Maybe in the future they will be seen for what they were—those postwar decades out of which grew a vast and powerful vision of California coastal life. All those dreamy songs. Bungalows built right on the beach. Homes constructed right up over the sea, as if the sea were a calm presence, or a force humans could control.
But it was a brief and unusual period of relative calm, those years, on a coast made by tectonic violence and constant change. To read Rosanna Xia’s exquisite new book, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, we must come to grips with the luck of that gift. If only the name of the phenomenon behind it were a bit easier to grapple with than “the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.” Essentially, thanks to shifts in sea-surface temperatures, water didn’t rise on the California coast the way it did elsewhere.
California Against the Sea briskly chronicles what was built during that period and others like it—the roads, the hotels, the beachfront developments, and even railways—and how today communities up and down the thousand-plus-mile coast called California face a stark choice. Is there enough cement to construct enough seawalls, which result in the loss of sandy beaches? Not even close.
Given the seriousness of this issue, and its intense politicization, to write California Against the Sea was an act of supreme hopefulness. Will any of the people in, say, Pacifica who are protesting the prospect of managed retreat in their town read this book? Probably not, but Xia tells their stories with empathy and care. The villains in this book are not the stubborn stayers—nor is the sea a villain. This is a book that asks us to imagine a predicament beyond villainy.
It does want us to know that California’s current shape—and the attitude that it could be molded at will—wasn’t always so. From its opening pages, which begin with a tale told by the Chumash people, who have been in what we call California for 14,000 years, to the final pages, which end with a moving tribute to a project that has made it possible for the Kashia tribe to hold the deed to land right on the coast, Xia leans strongly on Indigenous ideas of reciprocity with the land.
The question the book asks, over and again, is, What does that value look like in practice? That is, how do we live in a changing place? Who should undertake the hard work of repair? Should it fall entirely on working-class communities in Marin City and Oakland, where industries have poisoned the shoreline, to shoulder all the work of cleaning it up? Especially when more-affluent areas, like Laguna Beach, get to build walls against the sea whose consequences are felt elsewhere, and will be felt in the city in the future as well.
California Against the Sea can be read as a series of portraits of the people who have dedicated their lives to thinking about these problems, and the activists who are enacting old ways of life as solutions. City planners and oceanographers, including the heroic Gary Griggs, of UC Santa Cruz, who has taught some 15,000 students, animate its pages and take us right to the lip of the shoreline. In Point Dume, Sara Cuadra leads a project to replace invasive species of plants with native, climate-resilient vegetation.
Xia has spent as much time among dreamers as she has with city planners and makes it possible to understand what she is showing us. Essentially, as she points out, climate solutions fall under the category of “mitigation (reducing the rate of global warming)” or “adaptation (adjusting how to live with these increasing hazards).” She points out, rightly, that most of California’s solutions have focused on the former. And also: that even if we stopped emitting CO2 entirely, the sea would continue to rise for decades.
It takes a superior sense of poise to write into the heart of an issue involving such stark facts and not simply begin the project of species grief. But some towns, like the aptly named Marina, show that adaptation can happen—if we accept that the way coastal areas have functioned until relatively recently with the development of the coastline is sustainable.
To do this will require context and imagination. We must remember, for example, that most of what is now San Francisco’s financial district was once a coastal marsh. The city used to be ringed by tidal wetlands, almost 200,000 acres of them. What we think of the coast needs, in some ways, to change, and in other ways, to change back. A project to transform San Jose wetlands proves that it is possible.
I have not read a book with prose about the shoreline this beautiful in years. Xia understands, like someone who has hiked from Imperial Beach to the very northern redwood-clad beaches of the state, how alluring every foot of California coast is today. That for every cheesy development or beachside pier reaching out into Poseidon’s den, the call of the Pacific remains. That ocean might cover one-third of our globe, but up close on some days, it is paradise. Who wants to say we cannot live in paradise?
If you include many more people in that “we,” Xia points out, it will be possible; the sense of “we” has to change. It has to reach back and learn from the Indigenous tribes who called the state home before the Spanish came, before the Russians and Mexicans conquered it, before it became a U.S. state. California Against the Sea is the first book on the climate crisis in some time that makes you feel that this change isn’t just necessary, it is possible. It will be a beautiful way to live.•
Join us on Thursday, July 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Rosanna Xia will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Marthine Satris to discuss California Against the Sea. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
