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A few winding turns past Bodega Bay, about an hour north of San Francisco, relentless waves pound against a stretch of coastline in dire need of re-imagining. Gleason Beach, once reminiscent of a northern version of Malibu, is now mostly just a beach in name. Sand emerges only during the lowest of tides. Bits of concrete and rebar are all that remain of 11 clifftop homes that once faced the sea. A graveyard of seawalls, smashed into pieces, litters the shore. Here along the foggy bluffs of the Sonoma coast, the edge of the continent feels more like the edge of the world \u2014 a window into the future if California does not change course.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis \u2014 or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.<\/p>\n These wave-cut cliffs, a brittle m\u00e9lange of ancient claystone and shale, have been eroding on average about a foot a year, exacerbated since the 1980s by a hardened shoreline, intensifying El Ni\u00f1os<\/a> and, now, sea level rise. With the beach underwater, the seawalls destroyed and so many homes surrendered, the pressure is now on Highway 1 to hold the line between land and sea. Year after year, residents have watched the waves carve away at the two-lane road \u2014 their only way to get to work, their only way to evacuate, their only way to reach all the rocky coves, beaches and seaside campgrounds that make this coast a marvel.<\/p>\n Broken concrete is all that\u2019s left of a number of clifftop homes at Gleason Beach on the Sonoma Coast, pictured here in 2019.<\/p>\n (Carolyn Cole\/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n So, with every storm and every knock from the ocean, officials have scrambled to save the highway, pouring millions of tax dollars into a vicious cycle of sudden collapses and emergency repairs. From 2004 to 2018 alone, state transportation officials spent about $10 million in emergency defenses and failed repairs. In 2019, almost half a mile had to be reduced to one lane.<\/p>\n This lifeline for the region now hangs inches from the edge. The once spectacular coastline had seemingly morphed overnight \u2014 an apocalyptic transformation, decades in the making, seen with stark clarity now that orange caution tape and makeshift traffic lights mark what\u2019s left of the shore.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what unmanaged retreat looks like, and it is quite frankly a hot mess of septic systems, old house parts and armoring that have fallen into the intertidal zone with no real mechanism for cleaning it up,\u201d Sonoma County supervisor Lynda Hopkins declared. \u201cIf we don\u2019t start planning ahead and taking proactive measures, Mother Nature will make the decisions for us.\u201d<\/p>\n With the realities of climate change looming ever closer, California transportation officials agreed it was time to try something different: make peace with the sea and move the crumbling highway more than 350 feet inland. They knew nailing down the details would be fraught, but, if done right, this would be the first radical effort by the state to plan for a reimagined coast \u2014 a coast that could support California into the next century. It was the rare managed retreat<\/a> proposal that intentionally sought to both raise and relocate critical infrastructure far enough from the shore to make room for the next 100 years of rising water.<\/p>\n Compromise wasn\u2019t easy. Officials studied more than 20 alternatives that tried to balance safety codes, traffic needs, fragile habitats, public access to the coast and other competing requirements that were tricky to meet given the topography. There were also all the nearby property owners who needed persuading, not to mention a skeptical, conservation-minded community that was averse to saving a human-altered shoreline with more human alterations. They ran into every argument and counterargument that have tugged, pulled and paralyzed other communities<\/a>.<\/p>\n At its heart this project, like so many attempts along the California coast, called for a reckoning over what was worth saving \u2014 and what was worth sacrificing \u2014 and whether it was possible to redesign a treasured landscape so that it survives into the future.<\/p>\n Book cover for \u201cCalifornia Against the Sea\u201d by Rosanna Xia<\/p>\n (Heyday Books)<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems daunting; it\u2019s a lot of change to cope with, but it\u2019s also an opportunity for communities to think about, \u2018What are the coastal resources we want to have access to fifty, one hundred years from now?\u2019\u201d said Tami Grove, who oversees transportation projects for the California Coastal Commission<\/a> and spent years reconciling all the emotional meetings, the disagreements, the many stops and stalls and hand-wringing compromises. \u201cIt gets lost, sometimes, when people are worried about everything that we\u2019re going to lose to sea level rise \u2014 but there are things that we\u2019re going to be able to choose and enhance and design into the future if we start planning now.\u201d<\/p>\n In what many described as a major coup in government bureaucracy, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the coastal commission and county leaders set aside their differences to come up with a new solution together. By November 2020, they had hammered out a plan to relocate almost one mile of the highway \u2014 most notably with a new 850-foot-long bridge spanning Scotty Creek, a degraded stream that, choked for decades by the highway\u2019s current configuration, rarely reached the ocean anymore. Rather than agonize over how to restore the landscape to some former, unobtainable baseline of \u201cnatural,\u201d officials unanimously agreed that this bold re-imagining of the coast was the best way forward among no perfect options.<\/p>\n <\/a> <\/p>\n
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