Jason J. Crawford

This is where I was back in April of 2009 as I wandered through the crowd on the beaches below the college town of Isla Vista at what was to be an annual clandestine party called Floatopia. Since then Floatopia has pretty much been deflated by the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors with the decision to permanently ban alcohol consumption on Isla Vista beaches. As someone who regularly surfs by the point at the end of that picture, I can appreciate the prevention of trash being left behind since Floatopia has a very disastrous environmental footprint. While the decision to ban alcohol seems excessive, the decision has me wondering about the management of our beaches. Who gets to say who comes and goes and what they can do.

Despite being a free-flowing, open ended and amorphous gathering of people, by most standards Floatopia’s excess would be regarded as a tragedy of the commons. The unavailability of access, the externalities of waste and destruction matched others beaches whose utility is diminished by excessive overcrowding. Imagine trying to surf at this beach in China. It’s just not going to happen:

Most of us will never see beaches with crowds like this but for the rest of us, the question is how do we manage our own beaches without forfeiting the commons? David Bollier’s article at Onthecommons.org titled ‘A Surfing Commons in Hawaii‘ praises the “localism” of the Wolfpak as an example of managing the commons by a new generation of Hawaiian surfers stemming from Da Hui who have assumed a de facto role to police some of Hawaii’s most popular surf spots; most notably Pipeline.  While I often agree with Bollier, I don’t think he fully understands what I will call a “tragedy of the surfing commons” or what localism as a solution ultimately entails.

Bollier appears to have constructed his praise almost entirely on an article (which he cites in the piece) from the New York Times entitled ‘Rough Waves, Tougher Beaches‘ by Matt Higgins, who in turn seems informed by the commercial content that has come down the surfing-capitalist pike such as documentary Bustin’ Down the Door (detailing the conflict between the commercial surfing world and Hawaiian locals) and other web media (such as videos of fights on the North Shore).  I’m not saying these sources are misinformed about the threat of overcrowding, but I want to make it clear that they all share origins to a marketable and image-based form of knowledge that is produced around such figures as The Wolfpak and Hawaii’s marketable pseudo-tribal form of localism. In turn it is the problem of the localism that is brought on and how that becomes a threat to a surfing commons.

So why focus on The Wolfpak?  The Wolfpak have a different reputation depending on who you ask.  Some see them as counter-colonial heroes to emulate, others view them as thugs who are hogging surfing spots under false pretenses. Bollier had this to say about The Wolfpak:

The Wolfpak constitutes a commons because it is a social collective that manages usage of this scarce local resource that its members cherish and use themselves. They are protective of it and each other, and have evolved their own rules for the orderly, fair use of the resource and community stability.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the role a gang or cartel may have by acting as the decision makers for a common property regime.  If a cartel allows for “fair use” under certain limited grants of access, they are still nevertheless a cartel.  It would be like making the mistake by saying just because a record company allowed you to download a song on your computer, they no longer had a monopoly on content.  They still possess the rights and can control exclusion, so unless you have entry into that record company to determine who can and can’t access the song, it’s still a protective mechanism of a cartel to control access. In other words, let’s say hypothetically the company only wanted to allow you to download it at certain times when the download speeds were slow because they wanted better speeds to be prioritized for their friends. So while you have to wait for the bandwidth swell to go flat, they’ve let all their friends download at times when the speed is high. You’re essentially waiting, if even allowed, to get the slim pickings of the bunch. Now the parity between both examples isn’t exact as it could be argued it’s in the interest of the record company to promote the song regardless (as they profit from promotion), whereas for The Wolkpak it’s not in their interest to promote their spot (and they lose space from promotion). However in terms of either acting as a social collective, you have to question what dues have to be paid to join the gang or company and furthermore how you would make your way up the gang or companies hierarchy to have input in that decision process.

