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 178 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
Food, glorious food
Reaction Guidelines for Food
This is a resource for food. The goal is to have procedures you can pick up off the shelf and start putting in place when it’s too late to avoid disaster.
What could threaten our food supply?
- Flooding (ex. Central Valley 1861-1862 and Pakistan now)
- Drought and megadrought (ex. the “missing millennia” and the Anasazi)
- Heat (ex. cattle deaths in 2022 in the tens of thousands and a 20% drop in crop production)
- Disease (ex. the Irish Potato Famine and a modern increase in plant pathogen infection rates)
- Nuclear war (ex. Putin)
There’s more issues and more example of threats.
What could threaten our ability to get food donations?
- Wide scale disaster (ex. Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Pakistan, and China now)
- Famine (ex. Somalia, Madagascar, and the ripples from Ukraine)
- Infrastructure destruction (ex. the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995)
- Supply chain problems or collapse (ex. Russia/Ukraine and the China logjam)
- Political actions (ex. Puerto Rico after Maria and Yemen)
And there’s more issues and examples here, too.
If cut off, does SF have enough food stores?
SF has insufficient food resources in the event of disruption. Personal earthquake supplies probably average out to 3 days citywide (with some people having nothing and others having more). Business and government food supplies increase this amount by a few days up to a week.
The types of food supplies available are not uniform as to amounts. For instance, the baby formula supplies available from all sources would currently only cover a few days.
Does SF grow enough food locally to fill in the gaps?
No. There are community gardens and personal gardens, as well as sidewalk fruit trees and a few farms (Alemany Farm, some farms at schools, etc.) These add some fresh fruits and vegetables, but would do little to increase the overall food supply.
If we get food, can we get it to everyone in need?
No. SF’s emergency food distribution network is not resilient. As we discovered during the first year of the pandemic, many people are already food insecure. Since people already are facing food access issues, and since the networks in place are already strained, if disaster causes food insecurity to become general, the distribution networks in place will be insufficient. Not only that, the networks don’t show any ability to rapidly expand in order to cover all populations in the city in the event of disaster.
Don’t underestimate the scale of likely catastrophe
Things are bad and we know they will get worse. As UN Secretary General Guterres has said, “To deal with climate change … with a business-as-usual approach is pure suicide.”
Food for thought
We need robust, not fragile. What we’ve got right now is very fragile.