California Against the Sea - by Rosanna Xia

About the Book

Book Synopsis

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Winner * Golden Poppy Award Winner for Nonfiction * California Book Awards Gold Medal Winner * A Great Read from Great Places Selected by the Library of Congress * A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year * American Book Award Winner * 2024 American Energy Society's Energy Writer of the Year * An Architect's Newspaper Best Book of 2023 * 2024 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Medal Winner

Now in paperback: a "deeply researched and reported" (San Francisco Chronicle) exploration of sea level rise in California that "breathes exquisite detail and dialogue" (Science Magazine) into the subject.

"Viscerally urgent, thoroughly reported, and compellingly written--a must-read for our uncertain times." --Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

"When do seawalls make sense? And when is it better to give in to the tides? [...] In California Against the Sea, Xia [...] writes about the difficult realities of trying to incorporate fairness into our tally of costs and benefits." --The New Yorker

Along California's 1,200-mile coastline, the overheated Pacific Ocean is rising and pressing in, imperiling both wildlife and the maritime towns and cities that 27 million people call home. In California Against the Sea, Los Angeles Times coastal reporter Rosanna Xia asks: As climate chaos threatens the places we love so fiercely, will we finally grasp our collective capacity for change?

Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline--and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and tenacious environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future. Xia's investigation takes us to Imperial Beach, Los Angeles, Pacifica, Marin City, San Francisco, and beyond, weighing the rivaling arguments, agreements, compromises, and visions governing the State of California's commitment to a coast for all. Through graceful reportage, she charts how the decisions we make today will determine where we go tomorrow: headlong into natural disaster, or toward an equitable refashioning of coastal stewardship.

Review Quotes

2024 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Winner

2023 California Book Awards Gold Medal Winner

A 2024 Great Read from Great Places selected by the Library of Congress

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

2024 American Book Award Winner, Selected by the Before Columbus Foundation

2024 American Energy Society's Energy Writer of the Year

A Best Book of 2023, The Architect's Newspaper

2024 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Medal Winner, Restorative Earth Practices

Praise for California Against the Sea:

"What happens if, as the world warms and the Pacific Ocean rises, California's coast and beaches drown? That's the crisis that Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia investigates in her thoughtful, balanced, deeply researched and reported California Against the Sea." --San Francisco Chronicle

"When do seawalls make sense? And when is it better to give in to the tides? [...] In California Against the Sea, Xia [...] writes about the difficult realities of trying to incorporate fairness into our tally of costs and benefits." --Daniel A. Gross, The New Yorker

"Los Angeles Times reporter Xia debuts with a vivid exploration of how communities along the California coast are dealing with rising sea levels. [...] It's an unsparing look at California's contentious battle to cope with a changing climate." --Publishers Weekly

"Few people are more qualified to explain and analyze this landscape. Xia's reporting on this topic earned her a spot as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2020. In this, her first nonfiction book, she breathes exquisite detail and dialogue into a rich narrative held up by years of beat reporting." --Clare Fieseler, Science Magazine

"Coastal California offers a case study in what happens when some try to control a landscape and others move with it, a story deftly unfurled by Rosanna Xia in California Against the Sea. Xia is a sympathetic and careful observer, detailing the politics and (sometimes questionable) ethics of American settlement along the California coast, the natural and human-driven processes propelling change, and how people are confronting a new reality where the high tides of today will become the low tides of tomorrow." --PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, Judges' Citation

"A beautifully written, highly relevant book about not just our relationship with and how we think about the natural world, but also how we relate to each other." --Book Riot

"Since the Industrial Revolution, the oceans have been the dumping ground for almost one-third of the carbon dioxide released by humans and more than 90 percent of the resulting heat, writes Rosanna Xia in her well-researched, captivating book, California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. It's a brute fact that warm water expands, which means the sea is rising. [...] We've changed the ocean, and maybe, as Xia reports some California communities have done, we can change for the ocean." --Nina Schuyler, Alta Journal

"Vivid and comprehensive [...] In California Against the Sea, Los Angeles Times journalist Rosanna Xia examines the postwar coastal development boom and the daunting challenges facing the 27 million Californians who live in the coastal zone as sea-level rise and coastal erosion become urgent facts of life." --Lookout Santa Cruz

"This is not a dry book with nonstop facts and figures. Instead, Rosanna Xia brings together a community of vibrant stories and memorable people. Through these human connections, Xia explores issues like private ownership along the coast, public accessibility to nature and the need to build resilient communities and infrastructure, even if you're not a Californian." --Karina Taylee, Citizens' Climate Radio

"Perhaps the most important takeaway from this important book is that we are all in this together. Seemingly at-odds terminology like 'managed retreat' and 'seawalls' needn't be fundamentally at odds. Not if we acknowledge a shared set of facts and begin planning for a future California coast that will remain hospitable, not just for us, but for our children and our children's children." --Pacifica Tribune

"Although she centers her lens on California in her journalism, book, and film, Xia's reporting on mitigation and adaptation has meaning for everyone everywhere. [...] Xia's work is a clarion call to elevate matters of resiliency. She knows that solutions like 'managed retreat' and 'adaptation' are daunting and can seem like surrender. Yet, she presents a different course of action than we are taking right now, one in which we think and act faster and more collaboratively, rather than following the more common course of avoidance or rushing to judgement and then suffering the consequences of self-destructive solutions." --American Energy Society

"A book that should be read by everyone who lives along California's coastline, and everyone who cares about this jagged, unpredictable marvel of a landscape." --California Review of Books

"I have not read a book with prose about the shoreline this beautiful in years. [...] 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." --John Freeman, Alta Journal

"Rosanna Xia's California Against the Sea is not for the faint of heart [...] [It is] is both a cautionary tale and a call to action." --David L. Ulin, Alta Journal

