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 195 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 does SF need to survive?
This week: YOU KNOW THE ANSWERS
1. Refuse, reduce, reuse, repair/revamp, re-purpose, recycle, rot
On a city and county level, refuse to buy or produce crap, whether it be plastic, pesticides, bad buildings that tilt and break, insurance policies that invest in fossil fuels, lawsuits that threaten the health of the bay, or business models that depend on stealing from the Commons.
Reduce SF’s use of everything, especially things that produce carbon in any gas form and toxins that destroy ecosystems and poison species. So, from cement to plastics, cut back drastically, immediately.
Reuse instead of throw away, reuse instead of reorder, reuse instead of tear down and rebuild. No one gets rich, but no one is destroyed, either. SF does a decent job of this with displays and traffic equipment, now extend it to everything else. From paper to computers, from cars to electronic equipment, from office furniture to pipes and valves, reuse everything.
Repair/Revamp means fixing things that are fixable and making them useful for changed circumstances where possible. Fix the iPhones instead of replacing them. Revamp leaf blowers and park carts to run on electricity instead of fossil fuels. Help create the conditions legally, physically, and knowledge-wise where this is easy for everyone to do. SF’s libraries are already doing a little of this. Expand!
Re-purposing means finding second and third and fourth lives for stuff once the initial function no longer works. For example, all that empty office space would make good housing and community centers. Refitting buildings for living is a LOT cheaper and a better use of our evaporating resources than tearing them down to build something else in a distant (and no longer possible) future.
Recycling has to be done locally to mean anything. Otherwise, we’re exporting our garbage to someplace where it’ll still be polluting, but with an additional wallop of carbon added on. We need industry here, clean industry, if we’re to survive. Local recycling of our locally created materials and locally used/polluted resources would be a good place to start.
And rotting, i.e. composting of all kinds, keeps nutrients (aka resources) here instead of shipping them out to other counties. And that means we have the things we need here to start the loop again through growing and reformulation, depending on the materials we rot.
2. But there’s more: Localize
If SF is going to survive, we need, right here, the things we need to survive here. Importing isn’t viable, anymore than exporting our “waste” is an answer. If it’s not here and we need it to survive, we better figure out how to make it or grow it here.
3. Make it all sustainable
As much as possible, SF needs to be in a closed loop system, where waste becomes resource. Anything else is irresponsible and cannot be depended on when the disasters start coming faster and bigger.
4. Plan for conditions that are coming
For example, we know the coastlines will flood to between 4-10 feet and that this water level rise is coming sooner than had been predicted. We know that seawalls don’t work. We know that a huge amount of our infrastructure is at sea level. We know what housing and businesses are in future flooded areas. So we need to be moving out of those areas NOW and moving our infrastructure NOW!
5. Make SF flexible and adaptable
This means responding quickly and smartly to changing conditions, planning for coming changes and enacting plans before disaster strikes, and involving communities in creating and enacting planned responses. Cultures that do this have survived past climate changes (though nothing on the lines of what we’re doing to the climate now), whereas cultures that haven’t done so have died.
6. Actually care
I’m not sure what the problem is here. It could be that you don’t believe this is real in your heart of hearts, it could be that you don’t understand it, it could be that you think it won’t affect you and you don’t care about anyone else, it could be that you’re wholly owned and only respond to your owners’ demands, it could be that you’re suicidal, it could be that you are trying to destroy the ability of the planet to support life for religious reasons, it could be due to mental illness (narcissism, main character syndrome, learned helplessness, or depression), it could be a combination of these things, or it could be something else. In any case, you are supposedly political leaders and therefore your actions and lack of action speak for you, saying clearly that you don’t care.
You should care
To illustrate why, let’s pick up the story of PIG and Thwaites where we left off last week, shall we?
PIG, the Pine Island Glacier, and Thwaites together are the weak spots of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Thwaites, by itself, is known as The Doomsday Glacier because when it goes, it starts the collapse of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains more than enough sea level rise to doom life as we know it, among other things (since it will also disrupt and destroy food webs, radically alter global wind systems, and accelerate the decrease in earth’s albedo that will, in turn, increase melting).
PIG and Thwaites are both melting which, if you’ve actually been reading these weekly missives (highly doubtful), you’d know. Turns out they are melting faster than anyone had predicted. And the rate they are melting at is accelerating. And now PIG and Thwaites are clearly collapsing. There is open water now visible between them. This is bad, bad news. As one of the scientists said, “We were afraid this would happen, but not this soon.”1
This means we have to act, and we have to act now, and it will all be happening sooner than predicted and looks like it’s all going to be much bigger than predicted. You have to act. “How?” you ask.
You know the answers
You know what to do. You have 194 prior letters with details on what to do and how to do it, focused on San Francisco. There are tons of documents out there available with contacts and instructions, funding strategies, examples, and more. There are various localities in CA who’ve done most of the things SF needs to do to get started. “How?” is not the question. The question is can you do it? Can you act? Past evidence screams “no!” You are weak leaders who seem focused on whatever’s in arms reach and shiny. Will you act? It depends, doesn’t it. It’s not a hard choice.
You have to act and act now and act big
This is tooth-achingly obvious, but you continue not doing it. You must realize by now that so much worse is coming. You must know that actions speak so much louder than words. Actions count, actions save or take lives, actions determine our future. Actions make politicians famous. So why aren’t you acting?
Again, the above question is not rhetorical; I expect an answer. Here, let me be clearer in case you’re just scanning (“blah, blah, blah, maybe I should look at this line?, blah, blah”):
I expect an answer to my question. Because we’re all depending on you.
FOOTNOTES
1. Kris Van Steenbergen. Tweet from 22 January 2023. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/23/2148597/-The-ice-above-the-subglacial-channel-between-PIG-s-tongue-and-Thwaites-s-tongue-collapsing.