California on the Edge is a documentary film, currently in production, that explores how communities up and down the coast are living with, adapting to, and working to protect or repair a climate-changed California. The film is helmed by Barron Bixler (writing, directing, cinematography) and Allison Carruth (writing, production). Together, the duo founded and lead Blue Lab, an environmental storytelling and media production studio housed at Princeton University.

Challenging the golden, sun-drenched mythos of coastal California and the California Dream, the film foregrounds the vital and often contested terrains of ecological restoration, coastal development, environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty and managed retreat as well as technological gambits–like offshore wind energy, seasteading and deep sea mining–that aim to remake the coastline and its nearshore waters over the next half century. Recognizing that the California coastline is at an environmental inflection point, and that its future remains to be written, California on the Edge interweaves the stories of people who are working to imagine—and build—more resilient and just coastal communities. The project attends especially to communities who have often been sidelined or written out of coastal California spaces and stories alike, alongside overlooked nonhuman beings—including abalone, oysters and kelp—with whom many of these same communities are deeply entwined.

Taken individually, the stories that commingle throughout California on the Edge address, but refuse to accept, the worst-case future for coastal Californians and the places they call home—a future in which marine and terrestrial ecosystems collapse, sacred places are destroyed by fires and floods or defiled by extractive industries, and only the most affluent lay claim to whatever remains of the coast’s natural riches and cultural meanings. The people at the heart of California on the Edge are staking out provisionally more hopeful futures rooted in generative ideals of collaboration, organization, repair, ingenuity, and the profound meaning of work, often in tandem with impassioned feelings of grief, defiance, anger, worry and futility. It is their small-scale acts of world-making and world-salvaging—which cumulatively are a force to reckon with—that give the project its gravitational center and through which the project hopes to make a meaningful contribution to the unfinished story that is California.