California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

By Rosanna Xia

• An accessible, riveting look at how sea level rise manifests along the California coast from a star environmental journalist.
• Rosanna Xia was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for an explanatory piece on sea level rise ("The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim") and her coverage of a toxic dumpsite in the deep ocean has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.
• Fans of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush will love this book. 
• No trade book has addressed the West Coast as a site of threat from sea level rise, yet California tops the US coastal populations chart with 26 million people living in coastal counties.
• Combines storytelling with science and a deep understanding of the workings of California politics.
• Specific areas in California where Xia reports from include Imperial Beach in San Diego, Monterey Bay, Pacifica, Manhattan Beach, Laguna Beach, Ocean Beach in San Francisco, Marin City, San Jose, and many more.  
• Helps readers conceive of what a sustainable relationship with nature looks like along the coast in the future.
  
• The level of research and reporting in this book will make it suitable for undergraduate courses on environmental planning and policy.
  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heyday
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781597146203

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Sea Has Music for Those Who Listen

LET US BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING, with some wisdom as old as the shore:

A long, long time ago, on an island the first people of this land call Limuw, ancient mountains rose above a coast wreathed with tide pools and pebbled beaches. Bright yellow flowers blanketed the bluffs, joined by morning glories and live-forevers that decorated the shore. The spirit of the Earth, Hutash, had filled Limuw with many beautiful things. Prairies unfurled for miles. Boisterous streams carved through the island’s deepest canyons. The animals roamed free, and thousands of seabirds rested and nested along rugged sea caves curtained by waterfalls.

But something felt missing. So Hutash one day went to a very special plant, gathered its magical seeds, and tucked them into the earth. Up from the ground sprouted not flowers but people. Strong and attentive people that grew and made this island whole . . .

So begins the Rainbow Bridge story, a tale oft told by the people known today as the Chumash. Shared and passed down for generations, this story is both a story and a record—the oldest historical record, perhaps, of life along the Southern California coast. Limuw, which means in the sea, is now the name most commonly associated with Santa Cruz Island. Four times the size of Manhattan, it is one of the largest islands off the Pacific Coast—the keystone of the Channel Islands archipelago. With its stunning variety of native flora and fauna, the island, conserved ecologically as a national park, is a rare snapshot of what the California coast looked like before Californians developed the shore.

For thousands of years, Chumash people lived on this island with care, nurturing and tending to a vibrant land that thrived hand in hand with the ocean. Golden towers of kelp swayed underwater just offshore, providing shelter for otters, precious abalone, and all colors of fish. Acorns were gathered and hulled before winter, seeds harvested each year from sage that had been burned with precision. At night and whenever a thick fog moved in, dozens of villages across the island would alight with fires made from pine. The Chumash, guided by a deep sense of reciprocity, sought to leave this Earth better with every passing generation. Their villages were a part of nature, not separate from nature, and so they continued to grow and adapt in relationship with the land.

. . . Hutash showed the people how to live well on the island, and for many, many seasons, they did. But their villages kept growing, and Limuw soon became too crowded. Kakunupmawa, the Mystery Behind the Sun, saw this was not healthy for the island, nor for the people. Hutash agreed: They needed to find a bigger place where the people could spread out and be happy.

So they gathered the people up high to a mountain, and there, spanning across the sky and over the ocean, was a beautiful rainbow. This rainbow bridge, the people were told, would take them to a much bigger land. Most of them promptly crossed over, but some couldn’t help but look down. A few became so dizzy that they lost their footing and fell. Hutash cried out to Kakunupmawa to save them, and so as the falling people splashed into the deep ocean, they were transformed into dolphins and joined the harmonies of the sea.

Chumash people have long spoken of Wishtoyo, this rainbow bridge, as a reminder of their familial connection to dolphins. In more recent years, some think this age-old story might also be an oral account of sea level rise. For Alicia Cordero, a biologist and member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, Wishtoyo is not just a story that has captivated her since childhood—it is knowledge that matches the geologic record: Toward the end of the last ice age, when sea level was about 400 feet lower, Santa Cruz and three smaller islands in the archipelago were joined together as a single giant island. Formed millions of years ago by tectonic plates and ancient volcanoes, this giant island, which the Chumash knew as Limuw, changed in size and elevation with each fluctuation of the sea. Only in the last 11,000 or so years, as the great ice sheets started to melt and the ocean began to expand, did most of the island go underwater, with just its four highest peaks still visible today as four of the Channel Islands. Limuw, indeed, had become too crowded. You can’t accommodate the same number of people on four small islands as you can on this one giant island, said Cordero, who has worked for years with her community, as both a scientist and a cultural educator, to uphold the many ways of honoring knowledge. It made sense for people on the island to move to the mainland, she said, and to move with the changes of the ocean.

