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The Coasts of California: A California Field Atlas
A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller! An epic, gloriously illustrated journey up and down California’s shoreline. California’s coastline is world famous, an endless source of fascination and fantasy, but there is no book about it like this one. Obi Kaufmann, author-illustrator of The California Field Atlas and The Forests of California , now turns his attention to the 1,200 miles of the Golden State where the land meets the ocean. Bursting with color, The Coasts of California is in Kaufmann’s signature style, fusing science with art and pure poetic reverie. And much more than a survey of tourist spots, Coasts is a full immersion into the astonishingly varied natural worlds that hug California’s shoreline. With hundreds of gorgeous watercolor maps and illustrations, Kaufmann explores the rhythms of the tides, the lives of sea creatures, the shifting of rocks and sand, and the special habitats found on California’s islands. At the book’s core is an expansive, detailed walk down the California Coastal Trail, including maps of parks along the way—a wealth of knowledge for any coast-lover. The Coasts of California is a geographic epic, an odyssey in nature, a grand and glorious book for a grand and glorious part of the world.
672 pages, Flexibound
Published April 19, 2022
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237 people want to read
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April 27, 2022
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 1200 miles by car.
But if you were to walk the actual coastline instead – along the true intersection between water and land with its meandering coves, points and headlands, beaches, estuaries and bays - the total distance would be nearer to 3400 miles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
How many people do you know who’ve explored the actual coastline of California - and 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 first-hand glimpse of this vast, deeply influential State feature, where salt water and terrestrial habitats meet and overlap. It’s a fascinating compendium.
Kaufmann spent a year, seven days a week, delving into and recording what’s on the real 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 and The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource, and The Forests of California.
The books are an immersive journey, a song, as 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.” And 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, 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—sea water 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 as well.
_______________________________________________________________
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 that 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. For example, 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 outsized impacts on these interlocking systems. For example, 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.
The shoreline is constantly being swallowed by the sea in any case. 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 Hwy 1 bypass being constructed well inland at Gleason Beach in Sonoma County, where a dozen homes have already 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 sea level rose roughly 9 inches along California. Projections today suggest the water’s edge could rise by several feet higher by the end of the century.
The effects such changes will have on the patterns of California coastal life is unknown.
Kaufmann illustrates some of the elemental relationships that exist in this coastal zone; for example, between wind, waves and marine life. Seasonal winds and swells draw cold nutrient-rich waters up from the deeps 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 percent 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 non-human coastal inhabitants we’re witnessing today. Not surprisingly, at book signings and speaking stops, he is often approached, he says, by people in the audience alarmed and uncertain about the future, or deeply cynical about the prospects.
He often asks them when the last time was they went out camping, he says. He suggests taking the time to actually 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 outdoors as a teen, and after shifting his college major from science to art, 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” - actually determining firsthand what’s really out there.
“I don’t see myself as a pessimist or optimist,” he says.
“It’s essential to think,” Kaufmann says, “not about species, but about systems. 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. 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,” he says.
In his view, there is still a path that leads 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,” Kaufmann says. 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,” he says. “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.
But if you were to walk the actual coastline instead – along the true intersection between water and land with its meandering coves, points and headlands, beaches, estuaries and bays - the total distance would be nearer to 3400 miles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
How many people do you know who’ve explored the actual coastline of California - and 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 first-hand glimpse of this vast, deeply influential State feature, where salt water and terrestrial habitats meet and overlap. It’s a fascinating compendium.
Kaufmann spent a year, seven days a week, delving into and recording what’s on the real 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 and The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource, and The Forests of California.
The books are an immersive journey, a song, as 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.” And 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, 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—sea water 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 as well.
_______________________________________________________________
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 that 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. For example, 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 outsized impacts on these interlocking systems. For example, 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.
