The second guest book review on The Rubber Match, Kathleen Isenegger, my wife and an assistant professor of computer science at California State University, Chico, takes a look into California Against the Sea by Rosanna Xia, a novel that dives into coastal erosion in California and the impending effects the land and the people living nearby face.
I read this book as part of our community’s “Book in Common”, a program that tries to get people together to read and discuss a book relevant to issues their community is facing.
Being new to California, I was excited to learn more about the rising sea levels and lost coastal land– something we don’t think about much back in the Midwest. Overall, this book was a great read, teaching me a great deal about my new home state.
Rosanna Xia is an environmental journalist with an uncanny ability to bring the ocean to life through her words. Sitting in my Central Valley office, I could hear the waves lapping against the sand, the breeze gently ruffling the nearby plants, and feel the worries of the people who loved the coast more than anything, who dedicated their lives to protecting it.
The people who have lived on the shore don’t come from any one background, with the history of the shoreline inhabitants ranging from indigenous and Black Americans whose land was stolen by greedy developers to the multi-million dollar homeowners who continue to desecrate the land today.
While I’ve always loved beaches, seeing them through the eyes of the conservationists and activists interviewed by Xia has made them even more beautiful to me than ever before. On a recent trip, I had the chance to drive down much of the Pacific coast and take it in with a renewed understanding of just how precious it all is. As Xia argues, it is something we must protect at all costs.
In between stories of cities most impacted by the coastal crisis, Xia highlights the many overlapping issues that are at play. From harmful invasive plants and animal species to waste chemicals from long ago still poisoning us from underground to the social resistance to nature’s dominance, complicated may be an understatement.
This last problem I mentioned, of people’s resistance to acknowledging that maybe they can’t best nature, was one I hadn’t thought of much before. Xia explains how many communities are struggling to get their residents to realize that staying long term is not a possible option, with the words “organized retreat” being demonized by many.
However, the shoreline was always meant to move, and just because humans decided to build their homes there doesn’t change that fact. The climate crisis has only made that reality even more unavoidable.
As someone who has been known to be called a “bleeding heart”, I can emphasize deeply with caring about something so much, and wanting to solve a problem so badly that is ultimately way too big for you to fix. I feel that every week when I do mutual aid in my community, when I read news reports from Palestine and Iran, when I see people fall victim to fascist propaganda because they weren’t given the education to see through their lies.
I imagine this is what the lovers of the coast feel when their feet hit the sand, their fingers dance through the rippling waves, that is what they were put on this Earth to protect. Xia honors these heroes through her storytelling and imagery.
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