What is true is that The Wolfpak do in fact manage a scarce resource.  The North Shore is a mecca for surfing and has been for decades.  Surfers who have their own tragedy of the commons at their local breaks flock en masse to spots like Pipeline hoping to get a spot in the crowded lineup just for the chance of a wave so they can tell all their friends back home how they surfed Pipe.  But the question, much like the case of Floatopia, is what dangers these unintended guests cause and what to do if they leave the place a mess after their party?  The Wolfpak contend their beach cleanups and vigilance for “kooks” out in the water corrects this. However the reliance on this has resulted in a behavior that makes them feel like they are the rightful heirs to the waves.

No Lineup Should Be Regulated

For decades the surfing world has dealt with a wide range of encroachments on the surfing commons;  realty that hinders easements to beach access, runoffs and pollution by industrial modernization into a common space, a growing commercial interest in the sport that has expanded it into a marketable multi-million dollar pastime, and above all else the overuse of favored spots.  Despite that waves will always continue to break, surfing has witnessed a fast ascent into the tragedy of the commons. These matters have been treated by different interest through different structures to approach combating expansive growth, external pollutants and development of surfing commons.

Organizations such as the Surfrider Foundation have grown from collective efforts to preserve natural diversity through ecological principles aimed at protecting coastal commons and ensuring open access to surfers.  They have sometimes conjoined their efforts with the other end of the spectrum of state and local government’s regulatory process by seeking to council and promote ways to combat coastal growth that imfringes on the accessibility of surfing commons.  Surfrider thrives on being part of the community and relying on community volunteers to help with efforts. But above all else, they don’t take their position to protect the surfing commons by going out and regulating the lineup by telling people who can and can’t be surfing a certain break.

Surfline has a good “bill of rights” that dictates common knowledge about the surfing line-up. These unwritten rules are usually the same even when the vibe of the surf spot will differ. Any lineup is regulated by ad-hoc associations in the water. If someone is endangering the group they will be told off and in rare cases physically attacked. But for the most part this is pretty rare as surfers proceed to know the unwritten rules of the line-up and who is given right-of-way. Respect is also yielded to and sometimes given to regulars or those who also show respect for the lineup or beach. If someone isn’t allowing for this respect, it will be noticed as other surfers will try to take off inside of them and jockey for positions to prevent them from catching waves. The most important part as stated, it this is ad-hoc. it will differ from whoever is there at any given time.

The problem of allowing a cartel to basically camp out and dictate these rules or carry them out as The Wolfpak does at a break like Pipeline means they often use this advantageously to gang-up against outsiders or use their position as a cartel to hog the waves. Instead localism creates a conflict that doesn’t ease the jostling for waves but instead can shuts anyone off from even getting in the water. The rivaling of gangs has been something promoted through capitalism (I will use the term very loosely throughout) as an answer because it reflects the mindset of proprietorship that comes with the information cartels of intellectual property.

Capitalism Pulls Up and Wants You Out

Localism has had various faces in the realm of Hollywood. From being the leather clad villains in the campy 1960s pop-teen film Beach Blanket Bingo to mystically enlightened natives in the 1980s surf-cult-film North Shore.

Though Beach Blanket Bingo conveys the Malibu Rat Pack bikers as a threat to the beach party commons, their threat is one of pop-culture rivalry as opposed to something regulatory. Youth rivalries were settled in a “do or die” competition of sorts where the loser would be banished, never able to return. This reflected cultural evolution as dog-eat-dog when notions of what was changed from a greaser culture to surf culture pretty much came with the flick of a switch when Gidget came out and the sexes were able to interact in a past time that pushed the moral envelope by being able to show a lot of skin.

In the case of North Shore, we get a representation that goes beyond youth culture to dig into the history of Hawai’i and get closer to the representation of surfing-fraternization witnessed with The Wolfpak. In the film, Rick Kane is an outsider who goes to surf Hawai’i in a way much like the outsiders who came before him and brought competitive surfing to the state as documented in Bustin’ Down the Door. Rick is scorned as an outsider by everyone and comes to find his hero Lance Burkhart (played by surfing legend Laird Hamilton) is a representation of the threat that came to surfing and Hawai’i through forced annexation by the United States. This all coincides with Rick’s epiphany as channeled by his exotic love interest Kiani who happens to be family of Da Hui lead by Vince (played by Mr. Pipeline and surfing legend Gerry Lopez). Vince also steals Rick’s stuff earlier in the film as a symbolic taking that the Hui had occur to them by annexation. Da Hui are portrayed as exotic “noble savages” who have had their harmonious lives upset by the entrance of Burkhart and the competitive surfing world. Because of this, Vince represents a “surfing for the right reasons” and shapes the mind of Rick by the end of the film when he is finally integrated into the “familial tribe”.

