{MONDAY, 7 p.m. Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. Free. Details: www.bookshopsantacruz.com. }

By WALLACE BAINE

You can sing the praises of California’s majestic mountains, fertile valleys, redwood forests and breathtaking deserts all day long. And they all deserves that praise. But for most Californians, the fact of life that makes the Golden State golden is the state’s interface with the Pacific Ocean, the sometimes rugged, sometimes sublime coastline.

Author David Helvarg; Without the ocean, California is “little more than a long, skinny clone of Nevada.”

In fact, without the 1,100 miles of coastline, said author and environmental activist David Helvarg, California is “little more than a long, skinny clone of Nevada.”

Helvarg, who speaks Monday at Bookshop Santa Cruz, is the author of “The Golden Shore: California’s Love Affair with the Sea,” which can best be described as a biography of the California coast. From the U.S. Navy’s influence in San Diego to the establishment of the California Coastal Commision to the passion for surfing in both Southern and Northern California, there is a lot to tell in the story.

But the main thrust of the book is that for decades California was once a cautionary tale in human-made degradation of the marine environment, but is now a model for exactly how to maintain a vital and healthy ocean.

“This is a state where people are now engaged in protection of the ocean,” said Helvarg, the executive director of the Blue Frontier Campaign. “People here get it that you have to protect what you love and what they love is the water.”

“The Golden Shore” is part travelogue, part journalistic investigation, part cultural history. It takes on ecology, geology, sociology and geography, maintaining that since 90 percent of the state’s 37 million people live within an hour’s drive of the coast, the ocean is the strongest pull in the state.

Until the Gold Rush, the Pacific Coast remained almost pristine, thanks to scattered and very meager human populations. But for the second half of the 19^th century, and well into the 20^th century, exploding populations wreaked havoc on the ocean, as cities and other settlements dumped all sorts of waste into the sea, and depleted the state’s fisheries.

Helvarg said the change was gradual in some ways – the otter became the first marine mammal to enjoy protected status way back in the 1930s – and sudden in other ways.

“The big turning point was the 1960s,” he said, pointing to three East Bay women who founded the organization Save the Bay in 1961, stopping an effort to fill in much of San Francisco Bay. Another huge turning point was the infamous oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in the winter of 1969 that was the worst oil spill in U.S. history until the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 20 years later.

“Two years later, surfers were still taking turpentine baths when they got out of the water,” said Helvarg.

A few years after the Santa Barbara spill, a planned development in northern Sonoma County known as Sea Ranch sparked the establishment of the California Coastal Commission that has since put severe limits on development along the coast.

“Taken together, these things, as well as people acting individually in their communities all over California, created the environmental movement in this state,” said Helvarg.

Surfing as well served as a catalyst for ocean protection, as manifested in such organizations as the Surfrider Foundation. And, in recent years, the protection of the federal parks system has been extended beyond the shore into the oceans.

“I think this book is about reawakening people to things that we already know,” said Helvarg, “that there is always an opportunity to do the right thing for the oceans.”

The book also explores some of the challenges to the state in terms of future climate change, and outlines California’s preparedness.

“After Hurricane Sandy, the people of New York and New Jersey shouldn’t have looked to Washington for how to deal with these kinds of issues. They should have been looking to California.”