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.
This is the letter for week 42 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 to see topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
We plan for big earthquakes because we know they’re coming. Climate chaos is already here and will get worse; mass extinction is already happening and will get worse. We must act now because both of these things endanger San Francisco more than the next big earthquake.
So this week’s topic is RESILIENCY AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY.
Our possible paths are increasingly clear.
Though scientific models’ predictions on the speed and extent of climate chaos and mass extinction have been consistently too conservative1, 2, 3, 4, 5, generally we’re seeing our options for the future break into three different regimes:
EXPLOIT TO THE MAX
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BUSINESS AS USUAL
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SERIOUS ABOUT THE SCIENCE
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large CO2 increase
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slight CO2 increase
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25-40% CO2 reduction by 2020, 80-95% CO2 reduction by 2050
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2°C maximum temperature rise
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1.5°C maximum temperature rise
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no coral reefs, all fish extinct
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no coral reefs and most fish extinct
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keep some coral reefs and keep some fish
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mass starvation
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mass migration from displacement and crashing food webs
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most people and other species continue living where they are
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At 2°C loses from climate change are $70 trillion
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At 1.5°C, loses from climate change $24.8 trillion
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continue with building as we are: costs $192 trillion
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Green New Deal building: costs $190.2 trillion
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And there’s lots more data available.6, 7 So, given the options and the costs, how do we make San Francisco more likely to survive what’s coming? How do we choose the right hand column?
Having more options to respond to change is safer than having few options to respond to change.
From the Irish Potato Famine to Scotia, CA after the Pacific Lumber Company, humans have faced disasters that have been caused by reduced options. If there’s only one crop and that crop is hit by blight, people die. If there’s only one employer and that employer goes bankrupt, the town dies.
In biology, a resilient ecosystem is one that has many different species filling each possible niche. A biological family is more likely to survive changing environmental conditions if it contains multiple genera and species in a wide variety of niches, making it more likely some will survive the new conditions. A single species is more likely to survive change if it has a variety of physiological and genetic options available to respond to new conditions. More is better.
To survive climate chaos and mass extinction, SF needs to expand our options.
Increased self-sufficiency is the best way to expand our options and resiliency.
While the Resilient San Francisco8 plan was a good start, and some of the recommendations are still being implemented, it is nonetheless insufficient to the task, too little known by the people of SF, and too slow to meet SF’s needs. It’s not enough that cities like SF have lower carbon footprints9 than suburbs if we are also incredibly vulnerable to disruption.10 Self-sufficiency decreases the chances that disruptions will cause a collapse, whether that means NERTs11 taking over simpler tasks during an emergency or SF becoming food and water self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency increases resiliency.
How can SF become resilient and self-sufficient?
1. Invest in San Francisco.
2. Expand opportunities and options in San Francisco; the greater the number of possibilities we have to fall back on, the more likely we’ll have something to get us through whatever emergencies we face.
And that’s it. Of course there are an enormous number of things that fall under each of the two points above. We need to be producing our own energy, we need to be growing a large percentage of our own food, we need to be reusing and recycling or composting everything that comes into SF and doing so in SF proper, we need to be water self-sufficient12, and much more. And the decisions about what is needed in order to become self-sufficient belong to the people of SF, to be gleaned through active democracy and extensive, transformative community interactions. Fortunately, this type of thing has been done before and there are many models and individuals to draw on for assistance.
The advantages to pursuing resilience and self-sufficiency are greater than physical. Involving people in making decisions about their lives and their futures is empowering. It creates community and positive feelings. It is active, it is local, it is non-exploitative, it is just. If the worst happens and San Francisco and the human experiment fail anyway, pursuing resiliency and self-sufficiency will still have been good. It will have bought us time, given us resources, and joined us together to fight back against despair. If we’re lucky and the worst does not happen, it will be because we came out of our fortresses and engaged with each other to build a city that can survive.
Isn’t that enough reason to take action now?
Where can I get MUCH more information on all of this?
- Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2008.
- Becky Bond & Zack Exley. Rules For Revolutionaries. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2016.
- Peter Macfadyen. Flatpack Democracy and Flatpack Democracy 2.0. eco-logic books. 2014 and 2019.
- Alternativet (The Alternative). https://alternativet.dk/en. 2020.
- Participatory Budgeting Project. http://www.participatorybudgeting.org. 2020.
- ed. Brigitte Geissel and Kenneth Newton. Evaluating Democratic Innovations. Routledge. 2012.
- Jared Diamond. The World Until Yesterday. Penguin Books. 2012.
- Bill McKibben. eaarth; Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. St. Martin’s Press. 2010.
- Saci Lloyd. The Carbon Diaries 2015. Holiday House. 2008.
Act now. There are only 46 weeks left.13, 14
FOOTNOTES
1. John Cook. “How reliable are climate models?” Skeptical Science. 2020. https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm.
2. John Cook. Sea Ice Prediction. Skeptical Science. 2020. https://skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=35.
3. Paul Voosen. “New climate models predict a warming surge”. Science. 16 April 2019. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/new-climate-models-predict-warming-surge.
4. Aylin Woodward. “The world’s living creatures are disappearing at unprecedented rates—here’s what we stand to lose, according to a landmark UN report”. Business Insider. 7 May 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/animals-disappearing-extinction-by-the-numbers-2019-5?op=1.
5. Damian Carrington. “Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’”. The Guardian. 10 February 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature.
6. David Roberts. “This graphic explains why 2 degrees of global warming will be way worse than 1.5”. Vox. 7 October 2018. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/19/16908402/global-warming-2-degrees-climate-change.
7. Joshua Holland. The Green New Deal Is Cheaper Than Climate Change. The Nation. 11 September 2019. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-change-costs-inaction-green-new-deal/.
8. Resilient San Francisco. City and County of San Francisco. 2016. https://sfgsa.org/sites/default/files/Document/Resilient%20San%20Francisco.pdf.
9. Why Cities? C40 Cities. 2012. https://www.c40.org/ending-climate-change-begins-in-the-city.
10. Osamu Kunni, Masumi Akagi, and Etsuko Kita. The Medical and Public Health Response to the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in Japan: A Case Study in Disaster Planning. Medicine & Global Survival 1995; Vol 2, No. 4. 1995. https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/mgs/2-4-kunii.pdf.
11. NERT is Neighborhood Emergency Response Team and is known in other US localities as CERT (substituting Community for Neighborhood). NERTs formed out of volunteer, spontaneously organized responses to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, especially in the Marina.
12. “Five ways to make cities more sustainable and resilient”. United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security. 30 October 2018. https://ehs.unu.edu/news/news/five-ways-to-make-cities-more-sustainable-and-resilient.html.
13. Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting. United Nations. 28 March 2019. https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/ga12131.doc.htm. See the action timeline in the report.
14. Paula Murray. “We’ve 10 years to save the seas or life on earth will become impossible”. Express. 23 December 2018. https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1062990/environment-plastic-pollution-Sir-David-Attenborough-seas-earth.