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 148 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 to NOT to get stuff done
This week’s topic: Lessons of the recall
This isn’t rocket science
I’ve worked at SFUSD since 1994. I’ve survived 8 superintendents, done 2 years at a school the principal was trying to destroy (on orders from a superintendent), and put 21 years in at a favorite target of board members trying to make their political bones. My longterm ground level view of the district has let me experience, from conception to execution and often to abandonment, which initiatives and methods work, which don’t, and why. And, you know what? So many of the choices I’ve seen SFUSD make look exactly like the strategies SF is using to fight climate change. As the successful recalls should indicate, that’s not good.
What did the board members do wrong?
Simply put, they didn’t understand the assignment. They focused entirely on individual, stated and unstated agendas that had little support in law, from stakeholders, or from facts. They saw their job as driving their agendas through to (poorly defined) finish lines no matter what, so they ignored, belittled, or attacked everything that didn’t further their goals. Not being tethered to the real world made them prone to ridiculousness and ripe for lawsuits. Ultimately, they failed at their real and most basic tasks: educating children and achieving financial stability for the district.
The board, both those recalled and those who weren’t eligible for recall yet, failed to notice the elephant in the room, or that the room had filled, wall-to-wall, with elephants. That is why, in the end, more people voted them out of office then had voted them in.
How does this relate to SF and climate change?
1. If you don’t listen to and involve everyone, you lose.
The school board explicitly and for the record excluded voices that didn’t fit their agenda. At East River Park in Manhattan, one group had the ear of government while the people who live in the area were excluded from planning and decisions. The net result? For the school board it was lawsuits, bitterness, distrust, massive losses of students and teachers, debt, and the recall. For Manhattan, it was lawsuits, bitterness, distrust, gentrification, displacement, environmental injustice, ecosystem destruction, and more.
2. If you don’t listen to the science, you will make things worse.
Not working on or figuring out how to reopen schools for over a year hurt the district and everyone in it. Science had a lot to say on how to reopen safely, but the board ignored it. Building in flood zones (Treasure Island, for example) is a prime example of choices that make things worse. The science is clear, but the city is ignoring it.
3. If you don’t act, you make things worse.
Take a look at the history of the district’s debt. In the same way not acting on that debt was a recipe for disaster, not taking simple actions that fight climate change impacts — like floodplain zoning, basic infrastructure improvements, and biosphere enrichment — can kill us. Actions make a survivability difference in human-caused climate change.
4. Transparency matters.
Secret meetings, hidden agendas, private agreements, unpublished criteria for decisions — the school board violates the Brown Act over and over and over again and alienates stakeholders every time. The city and county are no strangers to this kind of secrecy and corruption. Lack of transparency in the school district led to the recall. Lack of transparency in the city’s fight against climate change could doom SF.
Learn the lessons of the recall
In a disaster, there is no time for incompetency. A political agenda means nothing in the face of a landslide, unfounded beliefs do no good in a tsunami, and ignoring it won’t make a pandemic go away.
Dear Editor
The recall of 3 school board members offers object lessons to politicians in the fight against climate change. These lessons are: 1. If you only listen to those who agree with you, you won’t know what the problems are and will have difficulty getting anything done. 2. If you ignore the science, you will make matters much worse. 3. If you don’t act when action is clearly required, you will make matters much worse. And 4. transparency matters. These foundations for governing are Politics 101, but clearly the school board didn’t understand even these basic ideas. Do the mayor and board of supervisors? The recall, debt, student and teacher losses, and mental health and academic issues of the school district pale in comparison to what climate change will do to San Francisco. Have our politicians learned enough at last to act for us?
FOOTNOTES
1. Keith Gessen. “The Destroy-It-to-Save-It Plan for East River Park”. Curbed. 11 May 2021. https://www.curbed.com/2021/05/east-river-park-nyc.html.
2. Jake Bittle. “US flood risk is about to explode — but not for the reasons you think”. Grist. 4 February 2022. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/flood-risk-growth-development/.
3. Fred Pearce. “It’s not just climate: Are we ignoring other causes of disasters?” Grist. 19 February 2022. https://grist.org/climate/its-not-just-climate-are-we-ignoring-other-causes-of-disasters/.
4. Candida Rodriguez. “Why transparency is fundamental to Climate Action”. UNDP. 4 May 2021. https://www.pacific.undp.org/content/pacific/en/home/blog/2021/why-transparency-is-fundamental-to-climate-action.html.
You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.
