Stinson, Ocean and Santa Cruz, then down the coast to Zuma and Santa Monica: California’s beaches are iconic and idolized. When, at a crucial moment in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” Ken shouts, “I’ll see you on the Malibu beach,” he was calling out not just to California but to the world.

But 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: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline.”

The California coast is 1,100 miles long, and Xia seems to have explored almost every inch of it. She starts her journey near the Mexican border in Imperial Beach. Here she joins researchers from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography as they monitor giant winter waves crashing over a seawall onto city streets. The immediate culprit is a moon-powered king tide. The larger looming threat is a Pacific expanding due to global warming: swelling from melting Arctic and Antarctic ice and from physics — warmer water occupies more space than cold. As one oceanographer tells her, “Sea level rise is the heart of climate change.”

Xia notes that many experts forecast a 3.5-foot rise in California sea level by 2050 — but we’re already starting to feel the effects in 2023. The specific threats vary with the coast. In San Francisco, a 3-foot rise would swamp the Embarcadero, flooding the Ferry Building every day. In Pacifica, just to the south, entire neighborhoods might vanish as the wave-battered coastal bluffs they’re built on crumble. On the other side of the Golden Gate, Marin City already suffers flooding caused by rising groundwater levels — levels caused by a rising San Francisco Bay.

Xia brings these communities and the threats they face to life through diligent reporting. She talks to everyone — to scientists like UC Santa Cruz’s Gary Griggs, who laments that much of the problem is that in California, “everybody wants to live on the sand.” And to the Pacifica politico who frets, “If Pacifica becomes known as the Town Eroding into the Sea, who will buy anywhere in a dying town?” She also focuses on communities, like Marin City, which is majority Black and has historically been left out of coastal debates and decisions. As one Marin City resident, frustrated by the city’s flooding, tells Xia, “Any other community would’ve gotten this fixed a long time ago.”

Solutions to these crises are anything but cheap or easy. Xia follows the saga of a Laguna Beach (Orange County) couple who build a possibly illegal seawall to protect their new $25 million oceanside mansion, in the process devastating a prized local beach. In Pacifica, a coastal engineer notes that anything the town can do to combat the rising sea — construct seawalls, add dredged sand to bolster vanishing beaches — will cost $200 million that Pacifica does not have. As for another response, “managed retreat,” where governments pay property owners to abandon their beachside real estate, it has proved to be a career-ender for any politician who suggests it.

然而,“加州大海”不是一个pessimistic book. In fact, its optimism is a relief when so many current climate change titles inspire a paralyzing sense of doom. Xia notes that Californians have a track record of rallying to protect their coast, as with the successful 1970s fight to establish the California Coastal Commission. She visits Alviso, at the south end of San Francisco Bay, where the largest wetland restoration project west of the Mississippi is underway. She travels to the city of Marina on Monterey Bay, which is attempting to proactively plan for higher sea levels by steering development away from the coast.

Near the book’s end, Xia goes to Point Dume, just up the Pacific Coast Highway from Barbie and Ken’s Malibu beach. Here a botanist from a local environmental group is restoring the point’s sand dunes by replacing invasive species like ice plant with natives like red sand verbena. The natives will create a welcome habitat for insects and birds. And they should help build dunes that will buffer the rising sea.

Taking a break from their work, journalist and botanist pause to gaze at the ocean, where a gray whale and its calf are breaching. “It’s beautiful,” the botanist says. In moments like these, you believe Xia when she writes, “We already have the knowledge to forge a new vision for the coast. Together, we can build more bridges to a future rooted in possibility ... a future that makes room for both water and people, a future that welcomes all.”

Peter Fish is a freelance writer.