We all want a piece of the world\u2019s Monacos. Population has surged in the coastal world. In China, the move to the coast has been particularly high in recent years at over three times the national rate. In the United States, 52 percent of the population lives in a coastal watershed, which accounts for 15 percent of the landmass, which is a 45 percent increase from 1970 to 2010. In Canada, the coastal population growth rate has been on the rise for decades: head in the opposite direction of the oceans\u2019 shores and population decreases exponentially. Keep in mind, measuring coastal population relies on a number of factors\u2014density, distribution, topography\u2014and will vary from country to country. But, everyone agrees most megacities hug the coast, and people continue to crowd the world\u2019s continental fringes.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>China\u2019s explosive development has led to explosive population growth on its coasts. Photo by Jon Arnold\/JAI\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n
Crowded coastal communities spend a lot of energy squabbling over their shorelines. The strong social and territorial behaviors of humans likely emerged, or were reinforced, by living along the bounteous shore over 100,000 years ago.<\/a> We\u2019ve been duking it out ever since; we always will. And we should: it\u2019s valuable territory, though the politics and economics of the modern world have complicated our struggles.<\/p>\n The coasts are places of wonder and plunder, where the sea is both fickle\u2014moving her boundaries daily, often hurling squalls and storms\u2014and steadfast, offering sustenance and travel. As flexible as the shoreline is, so too has been our relationship with the land, marine resources, and each other. But a fundamental change washed over the world a few centuries ago. What was once a tractable relationship became one of absolutes. It happened when we put a price tag on coastal land. Controlling the coast became a zero-sum game. There would be winners and losers.<\/p>\n In Owning the Earth<\/em>, Andro Linklater explores what it means to carve up land and privatize what was once a public resource. Like many theorists, Linklater calls the move to private individually owned property a land-grab. Or as Itai Sened writes in more scholarly phrasing in The Political Institution of Private Property<\/em>, \u201cThere is nothing natural, or particularly ethical, about property rights, as such. Property rights emerge because they serve some tangible interests of particular individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n The idea that an individual could own a piece of the Earth\u2019s surface erupted around the 1500s. By a number of accounts, it was spurred by something as mortal as a European population boom: more people needed clothes, clothes were made out of wool, and sheep provided wool. Traditionally, sheep grazed over common land and peasants lived a subsistence lifestyle. But with money to be made on the market, those savvy enough\u2014and already holding some reign of power\u2014to equate privately owned land with material wealth, tossed off peasants, enclosed fields, contained their sheep, and made a fortune. The English exported this radical new concept of owning the Earth pretty much immediately.<\/p>\n They look cute, but a European population boom meant more people, more clothes, more wool, and more sheep. The result? Now is a good time to read the essay if you haven\u2019t already. Photo by Joe McDonald\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n In 1583, Englishman Sir Humphrey Gilbert, explorer and scientist, sailed into the harbor in St. John\u2019s, Newfoundland and promptly surveyed the land at the water\u2019s edge. European fishermen, who had already muscled in on the common resource of the indigenous Mi\u2019kmaq, dotted the shoreline, unloading their cod and drying it on the patch of beach they would claim each season, through a time-honored first come, first served basis. But Queen Elizabeth I had granted Gilbert the right to own all the \u201csoyles\u201d of the lands he encountered. So he carved up the land, declared it privately owned, and charged each fisherman rent. He had conjured a price tag for the beach. So began the methodical looting of the coastal commons and its social and ecological integrity; private property as a global economic and political force has been practically unstoppable ever since.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important at this point to distinguish individual private property from the proprietary kind of ownership held over common land. Cultures the world over, past and present, have had various forms of land and resource control involving some sort of social contract with family, communities, monarchs, or gods. This was not the case for individuals who owned a patch of ground; the government and laws that sprung up around landowners extended them new powers and rights, more civil liberties, and, before long, more legal protections by the state.<\/p>\n The conundrum of how private property fit in with traditional communities didn\u2019t go unnoticed from the outset\u2014society was grappling with a radical concept. It was troubling. To paraphrase 17th-century English political theorist James Harrington writing in The Commonwealth of Oceana<\/em>: the ruling class is the class that owns the most property, and hence, they make the laws. \u201cThe system of government is determined by the system of ownership,\u201d writes Richard Schlatter in Private Property: The History of an Idea<\/em>. For Harrington, a prime concern for the ruling class should be balancing the distribution of land; otherwise they would court political revolution.<\/p>\n The concept of private property burst into the world when what was once considered a shared resource\u2014common grazing land for sheep\u2014was enclosed. Photo by Matthias Graben\/imageBROKER\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n This push and pull\u2014the rights of the commoner versus the rights of the landowner and the role of government\u2014has been a dynamic discussion among political theorists, economists, and law professors for hundreds of years. It\u2019s still troubling and likely always will be: they\u2019re oppositional forces that coexist. It remains normal to question the role of private property in society, because at various times everyone is a commoner. Commoner or landowner, we all need each other. The environment, for example, doesn\u2019t respect political or legal boundaries, says Deborah Curran, a law professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Whether we approach the coastline from a social, economic, or ecological perspective, Curran says, \u201cno one landowner can take care of all of our needs. There needs to be a sense of the whole.