Obi Kaufmann again shares love of natural world in ‘The Coasts of California’

From high above, the coast of California looks like a ragged white chalk line, where the vast, surging blue Pacific slaps into the continent.

Flying in a straight line north to south, you can cover the distance in about 840 miles, and it’s about 1,200 miles by car. But if you were to walk the coastline instead, along the actual intersection of water and land with its meandering coves, points and headlands, beaches, estuaries and bays, the total distance would be nearer to 3,400 miles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

How many people do you know who have explored the physical coastline of California — on foot? It’s not something most people are compelled to do. But if you did, what kind of perspective would that experience give you?

Obi Kaufmann, artist, writer and naturalist, provides the answer in his latest book “The Coasts of California,” a hand-illustrated and firsthand glimpse of this vast, deeply influential state feature, where salt water and terrestrial habitats meet and overlap.

Kaufmann spent a year, seven days a week, delving into and recording what’s on the coastline, in complex and dynamic detail, to produce a substantive, colorfully interpretive, frequently poetic “atlas.” “Coasts” is his fourth entry in a series, joining “The California Field Atlas,” “The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource” and “The Forests of California.”

The books are an immersive journey, a song, Kaufmann says, “from someone who’s given his whole life to this thing that he loves most in the universe, which is the natural world of California.”

The detail is stunning. For example, Kaufmann introduces Chapter 7 with a short synopsis of his walking journey along roughly 800 miles of the epic yet unfinished California Coastal Trail. It includes nothing less, he notes, than

“ … geographic details from marine environments, intertidal and estuarine habitats and the coastal uplands and ranges. Points of note include wildlife preserves, conservation refuges, parks and wilderness areas, ancillary hiking trails, sites of exceptional quality and sanctuaries of essential value for marine, intertidal, avian and terrestrial systems of life.”

What follows are pages of short and tight but illuminating details, multi-faceted field highlights of what he discovers. Posted sequentially north to south on watercolor maps, they include hundreds of sites and observations, grouped into 24 unique, individual “coasts“ that emerge along the route. Here’s a sample:

“10. Freshwater Lagoon: the smallest and least-developed of three lagoons that make up Humboldt Lagoons State Park; winter storms break open the beaches of the park momentarily to create a unique ecosystem — seawater mixes with fresh water, and more than 50 species of bird make their permanent home; 100 species pass through on their migratory path along the Pacific Flyway.”

And that’s just Chapter 7. The balance of the book is a realistically illustrated natural science tour of the wild diversity of California’s coastal plants, landforms, animals and the often-hidden systems they inhabit.

It is those systems, Kaufmann emphasizes, that truly define the impact the coast has on the character of the state’s unique flora and fauna and, increasingly, its human communities.

Beaches and eroding shores

Take California’s sun-stroked sandy beaches. They’re not entirely what they appear to be to a casual observer. For one thing, they’re not fixed.

Pacific waves, which approach California beaches from the northwest most of the year, push sand grains southward at a steady pace, so the beach sand is actually marching steadily down the coastline every day.

And where does the sand go? Much of it ends up disappearing into miles-deep marine canyons that yawn at intervals along the shore.

The Monterey Canyon beneath the water of Monterey Bay descends steeply into the black depths, and its head almost reaches the beach. Studies suggest it catches nearly all the beach sand washing past, north or south. Roughly 200,000 cubic meters of sand, it’s estimated, disappear down that one submarine canyon every year.

As Kaufmann illustrates in wide sweeps of detailed notes, the coast is alive with these often unseen but vitally essential systems, finely balanced, stacked one within another and always dynamically in motion.

Unfortunately, human decisions can have outsize impacts on these interlocking systems. Beach sand is normally replenished by waterways draining from inland to the sea, carrying weathered fine rock. Dams and diversions, drought and water withdrawals can interrupt their flow, depriving the coast of sand and beach.

