Residents encouraged to flee before it's too late.

San Clemente, California is many things to many people. Richard Milhous Nixon’s favorite retreat. Site of World Surf League Final’s Day. Southernmost town in Orange County. Scene of three Andino generations. Most importantly, though, it is the global home of the surfboard industry. Yes, the “Spanish Village by the Sea,” as it is affectionately called, has long housed extremely important shapers, glassers, sprayers, finishers. Matt Biolos calls San Clemente home and so does Matt Parker. Timmy Patterson and Cole Simler too.

Our wave sliding experience would be vastly different, certainly, if not for the hotbed of progression that is San Clemente, but a terror has presented, in recent days, as the oceanfront Casa Romantica crumbled into the sea as its executive director looked on. Amy Behrens was was enjoying a spring stroll when she heard a low rumble then watched, helpless, as a chunk of the property collapsed into the mighty Pacific.

It was not a singular event. The bluffs fronting this wave-rich stretch of coast have been failing at a wildly increasing rate, knocking out railroad tracks, horrifying wealthy denizens with unobstructed ocean vistas as their million dollar homes teeter on the brink of major insurance claims.

The whole town under a very real threat of disappearing.

San Clemente, though, is not alone in its dire predicament. According to The Los Angeles Times.

In March, a Newport Beach home overlooking the water was demolished after a landslide. Later that month, a landslide in San Clemente prompted evacuation of four oceanfront apartment buildings. Laguna Niguel declared a local emergency last week after soil movement was detected beneath the hilly contours of La Paz Road, prompting officials to close two lanes indefinitely.

Yikes.

But what will a post-San Clemente surfboard industry look like? Where will Biolos et. al. go? Torquay, Australia? Whale Beach? Boca Raton, Florida?

More importantly, I suppose, is who will have them?

Most importantly, what is the cause of this sudden collapse? Global warming?

Discuss.

Chief of Sportwashing.

The Santa Monica-based World Surf League has worked extremely hard during these past few years to place itself squarely in the camp of social progressives. From patting itself on the back for making equal pay between and women, adopting the most liberal trans inclusion policy, robust environmental bush planting and ruthlessly muzzling those who disagree, many have celebrated the acronym WSL also standing for “Woke Surf League.”

A brave new world.

Except.

Hours ago, the “global home of surfing” came under heavy fire for being a super gross polluter. The average surfer with his one-board-per-year and one-trip-per-five was fingered as 50% more environmentally damaging than the normal citizen. The professional surfer with her six-boards-per-event and three-trips-per-month, then, at least 90% more more environmentally damaging.

Whilst breaking out the scrub brushes an attempting a nice green wash, the League was hit once more, this time for tacitly supporting far-right Central American strongman Nayib Bukele and his brutalist incarceration spree.

The Guardian recently profiled Jose Antonio Potes and his childhood pal Manuel Castrillon, both Colombian, who traveled to El Salvador looking for work. Once there, the two were locked up in a draconian anti-gang mass arrest and spent over three months in jail with no trial or explanation.

“It started really making sense then that they were just throwing innocent people in jail to show them off to the outside world,” Potes said as he met many behind bars who were there by mistake. “You no longer need to have any link with the gangs to be locked up in El Salvador. You simply need to be a young male,” lawyer Ruth Elonaro López added.

Young and male or wholly female as other reports suggest that “lesbian women” are being taken from their homes and tossed in the clink after being denounced by strange taxi cab drivers.

The World Surf League, as you know, is headed to El Salvador in a few short weeks, for the Championship Tour stop number seven, the Surf City El Salvador Pro.

Exciting.

But how do you think WSL CEO Erik Logan and self-described architect of the grand liberal reforms Chief of Sport Jessi Miley-Dyer will react to right-leaning shenanigans south of the border? Will Bukele’s name be banished from the booth, like the great conservative Bethany Hamilton, or will announcers be instructed to simply look the other way?

Will Wright take a knee for the nearly 70,000 people recently locked up, many without trial?

Currently more questions than answers.

Breathe the hypocrisy.

The World Surf League, self-billed “global home of surfing,” is not shy when it comes to burnishing its environmental bonafides. Talking points sent down from twin chiefs Erik Logan and Jessi Miley-Dyer include referring to the ocean as “office, home and playground” thereby necessitating preservation. Action items involve coordinating planting a bush in Western Australia. But behind the scenes, deals are struck with landfill-ready, carbon spewing Chinese SUVs and any other company willing to open a chequebook in order to be covered by a green wave.

Well, it appears the jig might be up as a new entirely damning BBC piece fingers the average surfer as having a 50% greater carbon footprint than an everyday Joe. Professional surfers, with the amount of boards chewed through, non-stop airline travel, passively shilling Great Wall Motors, certainly scratching 80%.

An excerpt:

Historically, surfing has had an image of a sport and lifestyle that is in tune with, and protects, oceans and the environment.

But environmental campaigners say the manufacture and export of polystyrene and polyurethane boards and neoprene wetsuits comes with a significant carbon footprint.

One long-standing study estimated the manufacture of a traditional polyurethane board, covered with epoxy resins and exported across the globe, could be responsible for producing the equivalent of up to 250kg of carbon dioxide.

Yikes.

The reporter did find a glimmer of hope, however, in the top UK women’s surfer Lucy Campbell who has declared, unlike the World Surf League, that she will no longer accept sponsorships from gross polluters.

“It’s often hard to turn down a big pay cheque, if they’re a brand that isn’t sustainable, but it’s definitely more worthwhile in the long run,” she said, adding, “I think that they (the brands) need to take the onus and make that difference. It may come at a higher price but I think eventually that price will come down as technology advances.”

Mark Dale, the chief marketing officer for Agit Global, the US company that makes the mass-produced board Wavestorm dumpster-anticipating VAL boards, might have agreed, in theory, but quickly pointed the finger elsewhere, stating, “The misconceptions about Wavestorm is that we are creating this mass of boards that are meant for landfill, but you can use a Wavestorm board for many years. We don’t build boards as disposable boards here.”

Cool.

The World Surf League’s Logan and Miley-Dyer are yet to respond but be on the lookout for another bush planting somewhere near you.

Or maybe an exciting new partnership with clean coal.