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 155 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
How can we get you to act before it’s too late?
This week’s topic: Solutions-Based Governance
Because we need a script that works and we need it right now.
Solutions-based governance requires action and defangs the denialists
In three steps, solutions-based governance requires you to:
- Identify the problem.
- Solicit solutions.
- And adopt the solutions that solve the problem at the lowest environmental impact.
Identify the problem
This is the majority of the work in solutions-based governance. The clearer you are in defining the problem, the easier it is to identify relevant possible solutions for it.
An example is the longterm, seemingly intractable issue of SF’s very dangerous roads. Vision Zero has done little to reduce cyclist and pedestrian deaths and injuries, and cars in SF are pumping out more CO2 than ever before; these two things are dangerous to both individuals and to life as a whole. This problem, then, is worth solving as the solution or solutions are likely to lower our environmental impact.
Starting from dangerous roads, we now need to identify the problem clearly. A statement of identity can be comprehensive (“There are too many cars in San Francisco”) or smaller and local (“There is no safe pedestrian and cyclist north/south route on the west side of the city.”) There needs to be a clear connection between the issue and the statement of the problem. In this case, the primary danger posed on the roads is cars (as data from the initial months of the pandemic makes clear). The comprehensive statement addresses cars directly while the smaller, local statement focuses on individuals impacted by cars. In both cases, the connection between the statement and the problem can be clearly and easily explicated.
Please note that a problem can have multiple identifying statements and therefore multiple solutions.
Solicit solutions
Let’s continue with the second, more local problem as it is the closest to what you’re accustomed to working on. When soliciting solutions, you need to ask everyone. Everyone. The call for solutions needs to go out in all types of media, in multiple languages, through clubs, organizations, schools, coffeeshops, churches, bars, neighborhood groups, outreach workers, dance studios, needle exchange programs, unions, jails, political associations, halfway houses, the opera, tattoo parlors, grocery stores, shoe shops, malls, hospitals, homeless encampments, farmers markets, theatre lobbies, etc. etc. etc. You need to hold meetings with constituents; everyone needs to be heard.
The solutions are publicly posted throughout the entire solicitation process. There is a deadline. The solutions collected are then organized, consolidated when possible, and ranked by environmental impact.
“Doing nothing” will not be included among possible solutions. Our survival depends on solving the identified problems; we are living in a time of climate change. So while people may desperately want the status quo, identifying a problem in and of itself means a change must happen.
To continue with our example, a list of possible solutions to the lack of a safe north/south route for pedestrians and cyclists on the west side of the city could include the following:
- Make the upper Great Hwy into a non-automotive road.
- Make 41st, Sunset, 25th, or 20th into a non-automotive road.
- Change every north/south avenue between 19th and 48th to non-automotive in one direction and pedestrian/cyclist in the other. The even numbered avenues have cars in the north lane and non-automotive traffic in the south, and the odd numbered avenues are the reverse. The speed limit for all forms of transportation on these avenues is a maximum of 20 mph.
- Change the avenues between 19th and the Great Hwy to majority non-automotive, with cars only allowed on 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, and 46th avenues. Residents who live on the other avenues and who own cars must have a block sticker on their car, and can travel a maximum of .75 blocks on the avenue they live on to go between a letter street and their house or apartment.
- Eliminate all non-handicapped street parking on the avenues from 19th to the Great Hwy.
- Eliminate all street parking on 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 44, and 48th avenues, and turn half of each of these avenues into tiny housing with the other half for pedestrians and non-automotive transportation.
And so on.
Adopt the solution with the lowest environmental impact
Rank the possible solutions by environmental impact. In the example above, with a limited solutions pool, the easiest solutions to immediately implement are #1 and #5. Neither do an enormous amount in reducing CO2 pollution, through #1 does a lot for reducing other types of car pollution (such as copper, rubber, lead, and oil pollution into water). Additionally, it’s unclear how #5 is a solution.
The solutions that produce the greatest number of safe streets and reduce the greatest amount of car traffic are #4 and #6. More details would be needed to decide which of the two which is better environmentally.
#3 is likely to be more dangerous than what’s currently in place and is an example of why environmental impact needs to be calculated.
After the solutions are ranked and winnowed down, the solution that provides the greatest environmental benefit is adopted. It could be that there are multiple solutions that work and that operate at different time scales; more than one solution could be adopted at the same time.
This is a method to act now because we must act now
The grumpy, scared, uninformed people in denial believe if they yell loudly enough everything will go back to the way it was. They cannot be in charge of policy if we want to survive. If they don’t have a solution (and going back to the 1950’s is not a solution), they have to live with the solutions we find this way. They have to, at last, put up or shut up. And, lucky for them, our solutions will keep them alive to grouse another day. We just have to hear their grousing and then get on with the work.
ACT
It’s so very very close to too late.