“Viscerally urgent . . . a must-read for our uncertain times.

” —ED YONG

rosanna xia
California
Against the Sea
Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline

for
shing
line
California
Against
the Sea
Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline
Rosanna Xia

H E YD AY , BE RK E L E Y , C AL I F ORNI A
I NT R OD UC T I ON
The Sea Has Music
for Those Who Listen
introduction

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

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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 archi-
pelago. With its stunning variety of native flora and fauna, the
island, conserved ecologically as a national park, is a rare snap-
shot 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

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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 capti-
vated 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 fluc-
tuation 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

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systems intertwined. They stayed in rhythm with the sea until

Spain, then Mexico, then America forced a more brutal relation-
ship 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

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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 commu-
nities, 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 relation-
ship 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 land-
scape 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

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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.