Without beaches to shield them, exposed cliffs and bluffs, favored for homes and hotels and stellar sea views, erode catastrophically faster.

In any case, the shoreline is constantly being swallowed by the sea. Depending on the location and local factors, California’s sea bluffs are retreating at rates from several inches to 40 or even 100 feet per decade, eroded by waves and runoff.

The new Highway 1 bypass being built well inland at Gleason Beach in Sonoma County, where a dozen homes already have been lost to the sea, is an indication of what many places along California’s storied coast have in store, particularly as sea levels rise due to a warming climate and ocean.

Records of the last 100 years show that the sea level rose roughly 9 inches along California’s coast. Projections today suggest the water’s edge could rise by several feet higher by the end of the century.

The effects these changes will have on the patterns of California coastal life is unknown.

Broken chain

Kaufmann illustrates some of the elemental relationships that exist in this coastal zone, such as between wind, waves and marine life. Seasonal winds and swells draw cold nutrient-rich waters up from the depths offshore, creating an explosion of spring life at the surface that ripples through the entire food chain.

Once, migrating salmon and steelhead swam with vast amounts of these rich nutrients from the sea in their bodies, deep inland into valleys and mountains, where they essentially became rich fertilizer that fed the coast redwood forests and extensive river habitats.

That chain has been largely broken, as salmon runs continue to dwindle or disappear.

And at the opposite end of those rivers, where freshwater outlets once formed vast estuaries at the shore, reduced flows, drought and human construction have shrunk these coastal systems.

As Kaufmann notes, more than 80% of California’s fish and shellfish species still rely on the subtidal and intertidal habitats of these hundreds of wetlands as habitat for at least some stage in their life.

In “Coasts,” Kaufmann unflinchingly charts the sharp decline in the numbers and diversity of nonhuman coastal inhabitants we’re witnessing today. Not surprisingly, at book signings and speaking stops, he is often approached by people in the audience alarmed, uncertain or deeply cynical about the future.

He often asks them when they last went camping and suggests they take the time to connect with the natural world. It’s not only important personally, he advises, but to find the inspiration, understanding and motivation for the challenge ahead.

“Go out and meet your neighbors,” Kaufmann says.

He discovered the benefits of hiking as a teen, and after shifting his college major from science to art, he developed the skills to observe and capture the details and complexity of the natural world he explored. Now he spends countless hours in the field, watercolor kit in hand, walking the natural spaces of California in what one might consider to be “ground-truthing” — determining firsthand what’s really out there.

“I don’t see myself as a pessimist or optimist,” he says.

“It’s essential to think, not about species, but about systems,” Kaufmann says. “There are all manner of organisms interacting in this dynamic puzzle we call the coast. The California coastal region is a living system — actually not one, but many coasts of California. They are as resilient as they are vulnerable, and as enduring as they are endangered.

“On a systems level, I think we’re just as likely to tip to catastrophic success as catastrophic failure,” he adds. “These systems are precious and rare, and precariously set in a fragile balance: they may tip one direction or another. But in California, extinction rates are still low — there are still pieces on the board.”

In his view, there’s still a path to a better ending for the century.

“Biodiversity is the keystone element,” he explains. “We need to rewrite the story of what nature is and means to us.”

He tends to find himself critical of ways of thought that “lead us to think we have a license to mine nature as a commodity. These natural systems deserve recognition for their intrinsic value.”

Kaufmann considers his books to be “a kind of handbook on how to be more ‘from’ this place. ... We need to engage in system thinking — indigenous thinking. Nature has a very deep story to tell about how systems work.”

Readers who get the book may find the most shocking thing about it is that it seems to go on and on. That’s not a critique. The natural world of California’s coasts is surprising in its depth and complexity. And as captured by a diligent and experienced observer, unbelievably beautiful as well.

Stephen Nett is a Bodega Bay-based Certified California Naturalist, writer and speaker, with local nature stories at www.findingcalifornia.com. Contact him at snett@findingcalifornia.com