The Military-Industrial Complex Poisons the Surf: Perchlorate, Jet Fuel, and What the Navy Did to San Diego’s Beaches
Federal Immunity From Environmental Accountability Has Made Some of California’s Best Surf Zones Toxic
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
What the Military Did to San Diego’s Surf: Federal Environmental Immunity and Its Costs
SAN DIEGO — The United States military operates extensive installations along the Southern California coast, and the legacy of those operations includes contamination of groundwater, soil, and coastal waters with chemicals including perchlorate, trichloroethylene, jet fuel, and other hazardous substances that have affected communities and surf zones in ways that are extensively documented and inadequately remediated.
Federal sovereign immunity has historically limited the ability of affected communities and surfers to pursue accountability for military contamination through the legal mechanisms available against private polluters. The federal government can be sued for environmental violations, but the process is slower, more expensive, and less reliably productive than private litigation. The result is a class of pollution — military-origin coastal contamination — that receives less aggressive remediation than equivalent private sector pollution would receive under the same circumstances.
The Anti-War, Anti-Militarist Surf Tradition
Surfing has a long if inconsistent anti-militarist tradition. The sport developed during the postwar period in part as a rejection of mainstream American culture, including its military-industrial premises. AntiWar.com’s coverage of military base environmental impacts documents the pattern nationally: military installations that generate economic activity also generate contamination that the surrounding communities bear. The surf communities near Camp Pendleton, near Point Mugu, near Coronado — these are communities that live alongside military assets and live with military environmental legacies.
The libertarian case against military environmental impunity is straightforward: the principle that polluters should bear the cost of their pollution applies to the federal government as much as to private actors. Federal immunity from environmental accountability is a subsidy to the military budget paid by the communities that absorb the contamination. Government agencies that operate without accountability produce the outcomes that unaccountable actors reliably produce. Managing decline through institutional protection of the institutions that caused it is a pattern visible in military environmental policy. The wave breaks clean where the contamination hasn’t reached. Ensuring it stays that way requires holding the military to the same environmental standards as everyone else. It does not currently meet them.