\u201d<\/p>\n An ecological preserve, a working waterfront, a military base, a recreational beach. Each succeeds or fails depending on the greater whole, the surrounding communities.<\/p>\n One of the most contested public spaces is the beach. What was once a place of toil became, in the 19th and 20th centuries in Western societies, a coveted paradise, and an even newer idea than private property. Before that, \u201cchasing the shore,\u201d which once meant going to the beach for anything other than work, was weird. Leisure time, higher wages, trains, and automobiles changed all that when going to \u201cThe Beach\u201d became a thing, and owning the beach an even bigger thing. Once beach leisure was commodified as a lifestyle, another coastal battlefront emerged: public beach access. Take Malibu, California, as an example. It\u2019s a place awash in wealthy landowners with private properties that become public property below the high tideline. And defining where the line between public and private\u2014between what the homeowners say is theirs and what the beach-loving locals say is everyone\u2019s\u2014routinely results in public fighting. Landowners resort to subterfuge by locking gates, strategically planting shrubbery, even building a fake garage to block the commons. In response, the public trumpets the callousness of such cheats. The police are called; the courts get clogged; it\u2019s a relentless stage for conflict.<\/p>\n But sometimes societies bend the rules of the game. Scotland, for example, has some of the most progressive access legislation, informally called the \u201cright to roam<\/a>\u201d (which allows people to cross privately owned property without being accused of trespassing). Lobbying for access dates back almost two centuries. The impetus to formalize a cultural moral right of public access was the staggering unequal distribution of Scottish land. By the early 21st century, just 432 landowners held half the country\u2019s privately owned land, a level of concentration unrivaled in Europe. In 2003, Scotland adopted the Land Reform Act, finally solidifying the right, and Ramblers, members of a walking charity that advocates for public access, went to court a few times to test the legislation. It held and still does. From the Scottish experience, it seems that without a public fight, few landowners or governments can be persuaded to protect or return a commons.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you don\u2019t have statutory right, it can be taken away,\u201d says Helen Todd, campaigns and policy manager at Ramblers Scotland. \u201cI do think it\u2019s massively important to protect access. It\u2019s fundamental to the human relationship with the land.\u201d<\/p>\n The commons is also fundamental to community relationships. As Gregory Alexander, a law professor at Cornell University in New York who has written about the origins of Scotland\u2019s right to roam legislation, says, \u201cEqual access is good for a society, good for democracy.\u201d It\u2019s inclusive and binding, a defense of the notion that our lives together are more than a series of commercial transactions.<\/p>\n And in his 2008 paper, \u201cOwnership and Obligations: The Human Flourishing Theory of Property,\u201d Alexander writes, \u201cWe live in a society characterized by conditions of increasing congestion and social interdependency. The social-obligation theory recognizes that those very conditions, especially our interdependency, create for all property owners an obligation to contribute, in ways that are appropriate to them, to the vitality of the community\u2019s material infrastructure that facilitate the cultivation of affiliation, among other essential human capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n To flourish, Alexander writes, humans need individual autonomy, personal security and privacy, self-determination, community, and equality.<\/p>\n If a society\u2019s desired outcome is for humans to flourish, the right to exclude the public is contradictory. If exclusion is a right, then that makes human flourishing a zero-sum game, too: some humans get to flourish at the expense of others. And who gets to decide who wins? The problem extends beyond who gets to have a fun time at the beach.<\/p>\n In the article \u201cOkinawa\u2019s Elders Rage Against the Marines<\/a>,\u201d writer Jon Letman explores how little power the Okinawans have over the geopolitical role of their island as a strategic military point in Asia. Okinawa accounts for less than one percent of Japanese territory, yet hosts close to 75 percent of all American bases in Japan, a burden the local community believes is based on discrimination against a poorer population with little political clout. The Okinawans lose their autonomy and self-determination to the US and Japanese governments; they lose the game.<\/p>\n In India, Srinath Perur writes about a small community of subsistence fishermen fighting a classic battle between a commons lifestyle and the marketplace. For generations, they\u2019ve seasonally camped and fished on the Arabian Sea\u2019s Gulf of Kutch, their commons. They have a moral claim to the resource, yet hold nothing that calls them \u201cowners.\u201d As industry, supported by government, moves in\u2014grabbing land and excluding fishermen from the intertidal zone\u2014the Wagher fishermen<\/a> lose their autonomy, self-determination, and community; they lose the game.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of subsistence cultures have no clear legal boundaries,\u201d says David Bollier, author of Think Like a Commoner<\/em>. \u201cYet things change, the world is a dynamic place. There must be different ways that one can manage property other than in the clear and Western sense of surveying and creating blocks of it.\u201d<\/p>\n The human capacity for imagination runs deep. But laws have a way of structuring our actions to the detriment of any dreams of resurrecting or protecting a coastal commons. \u201cLaw doesn\u2019t deal well with sharing things. Law wants us to have a particular right to do something,\u201d Curran says.