Currently in production, California on the Edge is a documentary film series that explores how different communities are living with, adapting to, and working to protect or repair this iconic, climate-changed coastline. From free divers in Orange County to kelp scientists on Catalina Island, from an LA Times environment reporter to a group of coastal access advocates in Malibu, from environmental justice activists to Chumash tribal leaders on the Central Coast, from marine conservationists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to an oyster farmer in Bodega Bay, the project interweaves place-based stories to foreground the lived experiences of people who are working to imagine—and build—more resilient and just coastal communities. Their visions of California's storied coastlines are rooted in generative ideals of collaboration, organization, repair, ingenuity and the profound meaning of work, often alongside impassioned feelings of grief, defiance, anger, worry and futility. It is their small-scale acts of world-salvaging and world-building—which cumulatively are a force to reckon with—that give the project its gravitational center, and through which we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the unfinished story that is California.

In his book Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, historian Kevin Starr argues provocatively that the nineties and early aughts marked “the end of one California”—namely, the expansionist California of the post-WWII boom era. Some twenty years on, and this California hasn’t ended exactly, it’s just been atomized. Rebooted and remade by tech, media, agriculture and other forces, California and its mythic aura endure, even as the intersecting crises of a pandemic, social inequality and climate change make the California Dream arguably more contingent and shapeshifting than ever. California on the Edge revisits and revises Starr’s coast of dreams. Our animating questions are these: What still draws people to California’s storied coastline even as environmental stressors reshape its material terrain and strain its mythologies to the breaking point? In what ways is this iconic stretch of coastline meaningful and why is it worth fighting for, especially for those who live and work along it?

In 2023, we embarked on what will be a multi-year journey up and down the coast of California, exploring the histories and futures of places that are pillars of the California imaginary, and that today face different environmental threats: San Diego, Point Onofre, Crystal Cove, Huntington Beach, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Morro Bay, Big Sur, Monterey, Moss Landing, Half Moon Bay, San Francisco, Sausalito, Bolinas, Tomales Bay, Jenner, Point Arena, Mendocino and Fort Bragg.

Beginning fall 2025, we'll be sharing those stories here.