Pulitzer Finalist’s Prescient Exploration of Sea Level Rise Hailed as A Critical Guide to the Future
In her celebrated and awards-winning book, Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia reveals what we stand to lose along our vanishing shorelines—unless we can imagine a more climate-wise path forward.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Wherever land meets sea, heating oceans swell into higher-than-high tides and city-leveling storms. Venice sinks, Louisiana shrinks, Indoneisans flee their seaside capital, and North Carolina’s beaches are disappearing like a time lapse with no end. For the last hundred years, California’s 1,200-mile Pacific coastline had enjoyed relative calm, but shifting tides exacerbated by climate change are bringing this serene century to a screeching close. In California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, now releasing in paperback (September 24, 2024) and audiobook, Pulitzer finalist Rosanna Xia dives deep into the stakes, stopgaps, and potential paths forward for the 27 million people who call this coastline home.
By century’s end, sea level rise could threaten to push the Pacific shore inland by a measure of multiple football fields, an anticipated surge that could imperil tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of human settlement to say nothing of the risk posed to human and non-human life. Xia, a veteran environmental reporter for the LA Times, voyages across the West Coast to pull the curtain back on the trepidations of scientists, the tenacity of activists, and the battles intensifying in more than 20 coastal communities dotting the shoreline as they grapple with rising waters. The challenge, Xia says, is How do we get more people to care?
Through graceful in-depth reporting Xia explores how vested interests have trumped science, how low-income communities bare the brunt of environmental catastrophe (and are poised to do so again), how an attitude of human supremacy has hobbled our imaginations to envision what the coast could be, and how we may yet forestall impending devastation if we can embrace our collective capacity for change—in time.
“Few people are more qualified to explain and analyze this landscape,” writes Science. “[Xia] breathes exquisite detail and dialogue into a rich narrative held up by years of beat reporting.”
Declared a 2024 Great Read from Great Places by the Library of Congress, and winner of the California Book Award, the Nautilus Book Award, and the Golden Poppy (voted on by more than 230 independent booksellers), California Against the Sea is a triumph of ecoreportage, an indispensable future-forward book that has earned a place among the pantheon of watershed environmental treatises.“While largely focused on coastal erosion, California Against the Sea stokes a universal sense of urgency,” says Wesley Minter of Third Place Books (Seattle, WA). “This is a notable debut that deftly balances the hard realities of the present with a sense of pragmatic hope for the future.”
Advance Praise for California Against the Sea
“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. 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
Post-Publication Praise for California Against the Sea
A 2024 Great Read from Great Places
Selected by the Library of Congress and the California Center for the Book
A 2024 California Book Award Winner
Selected by the Commonwealth Club of California, Californiana Category
A 2024 Golden Poppy Award Winner
Voted best nonfiction book of the year by the California Independent Booksellers Alliances (CALIBA)
A 2024 Nautilus Silver Medal Winner
Restorative Earth Practices Category
A Best Book of 2023, Architect’s Newspaper • A Favorite Book of 2023, San Francisco Chronicle
“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.”
—The New Yorker
“An unsparing look at California’s contentious battle to cope with a changing climate.”
—Publishers Weekly
“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
“The stories of each community Xia highlights give you hope that climate adaptation is possible.”
—Powell’s Books
“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
“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.”
—Santa Barbara Independent
“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. Xia covers these complicated issues with a deft hand. I finished the book informed, enlightened, and even a little bit hopeful for the future.”
—Napa Valley Register
“This is a very important book, which will resonate for decades.”
—Sausalito Books by the Bay
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Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her work spans feature writing to investigative reporting and engages themes of climate and social justice. Xia’s reporting has uncovered the dumping of toxic DDT waste off the Los Angeles coast; set the record straight on the seizure of Bruce’s Beach from its Black proprietors (prompting an unprecedented reparative land return in 2022); explored the impacts of coastal gentrification; and articulated the dangers posed to shorelines by pollution and heating oceans. 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.