Once the people of Limuw crossed onto the mainland, they lived on and became part of the coast that stretches from present-day Malibu, up through Santa Barbara, and toward the southern edges of Big Sur. They understood that the line between the aquatic and the terrestrial was ever changing—two systems intertwined. They stayed in rhythm with the sea until Spain, then Mexico, then America forced a more brutal relationship with the shore. Within just one century, coastal meadows gave way to pavement. Rivers turned into concrete. Beach resorts rose atop wetlands, and oil wells pocked the shore. This environmental devastation played out across the state, destroying the ancestral homes of more than 180 tribes, nations, bands, and clans. The legacy of colonization in California often gets glossed over, but to truly understand the coast, we must first understand this: The shoreline, like the rest of the great American West, was largely built on violence—violence to not just the land but also the Native people of this land. The state’s most iconic beach cities—California’s historic piers and boardwalks and picture-perfect marinas—all these beloved seascapes were built on a foundation that sought to conquer nature and erase the people who first listened to the water.

So much of the California coast has been conformed into the populated shoreline we know today, and now the rising sea is once again demanding change. But the systems guiding us toward this change still tend to reinforce the notion that once we lay claim to a place, it becomes permanently ours to settle. It is this story of the coast that California has fashioned for itself for the past two centuries, and it is this unyielding line in the sand that so many are still fighting to defend. The ocean became yet another force to control, a wave to conquer, a crest to overcome. Generations of people, walled off from the water, can no longer remember a time when we moved in harmony with the tide. The battle, for now, might feel like it could still be won, but how far are we willing to take this war?

Since the first days of writing this book, the title running through my head has been California Against the Sea, a nod to John McPhee’s Los Angeles Against the Mountains and his account of the many places where people have attempted all-out battles with nature. My reporting, too, began with an examination of human supremacy—and the consequences of trying to control the shore. I spoke to dozens of people, in more than 20 communities, and walked for miles along the coast to understand what we’ve been fighting for, and why. I got to know not only the coastal cities with arguably the most to lose, but also smaller towns and neighborhoods that have come up with their own ideas for the future. The more I listened, the more this book evolved. My own understanding of land, of permanence, of our duty to each other has expanded since I first considered our relationship with the shore. There exists more than one way to live with rising water, but our current understanding of what the coast should be has overshadowed the possibilities of what could be. We are at an inflection point, and each conflict, however fraught, however emotional, has helped me see more clearly why we’ve been stuck. As our most climate-forward leaders have noted, we are the first generation to feel the consequences of a warming planet, and the last generation that can steer a different course.

California Against the Sea has become a journey in search of a different ending than the one looming over our shore. The book still starts in battle, but central now to each chapter is an examination of our capacity for change. Do we even need to be at war with the sea? Is it possible to reimagine how we live with water? These questions call for a holistic recalibration with nature and a more collective vision for the state, but they still beg to be explored in the fragmented way California first built its shoreline: mile by mile, city by city, along a wide-ranging landscape stretching from Oregon all the way to Mexico, a landscape stitched together by a multitude of places and people—and now by all the disjointed battles they’ve waged against the sea. This splintered approach echoes the very problems now dividing the state, but the inverse would also be flawed. The California coast, studied closely, is fractal, each part distinct, and impossible to appraise as one sweeping entity. Forcing a single big solution for the entire state would also overlook the communities that have long been neglected, and the many neighborhoods and homes that have been quietly sacrificed.

As this book journeys on, a deeper, more reciprocal way of thinking about California’s long and varied shoreline starts to take form. Rather than confront the water as though it’s our doom, can we reframe sea level rise as an opportunity—an opportunity to mend our fractured relationship with the shore? In Šmuwič, one of the Chumash languages still spoken today, there exists the prefix kiyis. When joined together with another word, it speaks to a shared sense of our. Kiyis’skamin, for example, means our ocean. The our conveys kinship, a mutual state of belonging. People belong to the coast; the coast belongs to the people. This belonging has little to do with posession, or control, in any Western sense of the word.

At the heart of kiyis is a duty to heal, to care for, to love this one Earth that is ours.