This impression of eclectic nobility in the pseudo-tribalist surfing world has been a cornerstone of how Da Hui and The Wolfpak interpret themselves to be. But here’s the key difference. Since the time of North Shore, the corporate surfing world has set up shop on the door-step of what Da Hui once claimed to preserve and now have become a sponsored extension of their localism. The surf competitions and surf clothing manufacturers that once posed an imperialization of their waves have become the key promoters of the image to Hawai’is famed localism. As such, Da Hui and The Wolfpak have evolved into corporate brands.

If there is any better example of the marketing it’s in the short-lived FuelTV show The 808, which followed around The Wolfpak and their leader Kala Alexander, including an episode where Alexander went to a corporate surfing expo to market The Wolfpak’s clothing line.

Alexander is a protégé of the old Da Hui and in particular Eddie Rothman (the guy on the far left in the red hat) who despite not being native to Hawai’i is basically the CEO of Da Hui with an unofficial claim to the ownership of Da Hui’s image and logo. Both Rothman and Alexander embody the marketable hyper-masculine “tough guy” image that is associated with Hawaii’s localism. These muscular, tattooed and self-described warriors share synonymy to the world of Mixed Martial Arts fighters by promoting a thrash-and-bash life style of excessive rowdiness (which coincidentally Alexander is a practitioner of MMA-fighting, along with Wolfpak member Kai “Kaiborg” Garcia who is a championship fighter).

Alexander is the poster-child for what is “post-modern punk capitalism.” He is the “new native” and represents gangster-corporatism as a means of connoting power through localism.

Those like Kala Alexander, Eddie Rothman and Koby Abberton (Bra Boys) have constructed a forced “native” identity as an associative and implied-empowering product.  Something that has created a new wave in the mass culture of surfing that brings their attitudes to the mainstream as something marketable to no matter your locale. As if you too can embrace their identity politics as your own and become a tough guy like them. Companies like Billabong, Volcom, DaKine, Lost, Rockstar Energy, Monster Energy and Vans have all been able to capitalize off localist image-laden manufacturing. In doing so it’s created a reverse dynamic of “localist hegemony” that in turn reverberates to other communities who become overtaken by Hawaii’s localist culture. For example, in Santa Barbara, California some of these aforementioned surfing conglomerates have planted themselves in the community with retail shops that turn around and sell the localism that Da Hui has constructed. As a result it’s also created a threat to the true local surf shops of the area who can’t compete when the retailers occupy high-rent storefronts and are able to take a loss when their companies aren’t driven by how well that store performs. The identity of locals in Santa Barbara has adapted elements and symbolism of the image of Hawaii’s locals through a mimesis in purchasing the same styles of clothing they wear to convey the same localist attitude they have. If you can dress like them then you can hope to be like them.

It’s Not About the Benjamins

If the surfing community were to go the route of The Wolfpak, it would create diasporic elitism of pseudo-tribal-inspired localism throughout the surfing community. Maybe even chapters of The Wolfpak would appear in the continental United States or surf spots around the globe. It would be an encroachment by mass-produced locaist attitude. None of this is to say what Da Hui and The Wolfpak do for their own community is wrong. They do engage in an occasional forms of corporate sponsored soup-kitchen-activism by teaching kids with cystic fibrosis to surf or adopting a highway and doing things like corporate-sponsored beach clean-ups. The problem is allowing that to be a rationale that gives them a right to control the accessibility of surf. What was once a call to protecting against a threat of outsiders in the period of post-annexation has become a tool for a transnational corporate surfing world to bottle and manufacture surfing cartels as the answer to the sport. For this reason, I have to disagree with those who believe this type of localism is an answer to protecting a surfing commons.