CA - Coastal Questions: Rosanna Xia considers California’s western edge
With the financial and human costs of climate change-fueled natural disasters rising rapidly, a new book invites Californians to reimagine their relationship with the state’s glorious and ever-changing coastline.
Rosanna Xia, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has spent the past few years traveling up and down California’s 1,200-mile border with the Pacific Ocean, speaking to residents, politicians, academics and public officials about the various challenges posed by sea level rise.
Xia’s experiences are documented in her forthcoming book, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. Sonoma County’s coast and Marin City both make appearances.
While many residents’ first instinct is often to fight to maintain the human-designated coastline with ever-more costly feats of engineering, California Against the Sea suggests that we humans should try a more humble—and hopefully less-costly—approach.
“Rather than confront the water as though it’s our doom, can we reframe the sea level rise as an opportunity—an opportunity to mend our refractured relationship with the shore?” Xia asks in the book’s introduction.
This reporter spoke to Xia by phone recently. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Will Carruthers: One of the things that I appreciated about the book is that you highlight that many of the development decisions that led to modern day California were made on the human time scale, not the Earth’s, which is obviously much longer. Why is that framing important to you?
Rosanna Xia: I love that that resonated with you. So often, our stories start with, you know, Western settlement, when the story of California began in the 1850s. So what does it mean to start before then?
The book opens with the Chumash, who have been along the coast from modern-day Malibu all the way to the southern edges of Big Sur for thousands of years. And then beyond that, geologically, the ocean and the coast have been here for thousands and thousands of years. I tried to put into perspective for readers and myself that we are mere humans on the edge of this massive edge where land meets the most gigantic ocean on this planet.
Something that humbles me every time I’m out by the water is the fact that the coast never looks the same twice. We might hide it a little bit better in some places, you know, down along Santa Monica near where I am, where sand gets brought in to help fill out the beaches and we actually rake and flatten the beaches. But the coastline itself is this incredibly dynamic space between land and ocean. This kind of tension between the two and also the marriage between the two has been in existence long before we arrived. So I think being able to capture that and establish that and really help readers reorient in that way was really powerful for me.
To start there felt like the right place to start and then, from there, let’s talk about how we got to where we are today, where we’re struggling with all of these things that we want from the coast that are in conflict with each other. And then add climate change to all that and ask, ‘Where do we go from here?’
