California Against the Sea

California Against the Sea is a work of narrative nonfiction by Rosanna Xia, an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, that examines how sea level rise threatens California's 1,200-mile coastline and explores whether communities can reimagine their relationship with the ocean rather than wage war against it.

Xia opens with the Chumash Rainbow Bridge story, an ancient narrative about the people of Limuw (now Santa Cruz Island) who crossed a rainbow bridge to the mainland when their island became overcrowded. Alicia Cordero, a biologist and member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, interprets the story as an oral account of sea level rise at the end of the last ice age, when four smaller islands merged as one large landmass that shrank as glaciers melted over roughly 11,000 years. Xia contrasts this ancient knowledge of living reciprocally with the coast against two centuries of colonization, during which Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers paved over sand dunes, filled wetlands, and channeled rivers with concrete. She introduces the Chumash prefix kiyis, which conveys a collective sense of "our" rooted in kinship between people and coast, framing it as a guiding ethic for the book.

The opening chapters establish sea level rise as an immediate crisis. In January 2019, scientists from UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography rushed to Imperial Beach, a working-class city on the southernmost California coast, to monitor an extreme flooding event. They watched massive waves overtop the seawall and consume the shore. The ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat from human-caused climate change; warming water expands, driving accelerating sea level rise. While the sea rose less than nine inches in California over the past century, projections suggest it could surge more than six feet by the end of this one. Converging tidal cycles, including an 18.6-year lunar cycle, threaten a rapid increase in high-tide flooding by the mid-2030s.

Moving north to Monterey Bay, Xia introduces Gary Griggs, a 76-year-old oceanographer at UC Santa Cruz who spent more than 50 years studying coastal erosion. Griggs surveys landmarks including the Venetian Court condos in Capitola, built on sand in the 1920s and regularly battered by waves, and a more-than-1,000-foot-long artificial cliff at Pleasure Point, made of concrete sculpted to look like natural rock. He outlines the limited options for responding to rising seas: seawalls sacrifice beaches, sand replenishment is expensive and temporary, and managed retreat provokes fierce opposition. He warns that more than $370 billion in property could be at risk by century's end, and two-thirds of Southern California's beaches could vanish.

The political paralysis surrounding these choices plays out in Pacifica, a town south of San Francisco where the ocean consumed more than 90 feet of bluff in less than a decade. When city planners concluded in 2018 that moving inland might be the most cost-effective option, residents erupted. Political consultant Mark Stechbart led a campaign against managed retreat, helping oust Mayor John Keener in the November 2018 election. Coastal engineer Bob Battalio presented data showing roughly $200 million in impacts regardless of action, but the town rewrote its plan to avoid the inflammatory language. Keener, now out of office, warned that Pacifica was just a preview of the conflicts that would engulf every coastal community.

Xia traces the legal framework governing the coast through the creation of the California Coastal Act of 1976. Peter Douglas, the act's principal author, was a Jewish refugee from wartime Berlin who fell in love with the California shore as an eight-year-old. After two failed legislative attempts, Douglas and a grassroots coalition pivoted to a citizen ballot initiative, Proposition 20, gathering 418,000 signatures in five weeks. The measure passed, establishing the California Coastal Commission, enshrining the public trust doctrine for beach access, and committing the state to the precautionary principle, under which no project may be approved without proof it would not significantly damage the coastal environment. Douglas served as the commission's executive director for more than 25 years before passing away in 2012 with the warning that "The coast is never saved... It's always being saved" (87).

The act's success in limiting development, however, made existing coastal properties more valuable, intensifying the impulse to defend them. In Laguna Beach, activist Penny Elia discovered an 80-foot-long seawall protecting a $25 million mansion on Victoria Beach. Seawalls disrupt natural sand replenishment and eventually strip away the beaches they front. In August 2018, the Coastal Commission fined the homeowners $1 million and resolved that no new seawalls would be permitted unless absolutely necessary; the homeowners sued, and the wall remained standing. In San Francisco, officials took a different approach: voters approved $425 million to reinforce the deteriorating Embarcadero seawall, engineers experimented with reef-like textures to support marine life on concrete panels, and on the city's ocean side, planners agreed to remove a mile of the Great Highway and restore ancient dune systems.

Xia examines who has been excluded from the coast through the lens of environmental justice. Effie Turnbull Sanders, the Coastal Commission's first environmental justice commissioner, reflects on Charles and Willa Bruce, a Black couple who in 1912 created the coast's first Black-owned beach resort in Manhattan Beach, only to have the city seize the neighborhood through eminent domain in 1924. Turnbull Sanders connects this to broader patterns of dispossession targeting Japanese American, Latino, and Native communities. Angela Mooney D'Arcy, a member of the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians Acjachemen Nation and founder of Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, describes California's history of genocide against Indigenous people and their ongoing disconnection from the shore. Former Coastal Commission executive director Charles Lester argues that the property lines Californians fight over are artifacts of colonialism, urging deliberate transformation rather than a return to a status quo built on inequity.

Hidden threats compound these injustices. UC Berkeley professor Kristina Hill reveals that rising groundwater, pushed upward as the ocean advances, could flood communities and remobilize buried toxic chemicals far sooner than traditional flood maps predict. In Marin City, a historically Black community in Marin County built during World War II to house shipyard workers, residents experience unexplained cancer, high asthma rates, and life expectancies 17 to 20 years shorter than those in neighboring communities. Hill's research shows the area could flood with just one foot of sea level rise via groundwater. In Deep East Oakland, communities of color face overlapping burdens of pollution, industrial contamination, and sea level rise exposure.

The book profiles efforts to build a different future. Along the southern edge of San Francisco Bay, a decades-long project aims to restore more than 15,000 acres of former salt evaporation ponds to tidal marsh near Alviso, a community more than 10 feet below sea level. The passage of Measure AA in 2016, a regional parcel tax approved by 70 percent of Bay Area voters, provided critical funding, and construction began in spring 2022. At Point Dume in Malibu, Bay Foundation watershed coordinator Sara Cuadra removes invasive iceplant and seeds native plants that naturally trap sand and build protective dunes without imported material. In Marina, a diverse city north of Monterey, Mayor Bruce Delgado, a botanist, guides a plan that forbids seawalls, directs development inland, and establishes phased triggers for relocating public infrastructure.

At the state level, Senator Ben Allen introduced Senate Bill 83, a revolving-loan program allowing cities to purchase at-risk coastal properties and eventually convert the land to open space. The bill passed both legislative chambers but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021. In 2022, the legislature secured more than $600 million for coastal resilience, and a multi-agency plan committed California to preparing for at least 3.5 feet of sea level rise by 2050.

Xia concludes at Gleason Beach in Sonoma County, where officials agreed on a $73 million project to relocate nearly a mile of Highway 1 inland, including a bridge over a degraded creek designed to accommodate the next century of rising water while restoring wetland habitat. The final narrative thread follows the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, whose 45-mile coastal homeland was devastated by Russian traders, Gold Rush settlers, and state-sanctioned genocide. Around 2012, the Kashia acquired 688 acres of ancestral coastline through a complex deal brokered by the Trust for Public Land, becoming, to the project team's knowledge, the first California tribal nation to hold a private deed to ancestral land on the coast. Chairman emeritus Reno Keoni Franklin drove his grandmother to the property; she asked if they needed permission from the rancher, and Franklin told her the land was now theirs. Xia closes by arguing that past triumphs of collective action, from the Coastal Act to Measure AA, demonstrate that Californians can forge a new vision for the coast, one that makes room for both water and people.