You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 129 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Water: too much and not enough
This week’s topic: Too much water - the assault
What do you mean, “too much water”? Aren’t we in a megadrought?!
Yes. The planet can do more than one thing at a time, especially things caused by climate change.
Okay, what assault?
Maybe a picture will work where words haven’t. Look at the picture above. See the flooding downtown? Our situation is even worse than that picture shows; look at the picture below.
Downtown will flood no matter what you do now! The only control you have at this point is over how badly and widely the financial center of the city floods.1
So what can we do?
Plant berms — underwater, at water level, and above the water line. Invest in soggy marshlands and sea meadows to slow down and soak up as much water as possible. And retreat from the coasts. Now.2
Can you act so SF survives?
Dear Editor,
Climate Central’s “Picturing Our Future” makes it clear that sea level rise will flood large areas of SF. If San Francisco is going to survive, we must act now and work with nature instead of against it. How do we work with nature in our mitigation efforts? We build horizontal berms around the coasts, plant seagrass meadows and destroy urchin barrens to restore the kelp forests, create rain gardens and mini-polders, restore beaches, and elevate housing. At the same time, we need to alter a bunch of our infrastructure or move it uphill. This infrastructure includes our wastewater treatment plants, a lot of transportation, the airport, and our water supply. Sea level rise is here and increasing daily. We can’t wait any longer; the mayor and city government must act now.
FOOTNOTES
1. “Picturing Our Future”. Climate Central. Accessed 12 October 2021. https://picturing.climatecentral.org.
2. Winifred Bird. “Rethinking Urban Landscapes To Adapt to Rising Sea Levels”. Yale Environment 360. 2 March 2016. https://e360.yale.edu/features/rethinking_urban_landscapes_to_adapt_to_rising_sea_levels_climate_change_new_york_city.