The shoreline is constantly being swallowed by the sea in any case. 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 Hwy 1 bypass being constructed well inland at Gleason Beach in Sonoma County, where a dozen homes have already 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 sea level rose roughly 9 inches along California. Projections today suggest the water’s edge could rise by several feet higher by the end of the century.
The effects such changes will have on the patterns of California coastal life is unknown.
Kaufmann illustrates some of the elemental relationships that exist in this coastal zone; for example, between wind, waves and marine life. Seasonal winds and swells draw cold nutrient-rich waters up from the deeps 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 percent 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 non-human coastal inhabitants we’re witnessing today. Not surprisingly, at book signings and speaking stops, he is often approached, he says, by people in the audience alarmed and uncertain about the future, or deeply cynical about the prospects.
He often asks them when the last time was they went out camping, he says. He suggests taking the time to actually 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 outdoors as a teen, and after shifting his college major from science to art, 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” - actually determining firsthand what’s really out there.
“I don’t see myself as a pessimist or optimist,” he says.
“It’s essential to think,” Kaufmann says, “not about species, but about systems. 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. 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,” he says.
In his view, there is still a path that leads 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,” Kaufmann says. 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,” he says. “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.
February 15, 2024
Too many lists. At one point I looked for the index. There isn't one, but honestly the whole book is a collage of random indices so that wouldn't make sense. Some places are mentioned ten or more times, but never in any meaningful way. A creek may be listed as a possible place for anadromous fish, as a watershed, as a county park, etc, etc, and I still have no feel for the place. Some of the watercolors are okay (mostly the mammals and dim landscapes), but most are bad and some are truly awful, mostly the birds and marine invertebrates. It's nice if the author is learning to do watercolor, but I don't need to pay for that. Look at the shrike for example; it looks like the body of a mockingbird stuck to the bill of an oropendula, and the artist wasn't able to stay inside the lines. The beak and posture are what makes a shrike. If you miss those two things, then start over. What was the publisher thinking?
Also the author inserts a multi-part "poem" at the end, taken from his diaries, that isn't a poem at all but more and more unorganized thoughts about capitalism and conservation. That he calls it a poem is an insult to poetry. His musings are a bit more poetic, but often written in his pretty but very distracting and hard to read calligraphy (it looks like an ECG of supraventricular tachycardia).
Overall this is a heavy book that tries to be many things and manages to be none of them. It reminds me of the old "coast pilots" that boats used to have to have, with sequential descriptions of all the bays, anchorages and points of a shoreline, in a very boring and matter of fact language, north to south. The difference is those books were organized and useful, and this one is neither.
Also the author inserts a multi-part "poem" at the end, taken from his diaries, that isn't a poem at all but more and more unorganized thoughts about capitalism and conservation. That he calls it a poem is an insult to poetry. His musings are a bit more poetic, but often written in his pretty but very distracting and hard to read calligraphy (it looks like an ECG of supraventricular tachycardia).
Overall this is a heavy book that tries to be many things and manages to be none of them. It reminds me of the old "coast pilots" that boats used to have to have, with sequential descriptions of all the bays, anchorages and points of a shoreline, in a very boring and matter of fact language, north to south. The difference is those books were organized and useful, and this one is neither.
February 1, 2023
There is a lot of information about the coast of California in this very fat and well illustrated book. That is, all 639 pages in this book! Luckily I was able to borrow the book from the local library and not need to spend the $50 or shelf space for it.
September 20, 2024
This is beautiful book for a very specific audience. A white guy gives his thoughts/philosophy, lists, maps and watercolors on the coasts of California. I found it very interesting and learned a lot of new things. Will definitely take it on future trips to the ocean.
September 25, 2025
What a wonderful collection. I love the drawings along with the maps provided. I love the coast here in California and had the opportunity to learn so many new thing from Obi Kaufmann. Thank you for providing such a wonderful book.
January 7, 2024
To call this a field atlas sorely understates the scope of what this book and its companions set out to describe and accomplish.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews