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The Boston Review  recently published Andrew Kahrl's "Free the Beach", an essay adapted from his  Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP, 2018). Here's an excerpt that digs into the connection between land privatization and racism: For millennia, beaches have been considered public property. The legal principle of the public trust doctrine, which dates to the ancient Mediterranean world, has long held the seashore as public land. In 1892 the U.S. Supreme Court validated the public trust doctrine with its decision in Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois , which ruled that land covered by tidal water belonged to the public, with the state acting as a trustee. States were obligated to maintain that trust and protect the public’s right to access the shore in perpetuity. Each state, however, marked the line separating public land from private property along the shore at a different spot—some drew the line at...

A while back we noted an H-Environment roundtable on Andrew Kahrl's The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South . Now Kahrl has turned his attention to the North in Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline  (Yale UP, 2018), and Law & History Review has a review by Deborah Dinner . Dinner writes: On July 4, 1974, a daring, no-holds-barred activist named Ned Coll launched an amphibian assault on an exclusive Beach Club in Madison, Connecticut. Coll’s comrades included more than fifty children from nearby Hartford’s poor, majority African-American housing projects. The children, their mothers, and staff members of Revitalization Corps, an advocacy organization dedicated to racial equality and justice for the poor, were clothed in bathing suits and armed only with laughter, songs, and excitement. Yet the affluent white parents on the beach saw the newcomers’ entry as an ambush and quickly retrea...

[A guest book review from Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith:] In the newest addition to the Studies in American Politics series from Princeton University Press, David Vogel in California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader  (Princeton UP, 2018) asks how it is that California has had such success in protecting its environment and has become a world leader in making and implementing environmental policy and law. Vogel sketches boldly on a large canvas: This book describes what is in many respects a remarkable success story. It demonstrates how a state government has been able to overcome substantial obstacles and enact a wide range of regulations that have made measurable - though admittedly uneven – progress in protecting its environment and improving the quality of life of its residents. Although California has often seemed on the verge of ecological (as well as economic) catastrophe, it has proven remarkably resilient. The state’s ability to remain the most importan...

Bixby Creek Bridge near Big Sur, California (Bill Lane Center for the American West) The issue of public beach access has played a major role in the history of environmental law (see, e.g., here , here , and here ). It also may be responsible for some of the backlash against environmental regulation. Last year the Journal of Policy History published Jefferson Decker's "Pacific Views: Property Rights, the Regulatory State, and American Conservatism" . The article opens: In November 1976, a bookkeeper named Viktoria Consiglio used money from an inheritance to purchase a plot of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean just south of Carmel, California. Two years later, Consiglio and her husband prepared to build a one-bedroom house for use during their retirement. They submitted applications for a building permit only to have their request denied. The impediment was the California Coastal Commission, a statewide regulatory agency that Californians had recently established in order...