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This is the letter for week 26 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 see topics for all the strike letters, see this story.
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Because all our actions now have enormous consequences,
it is impossible not to act.
This week’s topic is Why I Strike.
I was born and raised in San Jose. During that time, I witnessed the last orchards and fields ripped up for sprawl as the Valley of Heart’s Delight became Silicon Valley, I saw the hills only a few days a year because the smog was so dense, and I was sprayed with Malathion during the Mediterranean fruit fly battles. I did my undergrad work at Sonoma State University where the landscape vanished as Rohnert Park spread like cancer. I have lived, gone to school, and worked in SF since 1983 (except for 2 ½ years in Japan in the late ‘80s), and in that time I have seen SF green spaces turn into plastic, the SF night blasted by light pollution, the insects of SF disappear, and gentrification drive out entire communities.
Yet Kobe, where we lived in Japan, is also a big city, in fact much bigger than SF. We lived in Sumaura, at the southwest extent of Kobe’s reach, in an area where no environmental poisons were used, and the contrast to SF couldn’t have been starker. Sumaura was rich in biodiversity. There were tons of insects, like the mukade or the giant flying armored cockroaches or the spiders as big as an adult hand spread out, and these contributed to an immensely rich ecosystem. There were lizards everywhere, small snakes, tons of birds, loads of native bees (many big, stupid, and single-minded), and astoundingly diverse plant life supporting it all. The ecosystem was healthy and strong and had ongoing multiyear cycles that were not only intact but thriving.
California was like that too, once. Go to Mission San Juan Bautista, take a tour with a state park ranger and listen to how the place looked before the mission, how the Amah Mutsuns lived in a richly diverse and thriving biosphere, and then look around at what that became. Read about the birds so numerous along SF’s shore that they darkened the sky for hours as they passed, and then come visit the beach to see what’s left. Dig into the Monterey Bay Aquarium data on the plethora of fish that hugged the coasts for eons and then talk to the fishers about those fisheries now. We live in bio-poverty.
I got my teaching credentials through SFSU, and spent 30 years teaching science in SF. My students could look at data and do the math; they couldn’t avoid seeing what was happening. They asked me when they’d feel the impacts of this environmental apocalypse in their own lives, and I gave them rough answers, with caveats, based on best-info timelines. It was an awful countdown. Then I found myself saying “Now, it’s happening now.” And I realized I could no longer prepare my students “for the future” because that future didn’t then and couldn’t ever again exist. The planet had already changed beyond recognition, and I had to fight for it myself, not depend on them to do it for me.
So I don’t know the best way to do this, but I do know that cities can act quickly and make real differences. I know that cities can thrive alongside rich and diverse ecosystems, and that our bio-poverty is killing us. I know SF has acted fast, with great efficiency multiple times in our history. I know that we have very little time, 67 weeks, in which to act. And I know from years of studying the science that there are very real things we can and must be doing now.
That’s why I strike.