Coast Under Siege

Illustration

CHAPTER 1

California Against the Sea

Illustration

THE WATER CHURNED WITH A WILD ENERGY one winter morning in Imperial Beach, and the people living along Seacoast Drive had been forewarned. Sandbags, stacked along driveways and sliding glass doors, lined the quiet beachfront road. Boarded-up windows cast an even darker predawn gloom. At 4 a.m., the neighborhood barely stirred, but those lying awake in bed could feel the deep rumble, then crash, as the ocean unleashed wave after big wave. It was only a few weeks into the year 2019, and the sea, burdened by melting ice and a human-altered world, was already hinting at what will become routine. A supermoon was hours away from aligning with the sun and the Earth—locking in step a fierce gravitational pull that creates higher-than-high tides. Just offshore, a network of buoy sensors had alerted UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography that, on top of all this, the surf was also syncing up to be exceptionally large.

Three scientists, shouldering a drone and other wave-monitoring equipment, hastened on foot toward a three-story condo to reckon with what this confluence was wrecking. They had parked farther away, anticipating that the road, on a thin spit of land barely separating ocean from marsh, would be inundated by midday. Puddles were already pooling one block away, and the air, dampened by blasts of sea spray, made them wonder just how forcefully the waves were breaking. They scrambled upstairs to the balcony to get a better view.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, it’s already happening! Laura Engeman said. The beach was submerged, the sea already rushing over the seawall and spilling onto Seacoast Drive. She had thought they would have at least an hour to set up that morning, but the flood had arrived long before the highest point of the tide. Across the street, the marsh was swelling over the cordgrass as saltwater rose from all sides. Ocean and wetland were reaching for each other, remembering a time when the California coast was not hemmed in by pavement, a time when the water could still be one.

Engeman, a program manager at Scripps who specializes in getting communities to think about climate adaptation, had been tracking what she called combined-risk events in this big surf town. Paying attention to the waves, the tide, the floods that keep recurring, she said, could help more people understand what the ocean has in store. And now here she was with her colleagues, the clock already ticking, surrounded by this turbulent laboratory churning with new data. Right before their eyes was a window into the many pressures looming over the rest of California.

Another low boom from the ocean quaked and thundered. Her team stood by in momentary shock. There had been quite a bit of flooding here just a month earlier—signs of an already astonishing winter. But these waves right now, these swells, were much bigger than anything they had seen all season.

AN OFT-OVERLOOKED CITY on the southernmost corner of the California coast, Imperial Beach marks where the Tijuana River carves and flushes through land and marsh, the joining of two countries by the sea. There is more grit, less Malibu glitz in this seaside town, where one-fifth of the community is lower-income, and retirees on Social Security still have a shot at living the waterfront dream. Residents treading across the sand can speak through a metal fence to those in Mexico admiring the same sunset and the same white pelicans soaring overhead. The city’s prosperity lies in its public beaches and wetlands—a shared refuge for those seeking the unbridled joy of being near a body of water as vast as the Pacific.

Imperial Beach, as the story goes for so much of the state’s golden shore, began with a yearning to settle on the very edges of the sea. This sandy stretch of California had first been home to the Kumeyaay people, who for thousands of years lived with the water, the mollusks, the plants and animals nestled between the tides. Then Spanish missionaries arrived and forced their way onto the coast, followed by the Mexican army and early Californians. By the 1880s, the area had become a summer respite for farmers fleeing the inland heat of the Imperial Valley. Wealthier vacationers flocked just up the coast to the Hotel del Coronado, a lavish display of architectural ambition that rose in 1887 atop a sand spit where jackrabbits and coyotes once roamed. The railroad roared through nearby San Diego, bringing even more people to the shore.

For decades, developers drew up plans to fill Imperial Beach’s wetlands and also transform the town with glamorous shops and homes. But efforts to build never quite took hold beyond some modest housing that popped up along the fringes of the sea. While other coastal towns thrived with tourism and resorts planted right on the sand, the community here remained largely working-class, with no grand feat of engineering to call its own. But for hundreds of sweeping acres, salt grass could continue to root itself into the muddy landscape, submerging and re-emerging with the tides. Least terns and egrets still had their nesting grounds, legless lizards their sandy soils. Stretching along the inland side of Seacoast Drive, the Tijuana River Estuary held on as the largest remaining salt marsh in Southern California.

While Imperial Beach never kept up with its wealthier neighbors, it does hold claim to another California staple: epic surf. Large, colorful arches in the shape of surfboards welcome visitors by the old-school pier, where a series of retro benches tells the story of Allen Dempsey Holder and other surfers who, in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, conquered some of the largest waves on the coast. Known as the Sloughs, this giant, unrelenting break at the Tijuana River mouth feeds off the power of both river and sea. Comparable to the outer reef breaks in Hawaii, these legendary swells were once considered the gold standard in Southern California for heavy-water surfing.

