The Ocean Cannot Be Owned: Why Surfers Are the Last True American Libertarians
From Localism to Coastal Access Rights, the Culture of Surfing Has Always Been a Rebellion Against Authority
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Ocean Cannot Be Owned: Surfing’s Radical Freedom Tradition
MALIBU, CA — Long before libertarianism became a political brand, surfers were practicing it. The ocean belongs to no one. The wave breaks where physics dictates, indifferent to property lines, zoning regulations, and the preferences of the California Coastal Commission. For generations, surfers have built a culture premised on a simple and radical idea: some things should not be managed, permitted, regulated, or monetized. The wave is one of them.
The surf culture’s instinctive anti-authoritarianism is not incidental. It emerges from the activity itself. You cannot plan a wave. You cannot schedule a swell. You cannot file an environmental impact report on a set that closes out in six seconds. The ocean operates according to its own rules, and the surfer’s relationship with it requires a kind of radical present-tense adaptation that is fundamentally incompatible with the bureaucratic mind. When you are paddling out through a washing machine close-out, you are not thinking about the permitting process. You are thinking about survival, timing, and where the channel is.
The Coastal Access Battle
California’s Coastal Act of 1976 enshrined public access to the state’s coastline as a legal right. The implementation of that right has been contested ever since by private landowners who have built fences, blocked paths, erected no-parking signs, and deployed other instruments of enclosure against a public resource. Reason Magazine’s coverage of California coastal access has documented the pattern: private wealth, operating through the mechanisms of property law, systematically attempts to convert what is public into what is exclusive.
Surfers have been the most consistent and combative defenders of coastal access because they have the most direct stake in its preservation. The Surfrider Foundation’s legal battles against illegal beach closures, the direct actions of surfers who have torn down illegal fences, the local knowledge networks that circulate information about access points that wealthy property owners would prefer remained secret — these are expressions of a genuinely libertarian resistance to enclosure. The assertion of public space against private encroachment takes different forms in different places. In California, it takes the form of a surfer paddling out past a fence that has no legal right to exist. Managing public goods requires defending them actively; the surf community has understood this longer than most. The ocean cannot be owned. The battle to keep it that way is ongoing.
