
[Heyday; 2024]
“Golden towers of kelp swayed underwater just offshore, providing shelter for otters, precious abalone, and all colors of fish. Acorns were gathered and hulled before winter, seeds harvested each year from sage that had been burned with precision. At night and whenever a thick fog moved in, dozens of villages across the island would alight with fires made from pine.”
In her introduction to California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, Rosanna Xia conveys both the idyllic quality of the coast of the past, as well as the very real care and respect with which the Chumash people related to it. In the same introduction, she also offers insight into another, more adversarial relationship to the seascape. The book’s title is a reference to John McPhee’s “Los Angeles Against the Mountains.” The 1988 essay examines the dissonance between nature and human infrastructure through an account of the erosion of the San Gabriel mountains and LA’s hubristic attempts to fortify itself in response. The tension between two opposing approaches to living with the natural world—to work with it or to work against it—is at the heart of the book. Xia, an environmental reporter at the Los Angeles Times, maintains reportorial distance as she visits locations along the California coast and documents the wildly varied responses to rising sea levels. But this isn’t a book without a stance. For Xia, the shifting landscape is an opportunity to rectify past wrongs done to the environment and, in addition, to those who have been harmed in tandem with it.
Xia begins by outlining the reasons why the coastline is shifting. While climate change is the primary factor, the issue is amplified by a natural end to the decades-long calm period of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Xia writes:
Much of California’s coastal development coincided with the calmest period of [this cycle], during which generous winds pulled warmer water offshore, leaving water along the coast much cooler and less expansive. This “sea level rise suppression,” as scientists call it, kept huge storms in check and the rate of sea rise below the global average. . . . Developers, blinded from the consequences of a warming planet, paved over sand dunes and wetlands, river plains and streams—making more land out of these ancient ecosystems that buffer true land from sea.
Now, towns built along the shore and atop wetlands that have always been prone to flooding are facing existential crisis. While Xia is heavy on scientific information and statistics that explain coastal erosion, she also brings the reader into the field. A geomorphologist, for example, monitors the tide from the upper floors of an apartment building on the flooding shore of a beach. Xia’s description of the human presence behind the science makes it more digestible. The longer the period between waves, the stronger and bigger they will be when they roll in. Xia invites us to count the seconds: “Eighteen. Nineteen seconds. Twenty. When the surge finally came over the seawall, the water slammed onto the road and broke with incredible force—a blanket of whitewash that shook reality and consumed the shore.” While her reported facts can be persuasive, it’s often the illustrated moment that drives home her point. This particular dramatization, for example, leaves no question as to why coastal communities are grappling with the possibility of being consumed by the sea.
Xia’s message begins to crystallize as she details the varied responses to this terrifying future. Her attention often alights on the conflict between individual and collective interests in the recalibration forced by sea level rise. “There are only so many ways to adjust with the rising sea,” she writes. “Seawalls are one option, but they come with hidden consequences.” Xia bolsters this statement with an interview. Gary Griggs, an oceanographer, geologist, and professor, explains that “responding to coastal erosion with a hard structure parallel to the shoreline is a decision or choice not to protect the beach at that location,” since seawalls force the sand in front of them to wash away. Additionally, seawalls interrupt public beach access. In 2017 Laguna Beach, for example, the owners of a $25 million home constructed a seawall made of eighty feet of steel and concrete in an attempt to protect their mansion from encroaching waves. For the sake of private property, a sizable stretch of coast was made inaccessible. Xia turns to a resident activist, Penny Elia, to convey the anguish of such losses. “I watched them build that seawall right on the beach, and I kept screaming and yelling, ‘You’ve got to stop this, you’ve got to stop this.'”
Xia herself is invisible in her renderings of her interviews. She lets her subjects’ words, stories, and actions take full spotlight. The result of this rhetorical strategy is a series of focused profiles of activists, policy makers, scientists, politicians, and residents of affected towns. At the same time, Xia’s absence in these scenes gives weight to her narrative voice: Positioning herself outside of her subject’s circumstances allows Xia to maintain authority. The people speak, the author interprets. Xia’s conversation with Charles Lester, former head of the California Coastal Commission, is a good example of this. He considers the factors that play into both individual and societal resistance to proactive action. Xia writes, “For those still thinking in terms of man versus nature, resilience means having the strength to rebuild in the same place after a catastrophe, to resume life as it was before.” Xia’s use of the word “still” suggests that restructuring our conceptual understanding of the world is inevitable, and that if we haven’t done so yet it is only a matter of time. She underscores this point through the use of Lester’s words: “Resilience is often about making sure we are strong enough to not be changed, but what if we should change?”
