In introducing Rosanna Xia’s California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, the California Book Club’s July selection, host John Freeman called the book “an X-ray, in a way, of how people faced with gargantuan change either adapt or don’t, or pause or panic, and it’s a deep look at how interconnected we are.”
When Xia joined the event, he asked why she begins the book with a story from the Chumash people and how the story relates to everyone who lives in California or calls the California coast home. Xia commented that the book is a chorus of voices and perspectives that are sometimes in conflict with one another, and sometimes in harmony, the more you listen and peel back layers. “As an environmental storyteller, something that I am often thinking about and trying to be mindful of is who we tend to center as expert in these conversations and who we tend to value as expert in these conversations,” she said.
It’s a conversation that 15 years ago was very science- and policy-based, but Xia aimed to expand beyond that to “where is the heart and what people are saying and what people care about.” When she met with a member of the coastal band of the Chumash nation, Alicia Cordero, a biologist and culture bearer, for a walk on the beach, Xia asked what were key ideas that Cordero’s community wanted to see in a book about sea level rise. Cordero said that she wanted to see the Rainbow Bridge creation story, which Cordero thinks of as an oral record of sea level rise, perhaps the first. To be able to integrate that perspective and present a story as data was interesting for Xia, and it set the tone for the book.
Freeman noted that starting with that story also changed the sense of temporality around sea level rise and what it means to inhabit the California coast, rather than own it. He asked how she managed to approach everyone living in California on the coast now with immense sensitivity when she encountered so many different attitudes, particularly about managed retreat.
Xia said that the more she started exploring, the more she realized that we are conditioned to think in two-year political terms and four-year political terms, and many homeowners think in terms of 30-year mortgages. She said, “We are forced to make decisions based on these systems of time that don’t necessarily align with the way we have to think about climate change, and the frequency of climate change, and also the ongoing process of climate adaptation.”
Xia explained that she feels that talking to folks about tough topics begins with recognizing that everyone should have a say and that everyone belongs to the story. It’s been important to her when entering a community to start by listening to people’s worries and questions. “I think the more I did speak to folks, the more I realized, Oh my goodness, we have so much in common,” she said. “We just have to get past those first few layers of anger and denial and frustration and otherness.… And I think that part of the magic of being a reporter is being that dot connector.”
Heyday associate publisher Marthine Satris, who edited California Against the Sea, joined the conversation. Satris had cold-emailed Xia in 2019 after reading a “beautiful” series of pieces Xia had written in the Los Angeles Times addressing sea level rise in California. Xia told her that the series was the longest she’d ever written. Now, at the CBC event, Satris asked Xia what made Xia think the book needed to be written upon receiving her email. Xia responded that she had no intention of writing a book—she sees herself as an old-school newspaper reporter. She had received queries from other publishers, but they wanted her to write a big book on sea level rise, told in the first person and with California as just one chapter. As a coastal California reporter interested in the nuances of the state’s coastline, that national narrative was not the story she wanted to write.
When Xia asked Satris whether she could do a book just about California and in the third person, Satris said, “I want to publish the book that you think needs to be written, not the book that I think would sell. Let’s start there.” Xia has come to realize that what she wrote is a book not just about sea level rise but about California and our relationship to the place. In Satris’s first set of notes, she told Xia that the book needed to not be just an intellectual journey but also an emotional and philosophical one.
Later in the conversation, Xia noted that one of her favorite quotes from the poet Gary Snyder is, “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” She continued, “What does it mean to protect all of it and to recognize that even the places that are not pristine are places that are worth treasuring and cherishing and healing in this process of climate adaptation? I think the more we can help the next generation recognize that it is all interconnected, and that we all belong to nature, and that everything around us is nature—and I’m already seeing that in so many spaces—I think the more we can do that, the more we’ll have better stewards of the land and our oceans and our planet going forward.”•
Join us on Thursday, August 21, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Adrian Tomine will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Shortcomings. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