"Xia [...] makes a compelling case that the way California has treated its coastline for generations--as a desirable commodity to be parceled off and sold to the wealthy, or elsewhere, as a dumping ground for industrial infrastructure--was never sustainable to begin with, and this moment offers us an invitation to rethink our relationship with the ocean we cherish." --Berkeleyside

"Our coastline is shifting, far faster than it ever has before, and our love of ocean views and sea breezes is now at risk. This tension between desire and danger is at the heart of Rosanna Xia's impressive book, California Against the Sea. [...] Xia is a Pulitzer Prize finalist who investigates climate change and the coast for the Los Angeles Times, and she covers these complicated issues with a deft hand. I finished the book informed, enlightened, and even a little bit hopeful for the future." --Elayna Trucker, Napa Valley Register

"Addressing a complicated and controversial set of issues with a lesser writer, this book might have been subtitled 'bad news on climate-change.' Xia, however, transforms the topic by bringing history and humanity into focus in each chapter, taking special care to look at solutions and stories of those on the ground engaged in cultivating positive change as well as a pragmatic view of challenges." --YubaNet

"Every Californian--actually, every West Coaster--should read this book. [...] Xia examines communities and landscapes up and down the coast to explore the problems--and the potential solutions--that California will continue to grapple with for decades to come." --Redwood City Pulse

"Just as the coast defines the liminal world between land and sea, so too does Rosanna Xia's remarkable book exist in the overlap between development and erosion, between geological forces and human desire, between our ambitious past and our tenuous future. It's viscerally urgent, thoroughly reported, and compellingly written--a must-read for our uncertain times." --Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

"This book should be required reading for Californians--and all Americans. The fate of one state's rising coastline, and what it portends for our future, will affect us all. Exquisite and wrenching, Rosanna Xia has written an essential book that shows us what we stand to lose." --Lizzie Johnson, author of Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire

"Fans of Xia's work for the L.A. Times will recognize her virtuosic blend of propulsive boots-on-the-ground storytelling, explanatory reporting, and genuine curiosity and love for place. A profound and timely exploration of humanity's various and shifting relationships to coastlines and the forces that shape them by one of the great environmental reporters working today." --Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World

"Xia's prophetic and perceptive book reveals a California coastline denied by centuries of settlers more intent on dreaming than facing the unsteady reality of the living ocean's edge. California Against the Sea is the invitation we need today to enter a future where we learn to work with nature instead of against it. Xia's message should be heeded everywhere ocean meets land." --Meera Subramanian author of A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka

"In the midst of the climate crisis, can the people of California treat the rising Pacific Ocean as something other than an adversary? In California Against the Sea, Rosanna Xia argues persuasively that such a transformation is not only possible but already underway, inspired by lessons from deep history and the recent past. Rigorously reported and beautifully written, this book is a crucial guide to the future." --Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

"Xia's California Against the Sea deftly charts the past, present and future of California's changing coastlines in order to retrieve hope for more sustainable futures from headlines of environmental loss. This lucid account shows that sea-level rise is less an intractable problem than an urgent invitation to rethink our relationships with oceans and with one another. A beautiful, revelatory and prescient book." --Lucas Bessire, author of Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains

"Rosanna Xia's ability to move effortlessly between the journalist's voice, the historian's voice, and even the poet's voice makes her story of our climate precarity more than an account of evidence and circumstance. The book is rife with humanity, nuanced and powerful because of it." --Obi Kaufmann, author of The Coasts of California

"I don't often recommend books, but Rosanna Xia's California Against the Sea is an exception. I was very touched and moved by her book, and I highly recommend it. It may well change how you think about our coast, our relationship to it and our responsibility for it." --Gary Griggs, Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz

"In California Against the Sea, Rosanna Xia combines the best of deep dive journalism, by expending shoe leather to get out into the field and walk the coastline and by interviewing frontline community members, politicians and advocates, with explanations of the environmental science and geology to reveal both the impacts of and solutions to sea level rise that is already upending life along California's coastline. Beautifully written." --Christina Gerhardt, author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean

"As a journalist, Xia is able to put into context the very complex and fluid state of land and sea. And as a Californian, she uses an almost lyrical voice in describing the problems we face along our coastline." --Jann Eyrich, author of The Rotting Whale, a Hugo Sandoval Eco-Mystery

"This is a very important book. [...] Rosanna has written a book which will resonate for decades. I am hoping that one of Governor Newsom's assistants has dropped a copy on his desk." --Jeff Battis, Sausalito Books by the Bay

"While largely focused on coastal erosion, California Against the Sea stokes a universal sense of urgency. Xia's prose is incredibly smooth and her passionate curiosity for the coastal landscape is contagious. The book's greatest triumph, however, is its focus on the conservationists working to protect the coastline, especially those from or working with Indigenous communities, emphasizing the positive impact an individual can make. This is a notable debut that deftly balances the hard realities of the present with a sense of pragmatic hope for the future." --Wesley Minter, Third Place Books, Seattle, WA

"I was worried this book would be a real downer, but I found myself incredibly inspired and hopeful [...] The stories of each community Xia highlights gives you hope that climate adaptation is possible, and that the fluctuating nature of the coast, as well as impending sea-level rise, are things we need to work with, not against." --Lesley A., Powell's Books, Portland, OR

"This book is yet another magnificent example of [Xia's] work, a must-read for Californians and anyone who has ever seen and loved a coastline." --Lauren Tyler-Rickon, Gallery Bookshop, Mendocino, CA

About the Author

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her breadth of work includes the highly anticipated feature documentary film, Out of Plain Sight, which she directed and produced, and her celebrated book, California Against the Sea, which received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and a gold medal from the California Book Awards, among other honors. She was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting, and her journalism has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.