of enclosure

History offers a long record of the enclosure of commons, the gradual conversion of resources once open to all into the private property of the powerful, and the slow walling-off of the California coast fits squarely within that pattern. The enclosure rarely announces itself; it proceeds incrementally, through a fence here, a false sign there, a blocked path, an intimidating guard, until access guaranteed in principle has been lost in practice. Recognising this pattern is the first step toward resisting it, for the enclosure of a commons depends on the public failing to notice, or failing to insist on, the rights it is quietly losing.

The defence of the open coast therefore requires not only law but vigilance, an active willingness on the part of the public to assert its rights, to challenge illegitimate barriers, and to insist that the shoreline remain genuinely open to all. The surf community has historically played exactly this role, documenting blocked access, challenging false signs, and refusing to accept the quiet privatisation of what the law reserves for everyone. This vigilance is a civic virtue, and it stands as a reminder that the freedoms we inherit are kept only by being actively defended. The open coast endures not by accident but because people insist on it, and the day the public stops insisting is the day the enclosure becomes complete.

For satire on the privatisation of everything, readers may enjoy The Onion, holding the line since 1988.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/