Author: Rosanna Xia in conversation with Marina Psaros

Explore the future of California’s coast with journalist and author Rosanna Xia, author of California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. Xia examines the threats rising seas pose to California’s communities, infrastructure, and iconic coastline, as well as the difficult choices ahead for adapting to a changing climate.

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for her reporting on sea level rise, and her celebrated book, California Against the Sea, received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a gold medal from the California Book Awards, and a “Great Reads from Great Places” citation from the Library of Congress, among other honors. She has been praised for her investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, and her coverage of a toxic dumpsite in the deep ocean has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. Her most recent project, the feature documentary Out of Plain Sight, is a cinematic expansion of one of Xia’s most haunting environmental exposés. The film, which she directed and produced, was selected as Slamdance's 2025 opening night film, and it has received numerous film festival honors, including the audience award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the Jackson Wild Media Award for best investigative film.

Marina Psaros is a climate change researcher and author who uses emerging technologies to help people protect the spaces and the species they love. Her work spans games, immersive media, community science, and place-based storytelling. She is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center, the co-author of The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis and host of Earthworks, a podcast about creativity and nature.