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 159 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
This week: Imagine Survival
What does survival look like?
For SF, it rests on two things: water and energy. Everything else is secondary because, without those two things, the city fails and is abandoned.
How does SF do water?
We do it the way other water-poor regions do it: recycling, conservation, and working with nature instead of against it.
San Francisco needs to mandate blackwater recycling across the board, beginning with new, municipal and federal buildings, next moving on to all office and mixed use buildings, then mandating it in all housing, starting with apartment and condo complexes with more than 20 units, then moving on to include all smaller apartment and condo complexes, and then finally all housing.
Building owners can avoid retrofitting in a blackwater recycling system if they have a graywater system that will reduce potable water use in that building by a minimum of 10% and use only composting toilets.
No potable water is ever to be used on non-native outdoor plantings, including golf courses. Outdoor personal and community gardens can only be watered using recycled gray or blackwater.
A per person daily water allowance needs to be established. Those going under their set water usage for a year need to be rewarded in some way, while those going over their set water usage for a week or more are fined a proportion of their total income (ensuring equal punishment across income ranges). All plumbing and water pipe leaks need to be found and fixed.
Pollution that harms water quality needs to be eliminated and polluters severely punished. Pollution sources that do this include gas, oil, and copper particles from cars; rubber granules, synthetic fibers, and microplastics from artificial turf; and cigarette butts, poured out paint, and dog feces from human dumping.
Native water-trapping ecosystems and species need to be widely planted, especially in areas that suffer most from the urban heat island effect. Riparian and marsh ecosystems need to be restored. Rainwater and floods need to be captured in aquifers, swales, permeable pavement, and the emergency fire-fighting water system’s cisterns and reservoir. Impermeable surfaces need to be replaced with permeable materials. Blackwater recycling must be done outdoors with engineered marshes and streams for the multiple benefits provided.
How does SF do energy?
By kicking out PG&E, getting rid of “natural” gas, and municipalizing the grid to allow for multiple, green, safe, local, renewable energy sources. It’s time we stop funding the greed and destruction of a felon mass-murderer1, clean up our carbon footprint, and act.
We don’t want PG&E’s entire grid. We need a local grid, made of multiple resilient micro-grids and able to interact with neighboring grids in our local region. This is relatively easy to set up with existing infrastructure, easy to put underground as we work on plumbing and permeable surfaces citywide, and easy to repair and keep operational as we’re talking about a grid that is small and in a constantly-observed geographic area.
We have so many options here: solar, wind, geothermal heat pumps, air heat pumps, tide, water heat pumps, and more. We’re really only limited by our lack of imagination.
So act
It’s not hard to act, the benefits of action far outweigh the costs, and not acting will kill SF. ACT!
FOOTNOTES
1. Chromium 6 in Hinkley, 2 dead in the Butte Fire, 8 dead in the San Bruno explosion, 22 dead in the Tubbs Fire, 85 dead in the Camp Fire, and there’s more.