Rosanna Xia’s California Against the Sea is not for the faint of heart. An environmental reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the author was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for a pair of articles on rising sea levels; those pieces form the basis of this book, which is both a cautionary tale and a call to action, journalism with a point of view. The title, she acknowledges, represents “a nod to John McPhee’s ‘Los Angeles Against the Mountains’ and his account of the many places where people have attempted all-out battles with nature.” The implication, for Xia as much as for McPhee before her, is that in these battles, nature always wins.
And why not? It is hubris for humanity to place itself above or outside nature; we are natural-born creatures, after all. This is especially the case in California, where nature is always asserting itself. Earthquakes, fire, flood, and drought have been the state’s great quartet of not-uncommon disasters, to which we can now add coastal erosion due to climate change. “In the last 100 years,” Xia explains, “the sea rose less than 9 inches in California; by the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 6, possibly 7 feet.”
That’s a terrifying bit of data, almost unimaginable in its way. Yet the grace of Xia’s reporting is how she focuses on steps we can take as humans, if not to reverse the trend (we’re too far along for that) then to alleviate the most devastating and costly effects. By way of exploration, she constructs California Against the Sea as McPhee might have, centering many chapters on individuals who have studied or otherwise worked on the issue of rising seas. These figures include Gary Griggs, a UC Santa Cruz earth sciences professor and the author of the recent California Catastrophes, and the late Peter Douglas, who in the 1970s, as a young graduate of UCLA School of Law, helped write the California Coastal Act, which Xia characterizes as “one of the nation’s most elegant and toughest sets of environmental safeguards.”
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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Aware of the magnitude of what we face, Xia never pulls punches. She does, however, highlight forward thinkers changing their communities. Particularly compelling is her account of the Monterey Bay town of Marina, which has chosen to forgo short-term mitigation efforts, such as seawalls and sand-replenishment projects, in favor of a more holistic response. There, she notes, civic leaders “are doubling down on ideas that have been political suicide elsewhere: Require real estate disclosures for sea level rise, move infrastructure away from the water, work with the private resort in town to eventually rearrange its oceanfront property.”
That’s a tall order, but as Xia recognizes, the circumstance requires nothing less. “If business continues as usual and global temperatures continue to rise,” she writes, “more than $370 billion in property could be at risk of coastal flooding by the end of the century, the economic damage far more devastating than the state’s worst earthquakes and wildfires. Salt marshes—home to spawning fish, weary shorebirds, and many of the world’s most endangered species—face complete extinction.… In just a few more decades, two-thirds of the beaches in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego—so deeply tied to the state’s heart and soul—could also be no more.”•
Join us on Thursday, July 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Xia will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss California Against the Sea. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA: VISIONS FOR OUR VANISHING COASTLINE, BY ROSANNA XIA
