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This is the letter for week 147 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
What do we need to survive?
This week’s topic: Martians!
It’s time to be Mark Watney
Don’t know who Mark Watney is? He’s the guy below, the first multicellular Martian (though fictional), the astronaut who was accidentally left behind on Mars and survived for 564 Earth days / 549 Martian days.
Why are we talking about a fictional Martian?
Mark Watney may be fictional, but the science in The Martian is not. It was crowd-sourced and fact-checked by scientists specializing in the areas explored in the story. What The Martian has to say about survival on a planet hostile to life is pretty accurate, and this is important as we are rapidly turning our once hospitable planet into another Venus. Our survival is not a given.
So what does The Martian say about survival?
Mark had a few things to worry about that we don’t. He relied on machinery for both oxygen and sufficient pressure, and needed shielding so he wouldn’t sizzle in cosmic rays and the high energy light the sun pours out (x-rays, gamma rays, and the ionizing radiation Earth’s atmosphere protects us from).
But those had been dealt with by NASA efficiently enough so they weren’t a problem for him. What was a problem for him, what he had to keep dealing with and figuring out over and over and over again were water and energy. Without those, he could not survive. Mark was calculating energy and juggling energy sources all 549 sols he was on Mars. And he realized early on he actually had to make water (which he did — yay chemistry!) Water and energy are vital for survival: where have you heard that before? Maybe in prior strike letters, say in 25 — that’s 17% — of them.
SF’s only chance of survival is to secure water and energy
On Mars, Mark had plenty of energy once he figured out how to access it. SF has even more energy if you’d just start using it. We are surrounded by easily accessible green energy sources, from solar to heat differentials, from wave to wind, from tidal to geothermal. Get rid of all non-green energy infrastructure (good since it’s dangerous, especially in earthquake country), incentivize green energy, penalize non-green energy, and we’ll be swimming in clean electrons in no time.
Water is harder but doable and needs to be taken care of now before the megadrought really kicks in. Blackwater recycling, composting toilets, aquifer recharging, swales everywhere, a native urban forest, stream and river re-surfacing, getting rid of pollution, and the de-watering of industry (both in local industries and through purchasing) all need to happen immediately.
We are all Mark Watney
Are we smart enough and resilient enough to do what needs to be done in order to survive? Because that’s what we need to survive. We need to be Mark Watney, each and everyone of us.
Dear Editor
In the book The Martian, one astronaut with a lot of equipment and a few months worth of supplies has to figure out how to survive on an inhospitable planet. Between megadrought and energy sources that are baking the planet, California is rapidly becoming as inhospitable as Mars. That’s why it’s time to take a few lessons from The Martian. Specifically, we need to figure out water and energy for the long haul; they need to be renewable, green, and make the ecosystem richer (aka more resilient). Fortunately, SF has a plethora of green energy available: solar, tidal, temperature differentials, wind, and geothermal. SF can also save much more water with blackwater recycling, composting toilets, swales, aquifer recharging, and planting an urban native forest. Mark Watney, the Martian of the book, never lost sight of his goal: survival. We have what we need to survive — but only if we act.