You can make a difference, in your town or your city, to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event! Reuse this information! This is the letter for week 15 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 to all the strike letters, see this story.
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
because this planet is habitable for everyone or no one.
Greed and opportunism are destroying the ability of the planet to support life.
We must act now because there is no later, no putting it off, no other way.
This week’s topic is ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE.
The poor and “underdeveloped” are hit hardest, first.
“Pensioners left on their own during a heatwave in industrialised countries. Single mothers in rural areas. Workers who spend most of their days outdoors. Slum dwellers in the megacities of the developing world. These are some of the vulnerable groups who will feel the brunt of climate change.”
The Guardian, 31/03/2014
“Children in developing countries produce very little or no carbon emissions yet the impact of climate change for them will be huge. They will have less water, less crops for food and their health will also be affected.”
Australian Museum, 02/02/2010
“One-third of the planet’s land is no longer fertile enough to grow food. More than 1.3 billion people live on this deteriorating agricultural land, putting them at risk of climate-driven water shortages and depleted harvests […] 3 out of 4 people living in poverty rely on agriculture & natural resources to survive […] people living in the world’s poorest countries – like Haiti and Timor-Leste – are the most vulnerable.” Mercy Corps, 10/04/2018
“If you’re poor, you spend a higher percentage of your total income on food. In some regions, the poorest residents use more than 60 percent of their income to buy food while for the wealthiest, it’s less than 10 percent.”
National Geographic, 01/12/2015
“In Alaska, there are dozens of towns that the federal government has identified as being in potential need of relocation due to the damage caused by the climate crisis. The village of Newtok in western Alaska was granted $15m last year to start shifting homes to safer ground but the vast majority of communities have no pathway to do likewise.”
Grist, 17/06/2019
“[…] the flooding has taken what was already a dire situation and made it ‘devastating […] We’re already underfunded and strapped for resources’ from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she explained. ‘We’re already in survival mode every day.’”
NPR, 25/03/2019
“A sudden surge in corn prices due to historically low planting levels in the United States contributed to an increase in global food prices in May, for the fifth consecutive month, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on June 6.”
World-Grain, 06/06/2019
The rich are stealing from the planet, the future, and all species.
The CDP/Climate Accountability Institute report, released July of 2017, pointed out that 100 companies are the source of 71% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. More than half the global industrial emissions since 1988 can be traced to 25 corporate or state-owned entities. The top three polluters are Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and Exxon Mobil.
Oil is still all over the beaches of Prince William Sound, 30 years after the Exxon Valdez. Exxon Mobil has seen record profits almost every year since.
Global “development” drives extinction, according to the the U.N. assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services summary, released in May.
Yet indigenous cultural practices actually work best.
The same assessment summary pointed out that ecosystems and the species in them are declining at substantially lower rates in land that is traditionally owned, occupied, or managed by Indigenous peoples. Last year, Global Witness reported that at least 207 land and environmental activists were murdered, and almost half those targeted were Indigenous people. The U.N. Human Rights Council calls “attacks against and criminalization of Indigenous peoples” defending their forests, waters, wildlife, and homes against destructive governments and polluting corporations a current “global crisis.”
What does this mean to us in San Francisco?
We need to make San Francisco work for everyone and every species, not just the privileged, the rich, the bullies and profiteers, the people who see a resource and try to exploit it for their profit. How?
- Use the declaration of climate emergency to act immediately. This declaration is not window dressing. It is a statement of fact and needs to be utilized.
- Get everyone involved, and that involvement cannot be based on how much money people have. Additionally, corporations are not people and cannot be treated as such, much less as privileged people, in terms of the habitability crisis facing the planet.
- Get our Indigenous community involved and in places of authority asap. There is a genocide in CA that we have never acknowledged, apologized for, or made reparations for. It’s about time we start.
- Write the right to clean air, clean water, healthful food, and fertile soil into the city charter.
- Demand these rights at the state level be written into our state constitution and enforced.
- Sign on independently to the Paris Agreement and then push the international community harder for more action now.
- Build an Ohlone cultural center in SF and invite the Ramaytush Ohlone to help. It’s long past time.
- Insist on housing for all species – do not destroy ecosystems just because humans could live there if everything else was cleared away.
Don’t wait for a “leader” to show you the way. These “leaders” are the privileged – they don’t understand any of this because, so far, they haven’t had to. For most of them, for the last 11,000 years, there hasn’t been a reckoning. They got rich and stayed rich and occasionally fought wars to get richer, but that was the extent of their skin in the game. When they figured out how to fight wars by proxy, they even lost that knowledge.
They are ignorant, removed, oblivious, and scared. But this time, there is no escape for them, or for us, and the privileged are totally unprepared to deal with it. They have no knowledge and no training, beyond that of the pirate or thief. They cannot lead us. They can be made to give back the resources they’ve plundered. For a start. Don’t wait to start.