Always looking at new ways to embrace California, Obi Kaufmann is telling the story of the Golden State’s coast.

The four books on California nature Obi Kaufmann has written and drawn so far represent a new kind of genre. It began with the bestselling The California Field Atlas in 2017 – then his focus shifted to the state’s water resources, then Californian forests. Now, he is releasing his biggest book yet, a 700-page love letter to 1,200 miles of the California coast.

An artist-adventurer and independent bookstore lover, Kaufmann is familiar with Big Sur and the Henry Miller Memorial Library, where his books are “perennial,” Library Director Magnus Toren said in a recent podcast conversation with the author. So it only makes sense that he’d make a stop there to introduce his new book.

“I use California as a metaphor for my big inquiry into nature,” Kaufmann says. “But those books are as much about California as they are about me.” The Coasts of California: A California Field Atlas is a great addition to a collection of field guides or atlases that are also art books – this one has over 400 of the author’s signature watercolors and maps. While providing precious information on trails, the shifting of rocks, sand and special habitats, Kaufmann’s books can also be described as philosophical meditations written with surprisingly poetic prose.

Kaufmann spends his nights outdoors out of sheer epistemological practicality – to understand the world by gazing at the starry sky, as Kant did. Like Socrates, he repeats that the more he knows, the more he discovers there is there to know – and therefore he doesn’t know anything yet.

Kaufmann grew up in the Bay Area as the son of an astrophysicist and a psychologist. Asked about where California stands ecologically on the map of the world, Kaufmann is both a fan and critic of policies. “In many ways, California is leading the way,” he says, praising the state’s bold commitment to conserving 30 percent of its land by 2030. “In others, it’s lagging.” There are places where people recognize rivers as legal persons and “their right to run cold, clean and free,” Kaufmann says.

When it comes to Monterey County, Kaufmann says locals are doing a good job letting nature – “condors, otters, peregrine falcons” – rebound They were not here when he was hiking around in his 20s. Now, they are back.

OBI KAUFMANN speaks at 3pm Saturday, May 14 at Henry Miller Library, 48603 Highway 1, Big Sur. Free. The Coasts of California: A California Field Atlas is available at local bookstores.