California Against the Sea - Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

Los Angeles Times journalist and Pulitzer finalist Rosanna Xia and Dr. Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara, explore the inexorable challenge of sea level rise in this probing talk. Xia, author of California Against the Sea: Visions for our Vanishing Coastline (Heyday, 2023), has traveled across the state reporting on the stakes and struggles of the 27 million Californians who call the coastline home and face the imminent threat of surging seas. Heating oceans caused by climate breakdown mean melting glaciers and expanding waters that produce higher than high tides, more intense storms and flooding, and shoreline erosion that is poised to move the coastline inward by a measure of multiple football fields over the course of the next 100 years. 

In this conversation, Dr. Lester and Xia will explore what this means for California communities living on the edge, and what policymakers and developers in the American West can do to foster a more climate-wise relationship with our shifting shoreline.