The best books on the crisis at the shoreline

This book is one I didn’t want to put down and I don’t say this about most non-fiction books. Rosanna Xia, from her many years as a writer for the Los Angeles Times on coastal issues, has taken a topic that is of critical importance to all coastal cities and residents in California and beyond and through conversations with a wide variety of people in a handful of coastal communities makes this story engaging, interesting, and insightful.

The sea level is rising and we are in the way. We are now presented with massive challenges around the planet, and the coast of California and its diverse people and attitudes are a microcosm of this larger dilemma. Rosanna captures the diversity of opinions and perspectives in a very understandable and enlightening book that will be pertinent for many years to come.

Quite frankly, I loved this book and didn’t want it to end. As a journalist, Rosanna Xia brings a unique and engaging writing style to the threat that sea-level rise and shoreline retreat pose to a number of California’s coastal communities. I appreciated the way she used casual conversations with a disparate group of local residents in a number of towns to objectively present the diverse views of residents, elected officials, realtors and even scientists to the impacts of a rising ocean. 

“Build back better” won’t be a long-term strategy for responding to sea-level rise, storm wave attack, shoreline erosion, and flooding. As the Earth continues to warm, the planet’s ice will continue to melt, and sea-level will rise in response.

I like the way Jeff Goodell brings the science of global warming together with the experiences and observations of coastal communities around the world to sound a clear alarm over not only what has already happened, but also what is most certainly going to come. Building back better in the same location won’t solve the problems we are increasingly facing. We need to build back safer and in higher-elevation inland areas.

I enjoyed the way Elizabeth Rush ventured out into some diverse and remote places where sea level rise has had a profound impact on long-term residents.

She writes eloquently about people and their lives and homes and avoids the climate change politics and debates. This is not a future problem—it’s real, it’s now, and it’s everywhere, as her conversations so clearly and soberly illustrate.

I like the way John Englander took a timely and relevant topic—rising sea levels—that could have been technical and dry and presented it in an engaging way with his writing and clear and simple graphics so that virtually anyone can pick this book up and understand why the oceans are rising and what this means for our collective future.

I think Cory Dean, who was the long-time science editor for the New York Times, was perhaps the first to delve into the now well-documented and diverse impacts of the multiple human efforts to engineer and control our shorelines.

She visited dozens of threatened coastal communities and interviewed countless coastal geologists, engineers, elected officials, and citizens in order to better understand why decisions were made to modify shorelines in individual communities, more often than not, with predictable and damaging impacts on beaches.

In lively and engaging prose, she clearly explains each setting and location and why things went awry when Mother Nature always bats last.