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 194 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
There’s a reason for art
This week’s topic is: THE CHERRY ORCHARD
We’re living in a comedy
Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright who penned his major works from 1895 to 1903. All of his big plays, except Three Sisters, he called comedies, including The Cherry Orchard, his last, and some say greatest play. But these plays don’t read like comedies. So why did he say they were comedies?
Can you define “comedy”?
In The Cherry Orchard, an aristocratic landowning family is in dire financial straits and needs to sell property to survive, preferably their famous cherry orchard, or parts of it. All this is laid out to them 9 minutes into the play and it’s not a surprise even then. The son of one of their former serfs is rich and tries to help them, offering them multiple ways to solve their financial problems and keep their home, offering them financial and business assistance over and over again. He tells them exactly what they need to do, and keeps coming up with fresh tactics as the situation becomes more dire due to their inaction.
But the owners keep not acting and not acting and not acting until, eventually, the home and the cherry orchard are auctioned out from underneath them and they end with little to nothing, and no prospects for the future. They are frivolous, sentimental, self-involved, easily distracted ditherers, and not even threats to their lives and livelihoods change that. They knew what they needed to do, they had multiple chances all down the line to do something to solve the problem, and they kept doing nothing.
At the end of the play, we hear the first thwacks of the ax chopping the cherry orchard down. The family is split up, their past abandoned, their hastily and inefficiently packed up mansion left behind and soon to be torn down. Everything the family said was important has been lost. They are adrift in an inhospitable world, without anchor, place, purpose, or means, and it’s all of their own choosing.
Art matters because it distills reality for us
There’s an ironic, farcical, dark humor in seeing people pretend they have no power and refusing to do what obviously needs to be done, refusing even though the not doing will cost them everything.
Choosing not to act is a choice
It’s a very stupid choice, but it’s a choice. Choosing not to act even though there are multiple ways to act is why Chekhov called this play a comedy. Choosing not to act is a choice you have to keep making over and over and over again until all choice is gone. Choosing not to act even though not acting will cause disaster and there are multiple actions that could have been taken every step of the way — does this sound familiar? It should.
Because YOU keep choosing not to act
Art tells us stories of what it means to be humans living now and shows us that humans haven’t changed much since we first started telling stories. The landowners in The Cherry Orchard who choose to do nothing in the face of inevitable and preventable catastrophe? The only people they hurt by choosing to not act were themselves and their family. But you? By choosing to not act, again and again and again, in the face of inevitable and preventable climate catastrophe, you are hurting everyone.
“But I can’t be responsible for everyone!
I didn’t do it, it’s not my fault, I can’t be blamed for all of this — after all, I’m not doing anything!”
Okay, fine, you’re not responsible for everyone. But you are responsible for everyone living in SF. You may not have caused the problems, but you’re in a position of responsibility to deal with them. You have taken an oath to act for SF and, by not doing so, by not doing anything, you are choosing to ignore that responsibility and doom SF to inevitable and preventable catastrophe.
Act
You can make right choices for SF.1 So why don’t you? Funny how you all are great at talking to the press but really bad at answering to the citizens being hurt by your choices. Because the ax is already chopping down the cherry orchard and you continue to not act.
FOOTNOTES
1. Richard Procter. “San Francisco Knows How to Stop Global Warming — Will It?” SF Weekly. 11 September 2019. https://www.sfweekly.com/news/san-francisco-climate-change-emissions/.