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This year the Forest History Society bestowed the Theodore C. Blegen Award, which recognizes the best scholarship in forest and conservation history published in a journal other than Environmental History, to Kara Murphy Schlichting for her article, "The Narrowing of Broad Beach: Coastal Change and Public Beaches in Malibu, California," published in Pacific Historical Review. Schlichting's research examines conflicts over public access to Malibu’s Broad Beach, highlighting how climate change-driven storms have eroded both the beach and the boundary between public and private property.

What led you to research the Pacific Coast and Malibu, California’s beaches? 

I became interested in Southern California, a place famous for its beaches, because I wanted to know more about West Coast interpretations of the Public Trust Doctrine (PTD). I remained interested because U.S. waterfronts are a particular type of real estate, imbued with a unique legal standing—this trust. Under the PTD, derived from Roman civil and English common law, the government is required to preserve public use of tidelands and protect against private monopoly. Waterfronts are important for shipping and economic interests, for transportation infrastructure (highways, airports), for municipal services (waste transfer stations, sewer treatment plants), for recreation (parks and beaches), and for residency. Waterfront property is also finite. There are many potential users and only so much land. Not surprisingly, competing interests have fought to control waterfronts. And as I learned, greater Los Angeles has hosted high-profile fights between waterfront property owners and beachgoers in search of recreation.

What role has the Public Trust Doctrine played in 20th century U.S. History?

The PTD is perhaps best known today for its post-WWII application by environmental activists, when states like California added ecological protections, public access, water-oriented recreation, and open space preservation to the trust. But while a national doctrine, the trust looks different in each state. Each state has the authority to independently define the trust’s parameters. Individual states have, at various times, failed to define the trust in legislation, leaving its application to the courts; have variously defined what sort of access (or behaviors) the trust protects; and have variously defined how far inland (from the tideline) the trust stretches (defining how far inland the public has the right to go). The public/private divide that the trust delineates is, in practice, hard to identify and police. And as beaches are in flux, environments always on the move, so is this divide. Beaches are sought-after, often fragile and shifting, environments. The PTD makes coastal spaces even more dynamic.

What did you discover about the trust and this public/private divide on Broad Beach?

On Malibu’s Broad Beach the trust is hard to pin down. The beach’s dry sand easements lack uniform parameters. In the second half of the 20th century, some homeowners whose property fronted the beach signed easements that extended publicly accessible space. These easements stretched inland twenty-five or fifty feet, to the dune vegetation line (no matter its distance from the water), or even all the way to the property’s structure; sometimes this final permit type often included a ten-foot privacy buffer line between home and beach. This created a beach where it is hard to know, without an updated California Coastal Commission map in hand, what is public and what is private. As a result, boundary disputes concerning the public trust emerged as swimmers, joggers, and sunbathers attempted to use the beach.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, private development, illegal and deceptive signs concerning dry sand easements, hidden accessways, and misleading private security guards revealed the extent to which private ownership could constitute a near monopoly of a beach. Open beach and recreation activists responded to privatization attempts by framing Malibu beach access as a social justice issue for greater Los Angeles. 

What impact is climate change having on Broad Beach and the push for (and against) public access there?

Beachfront homeowners endeavored to dissuade the public’s use of Broad Beach, to “narrow” the beach and dissuade public use. By the late 20th century, environmental forces began to narrow it ecologically as well. Broad Beach began to narrow in the 1970s. Around 1974 the mean high tide line began moving landward about two feet a year. The combination of storm surge, exceptionally high tides, and El Niño winter storm seasons, which increased the frequency of erosion-exacerbating storms, narrowed the beach by sixty-five feet at the start of the twenty-first century. By the early 2000s no public beach existed at Broad Beach high tide, severely limiting public access along shore.

In the face of environmental change, wealthy beachfront residents demanded the state get involved. Long insistent on the right to exclusivity and segregation from the general public, Broad Beach owners rediscovered the public good when erosion appeared to threaten their homes. They reframed the beach as a public asset and fragile environment in need of public protection.

How did Malibu residents and the state of California respond to this change?

In 2014 the California Coast Commission pointed out that as Broad Beach “eroded the ambulatory public-private boundary . . . [had] shifted landward. Uncertainties over the location of public beach versus private property resulted in diminished public access along the beach.” Established in the 1970s, the commission partners with coastal cities and counties to plan and regulate coastal zone land use. In the 2010s it recognized that future erosion and sea level rise would cause gradual landward migration of the shoreline and continually reshape the proposal’s public trust. The Surfrider Foundation, a non-profit environmental organization that works to protect and preserve the beaches—including beach and water cleanup and access—encouraged the commission to see Broad Beach erosion as an opportunity to rethink both coastal engineering of public beaches and beachfront development.

Territory that was once beach-front private property, the protection of which required coastal armoring and beach renourishment, might one day become tide-washed, and thus public, land. The debates around both the public’s right to enjoy tide-washed beaches and the policing of the littoral’s public-private boundary may not matter in the longer term. Sea level rise could change erosion rates and/or the elevation of mean high tide and push the California State Land Commission to potentially change property boundaries. In the twenty-first century, the longstanding challenge to public access in this exclusive Malibu enclave is colliding with the unfolding climate crisis, highlighting the entwined nature of environmental risk and real estate development on the beach.

We invite you to read Kara Murphy Schlichting award-winning article, "The Narrowing of Broad Beach: Coastal Change and Public Beaches in Malibu, California," for free online for a limited time.

Print copies of Pacific Historical Review (PHR) issue 92.2, in which this article appears, as well as other individual issues of PHR, can be purchased on the journal’s site. For ongoing access to PHR, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.

We publish PHR in partnership with the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.