Petition Cites “Unreasonable Volumes of Stoked People” as Primary Grievance

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

MALIBU, CA — A coalition of Malibu surfers representing what organizers call “everyone who remembers when this break had parking” submitted a formal petition to the Pacific Ocean this week requesting that it cease generating photogenic, accessible, beginner-friendly waves that attract non-local surfers to their preferred spots.

The Petition: What It Says and Why the Ocean Hasn’t Read It

The petition, which has been circulating at two Malibu parking lots and one smoothie shop for approximately three weeks, requests that the Pacific Ocean “please consider redirecting favorable surf conditions to less iconic destinations, such as the inland portions of Los Angeles County, where people are already stuck in traffic and have no reasonable expectation of good waves.”

The document, which runs to four pages and includes an appendix of aerial photographs demonstrating lineup crowding at various states of swell, was formally addressed to “The Pacific Ocean, c/o The Jet Stream and Associated Meteorological Systems.” As of press time, the Ocean has not responded, which petition organizers interpret as neither rejection nor acceptance, but rather “the same energy the Ocean has always brought to human concerns, which is: none.”

The petition has gathered 340 signatures, which is approximately the number of surfers currently in the water at any given Malibu break on a weekend morning with 3-to-4-foot surf and offshore winds, which is to say: roughly everyone who has a complaint about the crowds and also roughly everyone creating them.

The Localism Question

Southern California surf localism, which operates on a spectrum from “friendly territorial instinct” to “behavior that makes headline news,” has always been a cultural feature of the California coast. Malibu, in particular, has a history with this dynamic that predates most of the surfers currently participating in it.

The original Malibu locals of the 1950s and 1960s, who surfed a largely empty break on wooden and early fiberglass boards, would likely have complex feelings about the current debate, given that the “locals” of today include people who drove from the Valley, which is itself a form of travel that earlier generations of Malibu surfers would have found puzzling.

The epistemological problem with surf localism — who exactly is local enough to claim a break, and at what point does a regular visitor become a local, and does anyone actually own the ocean — is one that California courts have addressed in various forms without resolving to anyone’s satisfaction, including the courts’.

What Actually Happened

The immediate trigger for the petition was a Memorial Day weekend that brought an unusually large number of beginner surfers to First Point, many of them equipped with foam boards rented from shops that have discovered foam boards are extremely profitable because they are nearly indestructible and can be re-rented to the next person who wants to experience the ocean recreationally without injury.

The foam board, viewed from the perspective of experienced Malibu surfers, represents a democratization of surfing that is philosophically correct and practically catastrophic. “Anyone can surf,” acknowledged local veteran Brenda Coyle, 52, who has been surfing Malibu since 1991 and can perform a nose ride that would make the 1960s icons nod approvingly. “That’s wonderful. It is also what is happening to this parking situation, and those are two facts that coexist in tension.”

The petition does not, in its text, explicitly request that anyone stop surfing. It requests only that the conditions be redistributed, which its authors acknowledge is not within human power to implement but felt important to articulate anyway.

The California Coastal Commission, which manages public access to California’s coastline under the principle that the ocean belongs to everyone, did not respond to the petition, having not received it, since it was addressed to the Pacific Ocean rather than any regulatory body.

The ocean, for its part, continued producing waves of various sizes and quality throughout the week, with no apparent reference to human preference, which local surfers acknowledged was consistent with its historical behavior.

More Malibu dispatches, SoCal surf culture analysis, and petitions addressed to large bodies of water: The London Prat.

Satire pairing well with brine: The Onion and The Daily Mash.

The Localism Literature: A Brief Survey

Surf localism has generated more written analysis than almost any other aspect of surf culture, which is ironic given that the ethic it describes is fundamentally anti-literary — it’s about presence, territory, and physical fact rather than narrative. Still, the shelves of surf literature contain numerous explorations of what it means to claim ownership of a wave, a break, or a stretch of coastline that belongs, legally and morally, to everyone.

The California Coastal Act of 1976, which established that all California beaches below the mean high tide line are public property, resolved the legal question definitively in favor of access. It did not, however, resolve the social question of whether surfers who have surfed a break for decades have some legitimate claim to preferential treatment in the lineup, which is the question that actually animates local surf culture on a daily basis.

The honest answer, which experienced local surfers will sometimes admit in private, is: no, not legally, but yes, experientially. The person who learned to read a break over years of daily sessions does know it better than the person visiting for the first time. That knowledge creates a relationship. The relationship generates feelings of ownership. The feelings of ownership sometimes generate behavior that ranges from mild to concerning. None of this is legally supported. All of it is humanly understandable. The petition to the Pacific Ocean, in this context, is at least honest about targeting the correct party: the actual source of the problem, which is not the tourists but the waves they were attracted by.

Localism satire also available at: The Onion and The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/