Xia guides us through visits to a number of towns along the coast that are attempting change in a variety of ways more innovative than seawalls. This series of snapshots conveys a fragmented picture, which makes sense: Xia is reporting on a response to rising waters that lacks consensus. Each town has unique needs and is left to fend for itself. It’s impressive then that so many towns have decided to take an approach to sea level rise that prioritizes environmental resuscitation or greater social good. At Malibu’s Dume Beach, for example, a restoration project is underway to restore dunes destroyed over years of flattening by trash-picking machines that have combed the beach as part of regular maintenance. There, the beach will be returned to a more natural, less manicured state. This inexpensive, low maintenance approach requires physical labor to clear the beach of invasive iceplant, which was mistakenly introduced in a past effort to control erosion, and then the seeding of millions of native species, which will fortify an ecosystem that when healthy will be strong enough to prevent sand from washing away with the tides.
The projects Xia chooses to highlight indicate that she is not advocating a dogmatically green approach. She spotlights projects that do the most good possible, and that looks different in each instance and sometimes requires significant human engineering. She makes this point through Alviso, a town outside of San Jose, that was threatened by the plan to return a section of coast to wetlands. Xia reports that wetlands sequester carbon at high rates and serve as nature-based flood protection as they absorb incoming water “like a sponge.” At the same time, this approach originally would have resulted in the displacement of the residents of this economically struggling, historically neglected town. The wetland restoration project that ultimately took shape cost $545 million and required the construction of a four-mile levee, but “With some unconventional engineering and a bit of compromise, it seemed possible to do it all.” In this case, Xia prioritizes a solution that in some way attempts to correct “the tendency to further devalue places [and communities] that have already been deemed less valuable,” even if it requires a degree of unnatural intervention.
Xia does not get carried away with optimism. Instead, her stance is realistic. Rising waters and the changes they necessitate will require losses. Xia’s discussion of the revamping of California’s iconic Pacific Coast Highway—long in need of fortification due to erosion—illustrates this point. The years of “2004 to 2018 alone [cost] about $10 million in emergency defenses and failed repairs” and eventually a more comprehensive fix was necessary. In an unprecedented move, transportation officials decided to quit trying to fortify the highway and instead move it inland, a project that required both compromise and innovative planning. Xia brings us into the push and pull of this and many other decision-making processes to convey the complexities of the negotiations and the difficulties of the decisions. Often someone will lose—in this case, the families whose homes will be supplanted by the new highway—and it is difficult to decide where and how to place those losses. But Xia wants us to understand that there are many collective wins to be had. In the Highway-1 project, previously depleted habitat was regenerated and stronger infrastructure was built to outlast decades of rising waters.
Xia’s method of employing a chorus of voices other than her own to elucidate the history, conundrums, and needs of the coast is one of her most powerful strategies. By the end of the book, it is clear that many have been and will continue to be affected by human intervention in the coastal environment. Xia presents the wrongs that were done in the name of development through an interview with Indigenous lawyer and activist Angela Mooney D’Arcy. “Settler colonialism isn’t just a history of the racist violence that happened here—it’s a history of ecological violence. . . . California Indigenous people . . . saw such a dramatic, ecological, violent change in our homelands over the course of a single lifetime.” This interview in the book’s final pages is a return to the ideas laid out in the introduction, where Xia’s discussion of the Chumash people establishes both the history of and the possibility for a respectful human relationship with the environment. Xia brings us with D’Arcy on a coastal field trip hosted by an environmental nonprofit that incorporates Indigenous approaches. Here, she makes her final case for reframing our engagement with the rising waters and the changes they necessitate. We should understand them, Xia affirms, as an opportunity to recalibrate the exploitative ethos that has shaped both the land along the shore and the history of this country. Xia ends her book with an image of realistic hope. She reports on a complicated land transfer that returned a stretch of coast to the Indigenous Kashia people who had been forced off of it after thousands of years of stewardship. The details indicate that changes such as these are unusual and not easily executed, but when an elderly Kashia woman freely revisits the ancestral land she, until this moment, had to ask permission to step foot on, it is clear that Xia’s assessment holds water: “By examining how . . . past wrongs continue to shape present-day injustices,” she writes, “more people could perhaps understand how to advocate for a different future.”
Samara Skolnik is a writer and teacher. She lives in Brooklyn.
This post may contain affiliate links.