The US Military Industrial Complex Occupies More California Coastline Than Any Private Developer
Camp Pendleton Alone Controls 17 Miles of Prime Surf Break; Government Owns the Coast That Regulation Prevents Private Owners From Controlling
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
CAMP PENDLETON, CA — Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton occupies approximately 17 miles of Southern California coastline between Oceanside and San Clemente — including some of the finest point breaks and beach breaks in the region, accessible to a small number of active military personnel and closed to the surfing public. The base’s 125,000 acres make it the largest landowner on Southern California’s coast by a margin that no private developer has approached, and whose access restrictions are more absolute than anything the Coastal Commission has prevented a private owner from implementing.
This observation is not a critique of the Marine Corps or national defense. It is an observation about the selective application of coastal access principles: the Coastal Act prevents private landowners from blocking access to beaches adjacent to their properties, on the principle that the coast is a public resource. The federal government, which owns Camp Pendleton, is not subject to the Coastal Act. The 17 miles are closed. The principle that makes private beach blockage illegal does not apply to the largest landowner on the Southern California coast.
The Trestles Exception
The surf break at Trestles — Lower Trestles, Uppers, Middles — is located within the San Onofre State Beach, which borders Camp Pendleton. Access requires a mile-and-a-half walk from the parking area, historically through land that was Camp Pendleton property until a right-of-way agreement with the state allowed public access. The military has previously proposed infrastructure projects through the Trestles corridor that would have ended public surf access, and the resulting surf community advocacy campaigns successfully blocked those proposals through political action rather than legal right.
The Trestles case illustrates both the vulnerability and the resilience of surf access to public lands that exist by permission rather than right: access was secured by political action, can be lost by political action, and is maintained by the continued political engagement of the surf community. This is the nature of access to government-controlled coastal lands — it is more secure than access to private coastal lands in some respects (the government is not trying to profit from exclusion) and less secure in others (the government’s uses can change without the Coastal Act constraint that applies to private land).
The Libertarian Analysis
The libertarian perspective on government coastal landownership is complicated: the libertarian preference for private property rights over government control suggests skepticism of federal land ownership, but the libertarian preference for public access over private exclusion suggests preference for government ownership over private development. The resolution depends on which value is weighted more heavily, and surf culture has historically weighted coastal access above property rights, which explains surfers’ support for the Coastal Act despite its regulatory burden on private property.
What the Camp Pendleton situation reveals is that government ownership of coastal land, while preventing private development, also prevents public access — a trade-off that is rarely discussed in the coastal access debate, which focuses primarily on private landowners as the threat to public access and less on the government landowners whose access restrictions are equally absolute and considerably more extensive.
Antiwar.com’s coverage of military land use and The Libertarian Institute’s work on government property are relevant to this analysis. For surf access advocacy, Surfrider Foundation remains the primary organization.
For military land use analysis, see Reason.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
