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 144 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
Underfunded schools treated like political footballs + omicron - what could go wrong?
This week’s topic: Because It’s Been Rough On The Frontline Lately
This week we’re going to review
You need it. You haven’t been doing your homework and are failing to attain benchmarks, even with remedial differentiation. You are not enacting best practices, you are grossly misapplying accommodations, and you are flunking your project-based learning. Your capstone project was built on extrinsic financial motivation, and you define accountability by low expectations. You are failing at inclusive practices, you have haphazard methodology, and you show no mastery of performance assessments. You have clearly never engaged in backward design, or likely in any kind of rigor at all.
Or, translated from edu-speak: You’ve got a LOT of catching up to do.
What does SF need?
1. Energy — clean, green, renewable, 0 CO2 emitting, locally-produced and locally-controlled
2. Water — local and recycled
With these, we have a chance of surviving. Without even one of them, it’s game over. Now.
What else does SF need to do more than just survive?
- Housing and infrastructure moved uphill
- Clean and free transit for all, with no-car policies
- Bioswales, bio-highways, tiny forests, horizontal berms, green roofs, permeable pavement, native planting, victory gardens, and urban farming
- Increased albedo, increased tree cover, increased permeable surfaces, reestablishment of surface riparian habitat, mandated natural cooling for zoning and architecture
- government of, by, and for the people and not the donors/corporations/billionaires/latter-day colonial powers and robber barons currently controlling you
- Divestment of finances and purchases from polluting activities, ranging from dumping Blackrock and Exxon (SFERS would be a good place to start) to outlawing plastic wrapping
There’s more, of course. This would be the lifeboat. Not the desert island, not land in sight, not a ship coming to the rescue, this is just the lifeboat. But your chances of surviving are a lot longer in a lifeboat than in the water.
What do you mean, “surviving”?
Let’s take a look.
Because I’m on the covid frontline, I have to strike virtually again this week. Most of you aren’t going to work in person anyway; it must be nice to have that choice. But there’s nothing virtual about climate change or the danger your continued inaction and inadequate actions put San Francisco in.
Dear Editor
If San Francisco is going to stand any chance of surviving climate change, the city must have locally produced, green, renewable energy and locally sourced (and recycled) water. If climate change is a shipwreck, those two things are our dinghy and, for longer-term survival, SF needs more than a dinghy. Beyond energy and water, we need berms and plantings to slow sea level rise, tons more native greenery to absorb and store carbon and cool down the city, public transit everywhere for everyone, divestment from all polluters, and a move uphill as we abandon low-lying areas that cannot be saved. In this climate change shipwreck, think Titanic; just rearranging the deck chairs won’t accomplish anything. We’ve already ripped the hull. Maybe it’s time to start building the lifeboats and hunting for land.