But for all this deference to marsh and ocean, human disregard for nature still seeps into the town. The Sloughs today are off-limits much of the year, contaminated by plumes of untreated sewage spilling in from Mexico. Heavy surf now means soaked roads every winter, threatening the homes and modest infrastructure that have helped the community come into its own. Those already living below sea level recall flood-waters so high after the last big storm that they had to use canoes. Imperial Beach stands to lose one-third of the town to sea level rise, but few residents have processed this slow-moving disaster that is already sweeping over their shore.

THE CALIFORNIA COAST grew and prospered during a remarkable moment in history when the sea was at its tamest. The Beach Boys crooned of crimson sunsets and golden dawns, woodies, and palm trees in the sand. Laguna Beach and Malibu sparkled white, their wide, sandy beaches dotted with seashells at low tide and surf shacks mere steps from the sea. Wooden piers staked each city’s claim along the 1,200-mile shore, which beckoned to the millions who came west and felt the ocean calling.

But the mighty Pacific, unbeknownst to all, was nearing its final years of a gentle but unusual cycle that had lulled dreaming settlers into a deceptive endless summer.

Elsewhere, Miami has been drowning, Louisiana shrinking, North Carolina’s beaches disappearing like a time lapse with no ending. Venice, Italy, keeps going underwater, and Indonesians are fleeing their own capital. While other regions have been grappling with destructive waves and rising seas, the West Coast for decades was spared thanks to a rare confluence of favorable climate patterns. Much of California’s coastal development coincided with the calmest period of an ocean-atmosphere cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, during which generous winds pulled warmer water offshore, leaving the water along the coast much cooler and less expansive. This sea level rise suppression, as scientists call it, kept huge storms in check and the rate of sea rise below the global average. It was with this fortuitous blessing that developers, blinded from the consequences of a warming planet, paved over sand dunes and wetlands, river plains and streams—making more land out of these ancient ecosystems that buffer true land from sea. New roads and rail lines made way for more people to reach the ocean. Seaside cottages morphed into glass mansions. Californians, captivated by this unconquered coast, kept building right to the water’s edge.

But lines in the sand are meant to shift. In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California; by the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 6, possibly 7 feet.

Such a dramatic rise in water might still seem far off for some California towns, but on that winter morning in Imperial Beach, the end of the century felt near. Mark Merrifield, who heads the Scripps Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation, could barely sleep the night before he and Engeman bundled up, grabbed their equipment, and sought a high enough vantage point to monitor the sea. Planting himself firmly on the apartment balcony, he couldn’t help but marvel at all the forces at play. He has devoted much of his life to studying the ocean’s shifts and rise, but, he said, the whole societal infrastructure of the coast is built on the premise that sea level doesn’t change. Wildfire and drought dominate the climate change debates in the state, yet this less-talked-about reality has California cornered. The coastline is eroding with every tide and storm, but everything built before we knew better—Pacific Coast Highway, the rail line to San Diego, entire communities by the sea—is fixed in place with nowhere to go.

As a student in the 1980s at Scripps, one of the world’s oldest and largest centers for ocean and atmospheric research, Merrifield was fascinated by how waves and currents shaped the coastline. His research took him to Australia, where he studied circulation and variability of the Great Barrier Reef, then to the University of Hawai‘i, where for two decades as the director of the Sea Level Center, he monitored how the world’s oceans have changed—and continue to change. He deepened his field research in Guam, Saipan, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands before finding himself back in California, analyzing the very first coast that altered his sense of permanence.

Merrifield said he didn’t start out with a climate focus, but once he pieced together so many signs of impending disaster, it was impossible not to adjust gears and start looking for solutions. A soft-spoken scientist whose eyes often crinkle with a warm smile, Merrifield speaks with an understated directness when he thinks about the future. He’s heard it all and there’s no debate. Sea level rise is the heart of climate change, he said. That’s where all the heat is going: into the ocean.

The ocean, indeed, has long been the silent hero in this burning world. It has absorbed almost one-third of the carbon dioxide released by humans since the Industrial Revolution and more than 90 percent of the resulting heat—helping the air we breathe at the expense of a souring sea. Warm water, put simply, expands, whereas cold water takes up less space. And when carbon dioxide mixes with seawater, it undergoes chemical reactions that increase the water’s acidity. If we treat Earth as our most ailing patient, the symptoms are right here in the water. Across the seven seas, coral reefs are dying, oysters and clams are struggling to build their shells. Gray whales, sentinels of the Pacific as they migrate 12,000 miles each year from the Arctic to Baja California, have washed up dead in staggering numbers. A special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that marine heatwaves—extreme periods of broiling water that disrupt entire ecosystems—have doubled in frequency since 1982. In just one year, the world’s oceans got hotter by about 14 zettajoules (one zettajoule is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy). This is a mind-bending number, so one thermal scientist put it this way: The oceans have absorbed heat equivalent to seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year.

