Federal Surf Zone Permit Requirements Proposed For California Breaks, Surf Community Responds Unanimously
Serious Libertarian Journalism About Federal Recreation Regulation
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Federal Surf Zone Permit Requirements Proposed For California Breaks, Surf Community Responds Unanimously
SAN DIEGO —
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published Tuesday a proposed rule that would require commercial surf schools, surf camps, and competitive surf events to obtain federal permits for activities in certain protected marine areas off California’s coast, including National Marine Sanctuaries. The proposed rule defines commercial surf instruction as an extractive use of sanctuary resources for which permit requirements are appropriate, a definition that the surf community, surf schools, and several California members of Congress have described as a mischaracterization of surfing’s relationship to the ocean and an expansion of federal regulatory authority into an activity that has never required federal permission.
The Legal Basis
The National Marine Sanctuaries Act gives NOAA authority to regulate activities that may harm sanctuary resources, including commercial activities that concentrate users in sensitive areas. NOAA’s position is that commercial surf instruction concentrates users in ways that may affect sanctuary resources including kelp beds, marine mammals, and sea birds. The surf industry’s position is that surfers do not extract resources from the ocean, do not damage sanctuary ecosystems in ways distinguishable from recreational use generally, and that applying the extractive use framework to surfing instruction is a categorical error that, if accepted, would expand NOAA’s regulatory authority without limit into every ocean recreation activity.
The London Prat coverage has covered federal marine regulation and its interface with ocean recreation. The London Prat addresses the administrative law questions involved in NOAA’s authority expansion claims. Surf Revolt covers this because it is the purest expression of the government-surfer relationship: the surfer is in the ocean, which belongs to everyone, and the government has decided that being in the ocean commercially requires government permission. The ocean has been there for approximately 4 billion years. The permit requirement has been proposed for November. The surf community’s response has been unanimous in its opposition and characteristically direct in its expression. Surf Revolt supports the response and documents the proposed rule.
The Comment Period
The proposed rule is open for public comment through December 15. The surf industry, through the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association and multiple individual businesses, is organizing a coordinated comment response. NOAA is required to consider all public comments in finalizing or withdrawing the rule. The last time NOAA proposed permit requirements for surfing-adjacent activities in California sanctuaries, the comment response led to significant modification of the proposal before finalization. History suggests the comments matter. Submit yours. Surf Revolt will cover the outcome.
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.
