California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

From a celebrated environmental journalist, the riveting exploration of sea level rise along the West Coast through human stories and ecological dramas.

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

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.

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting on sea level rise, which inspired the work that culminated in California Against the Sea. Her writing has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

Moderator Madeline Ostrander is a 2023-24 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and the author of At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth, a gold Nautilus Book Award winner for Ecology and Environment and one of Kirkus Reviews' 100 best nonfiction books of the year. The former senior editor of YES! Magazine, her work has also appeared in the NewYorker.com, The Atlantic, The Nation, Sierra magazine, PBS's NOVA Next, Slate, and numerous other outlets. Her reporting on climate change and environmental justice has taken her to locations such as the Alaskan Arctic and the Australian outback. She's received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Artist Trust, the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Edith Cowan University in Australia. 

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