In recent years, Merrifield and fellow oceanographers have found more climate patterns to examine together as one bigger picture. Scientists at NASA, too, have increasingly turned their attention back to Earth, using their satellite technology to help coastal researchers better understand our supercharged planet. In addition to accelerated sea level rise, there is El Niño, yet another swing in ocean circulation that upends the West Coast every few winters. Most Californians know El Niño for its torrential rain and tropical storm–like winters, but this burst of climate extremes roils the ocean as well. Water temperatures rise, and the perfect storm cliché begs to be used, as higher-than-high surf, storm surges, and sea level many inches above normal coalesce to pummel the shore. In the winter of 1982–1983, El Niño brought a conveyor belt of storms that tore through the coastline, triggered floods and landslides, and left California with $2 billion in damages. Heavy rains unshackled an avalanche of rock and soil on the Big Sur coast, shutting down the coastal highway for eight months. During another severe cycle in 1997–1998, and again in 2015–2016, El Niño inundated Imperial Beach and gnawed away portions of the San Diego coast.

With more heat building up in the ocean and our fossilfueled ways of life still not in check, it doesn’t take much more than another El Niño to push water levels past the point of crisis. Scientists are now eyeing the next big one, as well as the near-convergence of two multiyear tide cycles that will likely complicate the years ahead. A dramatic shift is coming to the California coast, with a rapid increase in high-tide flooding looming over the mid-2030s. Most people are familiar with the high and low tides that occur twice a day and twice a month, but there are even longer cycles, like the one that swept through Imperial Beach, that submerge the coast twice a year. Forged when the moon is new or full and tilted closest to Earth, these higher-than-high tides are sometimes called king tides. But there’s also a cycle that occurs every 4.4 years, as well as an 18.6-year cycle that traces where the moon’s orbit intersects the path of the sun. All these gravitational pulls very rarely, if ever, perfectly align. But every few decades, these orbiting variations of high and low, far and near, can coincide just close enough to overwhelm a settled shoreline already besieged by the rising sea.

The waves that smashed into Imperial Beach were indeed a window into the future. Merrifield and Engeman had been studying ways to forecast floods and were watching that bleak January morning because they knew change had arrived. That year, 2019, went on to become the hottest ever recorded for the world’s oceans, and the 2020s, the decade that began with an unheralded pandemic and record-shattering emissions, is now the most consequential decade humanity has ever faced. The last time carbon dioxide levels were even close to today’s—back when the world was 37 degrees hotter and the last ice age had not yet begun—the ocean towered almost 90 feet higher. Whether our planet becomes this hot again depends on how urgently we choose to scale back fossil-fuel emissions. To put these forces into perspective, 1 foot of sea level rise pushes the shoreline inland as much as the length of a football field. The coast is vanishing, surely and no longer so slowly, yet we continue to tune out the crescendo of record-breaking heatwaves and record-breaking floods.

These climate change numbers might start to feel too abstract to take seriously, but real forecasts could help more people seek out the science. When the Scripps researchers saw the surf and tide projections line up in Imperial Beach, they alerted city officials, who filled more than 500 sandbags and warned the community to board up their homes. Pop-up signs flashed warnings around town, and firefighters, lifeguards, and public works crews were dispatched to patrol the shore. These king tides are becoming a new normal, Merrifield said, but our sense of urgency has been distorted by clear skies and herculean efforts to maintain some semblance of order. Imperial Beach had never even counted the number of times the seawall failed to hold back the ocean—pumps and dozers just cleared the road before most residents started their sunshine-filled days.

Closing these data gaps—like tracking how often it floods—will make the truth more difficult to ignore. Today’s high tides will become, not too far into the future, the new low tide. Many in town, still dreaming of better sidewalks and nice hotels, will one day wake up to a beach submerged, roads and homes pooling with water, and driveways strewn with sand.

LOW TIDE’S NOT COMING TODAY.

These words tumbled out as Adam Young, a coastal geomorphologist at Scripps, stood on the apartment balcony with Merrifield and Engeman and watched the ocean swallow what was left of the beach. He started counting the number of seconds before the