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 43 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
To drive home why you must act, and act now, this week’s letter is A RECAP.
What’s the problem?
At the planetary level, the problems are climate chaos and mass extinction. At the local level, these manifest as enormous amounts of pollution, rising water levels, endangered shorelines, dying ecosystems, decreased biodiversity, drought, an increase in negative health outcomes, an increase in invasive species, local extinctions, increased extreme heat events, more forest fire smoke events, endocrine disruption, shortened life expectancies, dying flora, weather whiplash, and more.1, 2, 3
So what does SF need to do?
•We have to decrease: flooding, rising water threats, and erosion as much as possible.
•We have to increase biodiversity in terms of numbers of species and absolute population numbers as much as possible as quickly as possible.
How do we do this?
By working on three timelines simultaneously: on projects that take up to 30 years to complete, on projects that take 10-15 years to complete, and on projects that take 1-2 years or less to complete.
The 30 years to complete projects are:
•massive native plantings and buffer zone construction,4
•100% transit powered by 100% renewable clean energy,5 and
•100% blackwater recycling in SF.6
The 10-15 years to complete projects are:
•100% locally produced, clean, and at least carbon-neutral energy,7
•getting rid of plastic,8 and
•resiliencey and self-sufficiency.9
What’s coming up next?
The short range projects are going to be detailed in the coming weeks. There are a LOT of them.
But, for now, as you are drafting bond measures for building blackwater recycling, pricing solar panels for all city and county buildings, and planting native trees and shrubs, you should also do the following:
- start now — every new problem, every new opportunity, start immediately
- follow a philosophy of environmental maximization — the goal is to achieve more, faster, and better
- act like your house is on fire, because it is
There are only 45 weeks left.10, 11
FOOTNOTES
1. Umair Irfan and Kavya Sukumar. “Watch how the climate could change in these US cities by 2050”. Vox. 24 May 2019. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/18117953/climate-change-maps-cities-2050.
2. Brian Kahn. This Is How Climate Change Will Shift the World’s Cities. Climate Central. 5 July 2017. https://www.climatecentral.org/news/global-cities-climate-change-21584.
3. Allegra Kirkland. “What climate change will do to three major American cities by 2100”. Quartz. 18 October 2019. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/climate-change-three-major-american-090015056.html.
4. See the letter from Week 27, as well as Weeks 3 and 6 for the details.
5. See the letter from Week 29, as well as Weeks 7, 19, 21, and 23 for the details.
6. See the letter from Week 28, as well as Weeks 1, 19, 20, and 23 for the details.
7. See the letters from Weeks 38-39, as well as Weeks 32-36, and 19 for the details.
8. See the letter from Week 31, as well as Weeks 4, 16, and 22 for the details.
9. See the letter from Week 42, as well as Weeks 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, and 30 for the details.
10. 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.
11. 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.