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 200 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
Cause we don’t survive without water
This week: WATER
Here’s where we are on water
Hetch Hetchy is 167 miles away. Water from there has to travel through 7 counties, drop a total of 10,000 feet in elevation, and cross 2 massive faults to get to SF. This imported water makes up the overwhelming bulk of SF’s water supply.
SF’s Westside Basin, which makes up the other small percent of SF’s water, is a shallow, rain-dependent aquifer that is becoming increasingly saline from sea level rise.
While this year’s precipitation totals are looking good for the first time in 2 decades, the state’s aquifers are still very low, forests are still drought-shocked and dying, the soil is still compacted and unabsorbent (especially in burn scarred areas), the snowpack is still melting faster and earlier every year, agriculture (especially white-owned industrial ag) still uses the majority of the state’s water to grow export crops, the population of CA is still double the population the state’s manufactured plumbing was built to serve, and all signs point to this winter being a blip in the on-going megadrought.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF’s water supply is in peril.
Here’s what we need to do to have water
- Reduce water usage per person and per business in SF. SF is good compared to the average state usage, but we have room to be much better.
- Reuse the water we do use. Grey water is used in some parks and a few buildings for landscaping purposes and flushing toilets, but it is still absurdly hard for all but the most dedicated to create legal, safe, grey water systems at home. This can be easily remedied by politicians, and will provide new jobs and a new small-scale industry for SF.
- Recycle blackwater. There are multiple technologies for doing so, from high-tech (see Singapore) to low-tech biological (see Namibia), and CA legal hurdles for blackwater recycling have already been overcome (see Orange County and San Diego).
- Collect and store more precipitation more efficiently. We do this by actually enforcing SF’s permeable surface laws, increasing surface permeability requirements (amount of land and degree of permeability) to cover all land in SF, planting huge numbers of native trees and shrubs everywhere, and requiring rainwater harvesting.
- Outlaw water wasting. Turning potable water into sewage when composting toilets not only exist but make waste into fertilizer is one example of extremely wasteful water usage that can be eliminated.
BOTTOM LINE:
SF has multiple ways to reduce water waste and store water in SF.
Here are bad sources of water we need to not use
- CA’s 19th century dam and canal system is too expensive to maintain. It has destroyed and is destroying ecosystems statewide, ecosystems that both create and store precipitation. It only functions via theft from Native communities and poorer and lightly populated areas. It’s extending its destruction into the entire Sacramento Delta and is causing and will continue to cause extinctions, such as of the salmon. It is designed to benefit the wealthy, white, and corporate ag businesses at the expense of both communities of color and entire ecosystems. And it was designed using impossible precipitation figures when the population of CA was half what it is now.
- Desalination seems like a good idea, and as a temporary measure at small scales, it could be. But big desalination requires an enormous amount of energy, a location that gives easy access to water but won’t be swamped by rising sea levels, and a way to dispose of the toxic salts created that doesn’t destroy ecosystems. It is expensive infrastructure that takes a long time and a lot of money to build, and so far produces more problems than it solves.
- Depending on regularity from a climate in chaos is insane. Not only were the “average” precipitation figures that the entire CA water system is built on wrong, but megadrought means that they are very wrong. What the actual numbers will be in years to come no one knows but, based on precipitation patterns of the past and the best current climate models, there will be less and less water available from now on.
BOTTOM LINE:
Big infrastructure projects and ignoring climate change will not yield adequate water to keep SF alive.
Here’s why we have to take care of this now
We have water this year — that gives us a little leeway, but only a very little. We lost a lot of trees in the last few storms, many non-native and at the ends of their lives, but we were already low on tree count and need so many more to begin saving water and lowering our urban heat island temperatures. Planting needs to start now. We’re looking at El Niño coming back later this year with unprecedented heatwaves, pushing us above the 1.5°C we’ve all been warned about. Everything is going to get more extreme, faster.
BOTTOM LINE:
It’s now or never.
Do you want SF to survive?
Then ACT NOW! The situation will never be better than now.