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 137 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
Our choices are the problem.
This week’s topic: Resources
How are colonialism, capitalism, and locusts alike?
In colonialism, the colonizer uses someone else’s resources for their own profit. Capitalism is a system based on the private accumulation of resources in which those with the most win. And locusts, when the environment swings between extremes, swarm and consume all the resources in their way. Notice any similarities?
So small individually, so destructive en masse. A lot like humans.
This isn’t the way humans have to live
In fact, many cultures have lived, and some even continue to live, in ways that do not depend on the exploitation and destruction of all available resources.1 They take care of the environment.
SF: locust or caretaker?
SF is currently on the path of exploitation-to-ruin. Why else would SF permit “disruptive” businesses that destroy livelihoods, kill people, and pour GHGs into the air?2 Why else would SF empower and protect those who cheat on and abuse environmental regulations to build luxury living spaces that fuel gentrification?3 Why else would SF even consider investing in enormously expensive, environmentally destructive, and futile seawalls when cheaper biological buffers work better and last longer?4
Don’t consume SF’s resources like locusts
We have a wealth of energy-generating resources in SF if you’d just invest in and require them.5 We have myriad ways to save, preserve, and better use water in SF if you’d just invest in and require them.6 We have a dense, diverse, and educated population if you’d stop driving them away for profit. SF is not a colonial holding to be sucked dry (literally) and abandoned. Is it? Care for our resources because they take care of us.
Dear Editor,
How are colonialism, capitalism, and locusts alike? They all destroy someone else’s resources, and none of them care about what they leave behind. SF doesn’t have to act like a colonial power, robber baron, or swarm of locusts to survive. In fact, acting this way is anti-survival. What should we be doing instead? How about instead of insisting on profits in every action, we require sustainability in every action. How about instead of destruction, we figure out how to sustain ourselves and our city. How about we listen to what the indigenous people’s of this area, the Ramaytush Ohlone, know about the land and water, and we all work to take care of the land we’re on. Because, unless we take care of it, it can’t take care of us. And, despite billionaire boys’ club dreams, there is no Planet B.
FOOTNOTES
1. The Ramaytush Ohlone, the Lax Kw’alaams, the Wet’suwet’en, the BriBri, the Sápara, the Maasai, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, the Inupiaq, the Australian Aboriginal peoples, and many many more.
2. Uber and Lyft to start with.
3. Take the Quiz! Alex Mak. “Mission Local Makes ‘SF Corruption Scandal’ Quiz & Interactive Map”. broke-ass stuart. 8 November 2021. https://brokeassstuart.com/2021/11/08/mission-local-makes-sf-corruption-scandal-quiz-interactive-map/.
4. Jamie Oppenheim and Patrick Monahan. “SF State experts weigh in on possible responses to surging seas”. SF State News. 20 February 2020. https://news.sfsu.edu/news-story/sf-state-experts-weigh-possible-responses-surging-seas.
5. Wind, solar, tidal, and a locally owned and controlled grid. See Strike letters for weeks 38, 39, 42, 68, 81, 94, and 103 for details.
6. Conservation, blackwater recycling, composting toilets, permeable surfaces, planting an urban forest and bio highways are a good start. See Strike letters for weeks 1, 20, 28, 52, 82, 95, 103, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 119, 128, 129, and 130 for details.
