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 128 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
It’s a megadrought. Do you know where your water is?
You, the government of SF, must figure out water and energy if SF is going to survive — and you must convince the citizens of SF you can be trusted to do what’s right.
This week’s topic: Water and the Common Good
Water, in detail
Why worry about water? Higher temperatures increase dehydration risk (even in environments with high humidity1), and dehydration kills. We are in a world where every season is getting shorter except summer2 high temperatures are much higher for much longer, wet bulb temperatures are rising decades before predicted, and freshwater supplies are vanishing.
Locally there’s an ongoing megadrought and depleted water tables; a vanishing snowpack; sea level rising and saltwater intrusion; freshwater endangered by pollution, algal blooms, and increasing salinity; agriculture selling CA water via the exporting of water-hungry crops; corporations and cities stealing from ecosystems; CA increasing environmental racism and treaty breaking; and regulatory capture by the Resnicks et al.3
All this can be boiled down to: Water is changing and we have to act differently, now.
How differently?
We need to use much less water, use water better, use only local water, and use water as part of the ecosystem (recycling and replenishing it). SF uses less water than most municipalities in CA, but this isn’t a race between municipalities; it’s an attempt to survive the situation on our planet. Next week, we’ll start working through the details of how SF can do all this, again.
Meanwhile, you have to convince us you can be trusted to do what’s right
The city’s track record for transparency and accountability is terrible, SF’s history of corruption is overwhelming4, city hall insiders are being arraigned on a daily basis, and the view from the street level is that only money and connections count. You’re starting with a big deficit. How can you reverse that in order to actually accomplish something? Transparency and accounting.
Transparency and accounting?
Corruption is only successfully fought by transparency and clear intentions. Transparency works.5, 6 And psychologists, who work in understanding and clarifying intentions, help communities achieve real, lasting environmental change.7, 8 Social science is needed to help with the accounting.
Can you change so we survive?
Dear Editor,
If San Francisco is going to survive climate change, we must act now. But how can we, the citizens of SF, trust that city hall is looking out for us and not just the politicians and corporations hungry for profits at the expense of the planet? SF city hall has a long legacy of corruption. What needs to change, so SF can survive climate change, is municipal transparency and accountability at every level. If the citizens of SF can easily see where the money is coming from and going to and how decisions are being made, if we all know the actual issues and get equal voice on solutions, then we will have a fighting chance at SF continuing to support life. Call, tweet, or visit your supervisor and demand full transparency and accountability. It’s a matter of survival.
FOOTNOTES
1. Mayo Clinic Staff. “Dehydration”. Mayo Clinic. Accessed 5 October 2021. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dehydration/symptoms-causes/syc-20354086.
2. Kasha Patel. “Every season except summer is getting shorter, a sign of trouble for people and the environment”. The Washington Post. 22 September 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/09/22/longer-northern-hemisphere-summer-climate/.
3. Josh Harkinson. “Meet the California Couple Who Use More Water Than Every Home in Los Angeles Combined”. Mother Jones. 9 August 2016. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewart-resnick-california-water/.
4. Joe Eskenazi. “Permit irregularities abound on properties of Angus McCarthy, president of Department of Building Inspection’s commission”. Mission Local. 25 September 2021. https://missionlocal.org/2021/09/angus-mccarthy-president-of-dept-of-building-inspection-commission-admits-he-has-private-builders-edit-redraft-dept-of-building-inspection-materials/.
5. “Environmental transparency, participation and justice”. The Transparency & Accountability Initiative. 2011. http://transparency-initiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/7-environment1.pdf.
6. Ramon Arratia. “True sustainability needs transparency”. The Guardian. 17 March 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/waste-and-recycling.
7. Nathanael Johnson. “How one town put politics aside to save itself from fire”. Grist. 1 September 2021. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/how-one-town-put-politics-aside-to-save-itself-from-fire-ashland-oregon/.
8. Tania Lombrozo. “How Psychology Can Save The World From Climate Change”. NPR. 30 November 2015. https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/11/30/457835780/how-psychology-can-save-the-world-from-climate-change.