We talked with Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times environmental reporter in 2023, as she delves into the realities and solutions to sea level rise in her book California Against the Sea, Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline.

Wherever land meets sea, global warming is wreaking havoc. As the ocean absorbs heat generated by the burning of fossil fuels and its attendant climate breakdown, its waters swell into overwhelming tides and city-engulfing storms. Glaciers melt, Pacific Islands shrink, Indonesians flee their seaside capital, and North Carolina’s beaches disappear with each passing supercharged hurricane.

Sea level rise threatens low-lying coastal and estuarine zones which may have nearly one billion inhabitants worldwide by 2030. Thus, those residents will lose their homes and businesses, maybe their possessions and have to migrate to higher ground, if they survive the transition.

To adapt, governments, industries, and communities must work collaboratively through integrated, multidimensional management schemes that cross the boundaries of natural sciences, environmental justice advocacy, and engineering. Sadly, in our short-term speculative real estate-centric world, we are nowhere close to working together…but there are some positive signs.

Journalist and author Rosanna Xia provides an in-depth look at the complex challenges coastal communities face from rising seas. She draws on years of covering coastal management to unpack contentious issues like managed retreat, where communities acknowledge the ocean's inevitable reclamation of land. We discuss the plight of homeowners and businesses struggling to save their properties as well as innovative solutions like wetland restoration, Xia brings her extensive reporting to bear on how we can create more sustainable and resilient coastlines.

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Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times [https://www.latimes.com/people/rosanna-xia] where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her work spans feature writing to investigative reporting and engages themes of climate and social justice. Xia’s reporting has uncovered the dumping of toxic DDT waste off the Los Angeles coast; set the record straight on the seizure of Bruce’s Beach from its Black proprietors (prompting an unprecedented reparative land return in 2022); explored the impacts of coastal gentrification; and articulated the dangers posed to shorelines by pollution and heating oceans.  She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for explanatory reporting on sea level rise, which inspired the work that culminated in California Against the Sea [https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/california-against-the-sea/]. Her writing has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.

Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs.

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Executive Producer and Host: Jack Eidt

Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats

Episode 200

Photo credit: Rosanna Xia