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 141 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
What do former Olympic sites, the Pyongyang Ryugyong Hotel, the U.S. military budget, Ne Win and Burma’s currency reorganization, war, the rollout of Myki in Victoria, America’s penal system, and Chinese ghost cities all have in common?
All are examples of this week’s topic: Massive Waste
Massive waste? In SF? Where?
The sea is rising and will continue to rise. Water levels are rising faster and higher than the predictions of even a few years ago.1 Those predictions were already bad for SF — see map below.
In SF, frontline communities are the most impacted
Treasure Island, Bayview, Hunters Point, Candlestick Point, some non-gentrified areas south of Market, and parts of Chinatown —only the Tenderloin and Vis Valley are left out of this low income equals going-to-be-underwater equation.
Flood zones are not viable land
These are actual sacrifice zones that will soon be underwater — we need to be getting people out of there now, before their houses, businesses, and lives are destroyed.
But that’s where you’re building
8000 units on Treasure Island, a 12-story housing complex at Ocean Beach, mega projects at Mission Rock, Pier 70, the Power Station, Tidal House, the shipyard, and Candlestick Point2 — you’re building and proposing to build and preparing to build housing in areas that will be underwater in your political lifetimes. Why not throw money directly into the ocean? It would be less damaging.
You’re making massively wasteful decisions
Because building in flood zones causes floods and erosion in a much wider area. Hard, impermeable surfaces such as city streets channel and accelerate floodwaters. Hard protective measures like sea walls damage the ecosystems behind them and cause flanking erosion on adjacent coastlines.3 And we already know massive buildings are sinking SF, causing us to lose elevation when we need to be gaining it.4
This is massive waste
All our available money, time, and energy need to be spent on projects that will do good and last longer than an election cycle. We need to be building at elevation, investing in defenses that will work and last, figuring out local solutions, actually acting (and not just talking) green, and ensuring SF has multiple ways to achieve necessary ends (aka resilience).
What does that look like?
Retreat from the coasts now and plant marshes, kelp forests, and sea grass meadows as horizontal berms to absorb some sea level rise, slow wave and saltwater intrusion, protect the areas behind them, and store and sequester carbon. Move infrastructure uphill where it can last and build transit to accompany this, including funiculars. Put housing and shared spaces and grocery stores and shops on the hills. This is the biggest emergency of your lifetimes; why aren’t you acting?
Dear Editor
Imagine standing at the waterfront and tossing all your money into the waves, one bill at a time. You won’t be able to get the money back and you can’t use it once it’s gone. But throwing money into the ocean is less wasteful than what SF is doing right now. Sea levels are rising and NOAA has already mapped out large areas on SF’s east, north, and west sides, plus Treasure Island, that will soon be underwater. So what is the city‘s response? To build mega housing projects in most of these doomed areas. Not only is this actually throwing money into the ocean, it is throwing people in as well, and diverting resources from adaptation work that needs to happen if SF is to survive. SF needs to fasttrack and fund useful responses to climate change instead of building more developer wet dreams.
FOOTNOTES
1. Mongabay.com. “New study warns that sea levels will rise faster than expected”. Mongabay. 2 February 2021. https://news.mongabay.com/2021/02/new-study-warns-that-sea-levels-will-rise-faster-than-expected/.
2. J.K. Dineen. “S.F. has a slew of mega housing projects on track for 2022. Here’s what it could mean for the city”. San Francisco Chronicle. 22 December 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Big-S-F-housing-development-will-go-gangbusters-16721048.php#photo-21851016.
3. Stefanie Sekich-Quinn. “Seawalls Are Stealing Our Sandy Beaches”. Surfrider Foundation. 8 September 2021. https://www.surfrider.org/coastal-blog/entry/seawalls-are-stealing-our-sandy-beaches.
4. David Nield. “The Colossal Weight of Cities Is Making Them Sink, Even as Sea Levels Are Rising”. Science Alert. 16 February 2021. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-weight-of-cities-is-sinking-urban-areas-at-the-same-time-sea-levels-are-rising.