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no accident that two cherished ideas integral to global society emerged alongside private property rights: human rights and democracy. Each of these pathways to justice helps thwart a side effect of private property laws: greed, a common human failing. Name a society that existed pre-private property in which greed was good. To Plato, avarice started war, caused civil strife, and was personally immoral. Confucius, the Bhagavad-Gita<\/em>, the Judaic commandments are all anti-greed because the powerful have always wanted their own private Malibus. And the Romans have always wanted their Bay of Naples, writes Heather Pringle in an article that explores the fishy business of an ancient \u201c1%.\u201d<\/a> The Roman Empire\u2019s Neapolitan waterfront became an economic investment for the wealthy to the detriment of the working poor. Wealthy Romans enclosed the sea.<\/p>\n The Romans didn\u2019t have private property laws like we do today, but the powerful hogged a common resource. Their development of the Bay of Naples foreshadowed a complex problem along the coveted coast today, which is complicated by modern property laws: gentrification. Gentrification can prick a city\u2019s heart and gut its neighborhoods physically and psychologically as the landscape transforms. That ugly dock you fished from? The cafe with the cheap coffee and priceless view? That mysterious building you were sure was once a brothel? Gone in one day; the past is so close you can watch its dust settling. Paternoster, South Africa<\/a>; Vancouver, Canada<\/a>; Haifa, Israel<\/a>; Havana, Cuba<\/a>. Each city has a story of gentrification. Each in conflict with the powerful, each looking for a way around the international real estate market, each hoping to win the game.<\/p>\n This is not to say gentrification is always bad; it could be a force for good when the community at large is involved. Economist Elinor Ostrom, whose work to understand successfully managed commons won her the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, found that a role for commoners (a diversity of local users) in creating and influencing the rules is essential. There is no way Darwin, Australia, could return its coastal control to crocodiles without locals buying into the presence of a predator that would eat the family pet, and the family, if given a chance. Hakai Magazine<\/em> senior editor Shanna Baker swam with a crocodile to bring us the story \u201cCrocodile Rising<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The rich and powerful often prevent the public from accessing valuable beach property. Photo by Steve McDonough\/Masterfile\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n But, as Curran says, there are limits to local control. \u201cTo me it\u2019s a push and pull; how do you get a neighborhood not to be racist, for example? They might have a great democratic system, but what if they are specific about who can live there? We need normative standards.\u201d Social and ecological standards.<\/p>\n Every community needs to acknowledge a greater ecological whole or they find themselves in a tenuous position as nature threatens to swallow their communities. Permanent structures have a way of messing up an intertidal ecosystem\u2019s natural migration inland, a response to rising sea levels and storms. Big developed cities such as Miami, Kolkata, Venice flail to stay above rising tides. Yet the sea chips away at smaller communities that have depended for generations on the coast for a subsistence lifestyle, such as the farmers in the Ayeyarwady (or Irrawaddy) Delta, the \u201crice bowl\u201d of Myanmar and the focus of the photo essay \u201cCoastal Squeeze<\/a>\u201d by Taylor Weidman. Nature will always win the game if we insist on ignoring her rules and playing only by our own.<\/p>\n I love these stories. They are universal, there is no easy solution, but they show that people will not give up on their shoreline and their neighborhoods without a fight. Even an absurd fight like the one against nature. Or one man\u2019s private battle to remain in his neighborhood, a place he\u2019s called home for decades, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Vancouver, British Columbia. Writer Laura Trethewey takes readers on a journey with Randy van Eyk in \u201cVancouver\u2019s Other Housing Crisis<\/a>,\u201d as the weathered sailor steers his sailboat around the city\u2019s harbor, tucking into watery nooks for a night or two, outmaneuvering the regulations that protect those who own bits of land, not those who need affordable housing.<\/p>\n Controlling or owning the coastline is not for the faint of heart; it\u2019s a constant battle.<\/p>\n For the next few weeks, travel to South Africa<\/a>, Japan<\/a>, Israel<\/a>, Canada<\/a>, Myanmar<\/a>, India<\/a>, Scotland<\/a>, Cuba<\/a>, Australia<\/a>, and even Ancient Rome<\/a> with <\/em>Hakai Magazine as our writers unpack clashes around the globe. The stories you will encounter are at once different, but also the same: a battle for control.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Squabbling over some of the world\u2019s most valuable territory, the shoreline, is ultimately a very human thing to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12852,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[199],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"Squabbling over some of the world\u2019s most valuable territory, the shoreline, is ultimately a very human thing to do.","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[15596]}],"word_count_override":"","podbean1":"","podbean2":"","redirect":"","geolocation":null,"related":[16216,16207],"twitterimage":14390,"facebookimage":13889,"twitterdescription":"","edited":"","factchecked":"","code":"","no_old_story_flag":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16215"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_features"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20441,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16215\/revisions\/20441"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16207"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/features\/16216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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