The Ocean Conservation That Actually Works Is Property Rights, Not Regulation; Marine Protected Areas Prove It
The Research on Marine Protected Areas Shows That Defined Exclusive Zones Restore Fish Populations Better Than Open Regulation
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Marine Protected Areas: The Ocean Conservation That Works Through Property Rights Logic
CALIFORNIA — Marine Protected Areas — designated ocean zones where fishing, development, and certain human activities are restricted — have produced documented evidence of ecosystem recovery in California coastal waters. Fish populations inside MPAs are significantly larger and more diverse than in comparable unprotected areas. Kelp forests within MPAs have recovered in areas where they had declined. The biological evidence for MPA effectiveness is robust. What is less discussed in conservation circles is that MPAs work through a mechanism that is fundamentally property-rights-based rather than regulatory: they define an exclusive zone, restrict access, and allow the ecosystem within that zone to recover without the tragedy-of-the-commons dynamic that open access produces.
The tragedy of the commons in ocean fisheries is the libertarian analysis that Elinor Ostrom and Garrett Hardin both addressed: when a resource is open to all and unregulated, individual rational actors overexploit it. The MPA solution — defining zones with restricted access — creates the functional equivalent of a property right that prevents the exploitation dynamic. The enforcement is governmental, but the logic is private property logic applied to a commons.
The Surf Implication
Surfers benefit from healthy marine ecosystems: kelp forests reduce swell energy in undesirable ways but also support the fish and marine life that make coastal waters worth being in. The San Onofre Marine Conservation Area adjacent to San Onofre State Beach has produced measurably improved kelp and fish populations. Surfers who use the adjacent breaks benefit from this without having organized to produce it. The conservation argument for MPAs is also a surf quality argument, and the mechanism by which MPAs work — defined zones with restricted access — is consistent with the property rights framework that libertarians should favor over open-access regulation.
Reason’s environmental economics coverage has addressed the property rights approach to ocean conservation; managing shared natural resources through defined access rights produces better conservation outcomes than either open access or purely command-and-control regulation. MPAs are the ocean version of this insight. The surf community should engage with the property rights argument for them rather than leaving ocean conservation entirely to the regulatory advocacy framing that it currently occupies.
