(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Climate Strike -- Getting Everyone Involved (week 70) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-04 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 70 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 Because, unless everyone is working on it, we will not make it. This week’s topic is GETTING EVERYONE INVOLVED. Why include everyone in saving the biosphere? Because we all live here. Because we’ve made this into such a huge task that we have to get everyone working on it if we’re to have any chance of surviving.1 So how do we include everyone? There are a bunch of different ways to include everyone in the work and, as we’ve waited until we’ve passed multiple points of no return2 and turned an ecological catastrophe into an existential crisis3, it’s likely we’ll need to use all of them. Some of the ways to include everyone are: Telling the stories of what is happening to us and how to fix it, and telling these stories constantly from every possible platform and in every media and venue. This means supporting and telling daily environmental news at a county level (much like a COVID or fire tracker, or like The Guardian Days to save the Earth project4), supporting the arts in telling environmental stories and creating public pieces and installations5, consistent and frequent reaching out to religious and social groups on how environmental issues affect their communities6, assisting in developing curriculum for and mandating weekly if not daily environmental education — including environmental action — at all grade levels in SFUSD classes7, and viewing every single governmental action through the lens of this planetary crisis.8 Make environmentally destructive behavior insanely costly. The sky-high costs of environmental destruction must include social costs (like shunning, shaming, and blaming), legal costs (jail time, permanent corporate dissolution, loss of rights), individual and corporate costs (corporate and personal legal liability, including for media platforms), as well as massive monetary costs (such as permanent liens, true-cost carbon tax9, and restorative justice for ecosystems10). Reward environmentally beneficial behavior. This includes jobs contracts, public recognition, and influence for companies11; job retention and promotion for city workers of all levels12; gardens, parks, libraries, transit, pedestrian-only streets, sustainable infrastructure, and attention for communities, schools, and neighborhoods13; and funding and grants to individuals making a difference. These rewards cannot be delayed to end-of-career recognition or designed to be insignificant (a plaque and a proclamation won’t cut it.) They must be real, they must be immediate, and they must magnify the environmentally beneficial behaviors.14 Pay for what is truly of value — this is where the jobs are if there are to be any jobs at all in the future. What is of value to SF? Carbon sequestration, especially in parks, urban forests, urban farms, sidewalk verges, front and backyard “lawn” spaces and on rooftops, and native or near-native ecosystems15; blackwater recycling16; 100% green, carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, renewable, locally-produced and owned, diversely-sourced energy17; clean, accessible, and affordable transit18; cradle-to-cradle manufacturing and purchasing, with manufacturers being required to recover and recycle or reuse both their packaging and defunct products19; planting the shorelines and moving SF’s infrastructure uphill20; and rapidly transitioning to all electric housing, businesses, governmental buildings, and transit, among others.21 Fund resilience.22 Make this the central job and focus of the human endeavor, because if it isn’t we’re dead.23 How will we know we’re succeeding? You will have multiple groups working together who come to you, who you can go to, and who represent EVERYBODY. We will actually be doing the work that HAS TO GET DONE NOW! Piddling around at the edges of the changes that need to happen is a colossal waste of time. We’re down to big changes now, or we don’t make it, and the “we” not making it isn’t just the have-nots this time. It isn’t even just our species. It’s the entire biosphere; it’s ~90% of all species larger than bacteria that have been alive in modern times. And that kind of ecocide doesn’t look good on anyone’s resume. Why is it your job to get everyone involved? Because you all and the people you all have represented in this country for over 400 years have done your best to use and abuse, ignore and disenfranchise, gentrify and deny, suppress and rip-off the vast majority of us who live here. You all have taught us that we count for nothing and can expect nothing, and for some of us you have consistently taken away the little we do scrape together. It takes a lot of Restorative Justice, a lot of listening, a lot of making amends, and a lot of immediate investment, as well as disinvestment in the people and organizations that have profited from and perpetuated this system of theft and destruction, to fix that kind of history. And if you don’t work to fix it by including all of us, nothing will change and none of us will survive. Why should you care what I say or that I’ve been striking for over a year? Because this isn’t about just me. There are, at most, 19 weeks left in which to start the necessary big actions if we’re all — you, too — going to survive.24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 In a little over a year, we lost 10 years time in which to act. California is burning, our species is ill, and we’ve passed tipping points that we cannot undo. The Guardian climate countdown gives us 70 days to save the earth.32 There is NO time left; why aren’t you acting? FOOTNOTES 1. Brandon Specktor. “Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don’t Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims”. LiveScience. 4 June 2019. https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html . 2. Camille Bas-Wohlert. “Greenland ice melting past ‘tipping point’: Study”. The Jakarta Post. 18 August 2020. https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/08/18/greenland-ice-melting-past-tipping-point-study.html . 3. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. “‘Time Is Running Out to Save Our Planet,’ New Mexico Governor Says”. 19 August 2020. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/elections/100000007297726/michelle-lujan-grisham-speaks-dnc.html . 4. https://www.theguardian.com/us . Scroll down to just below the Headlines and Coronavirus sections. 5. See Strike letter for week 67: Art. 6. See Strike letters for weeks 15, 23, 25, 58, and 64 on Environmental justice and the demand for climate crisis response. 7. The Sierra Club and a few school districts in the East Bay are actively working on this, as well as the EEI group at the state level, but the effort is entirely driven by a few teachers, a few state bureaucrats, a few scientists, and a few parents, and that’s insane. That is akin to leaving the fighting of WWII up to the League of Women Voters. This education needs to be mandated and supported. I am more than willing to work directly on this, and have decades of lesson plans developed and tested specifically for this, but one person acting by herself isn’t sufficient. You must support this. Requiring environmental education to be on the fringe of education, and that to get it done teachers must engage in a volunteer, Sisyphean effort guarantees that little to nothing will change in the timeline left to us. 8. See Strike letter for week 40: Climate emergency. You do remember that you declared that there is a Climate Emergency, right? 9. See Strike letters for weeks 61 and 62: CAF. 10. See Earth Restorative Justice at https://earthrestorativejustice.org and the European Forum For Restorative Justice at https://www.euforumrj.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/EFRJ_Thematic_Brief_Restorative_Environmental_Justice.pdf . Both accessed 26 August 2020. 11. See Strike letters for weeks 10, 13, 19, 42, 55, and 65 covering multiple topics related to the text cited. 12. See Strike letter for week 2: Ideas. 13. See Strike letters for weeks 6, 7, 9, 19, 27, 29, 42, 44, 45, 48, 59, 63, and 69 covering multiple topics related to the text cited. 14. See Strike letters for weeks 49, 50, 51, 54, 59, and 65 covering multiple topics related to the text cited. 15. See Strike letters for weeks 3, 6, 27, 45, 61, and 62 on getting carbon out of the atmosphere. 16. See Strike letters for weeks 1, 20, 23, 28, and 52 on blackwater recycling. 17. See Strike letters for weeks 38, 39, 42, 51, and 68 on energy. 18. See Strike letters for weeks 7, 23, 29, 63, and 69 on transit. 19. Such as the Green Dot System in Germany and much of Europe. See “Sustainable Development Case Studies: Solid Waste Management”. Colby College. Updated April 2008. http://personal.colby.edu/personal/t/thtieten/swm-germ.html . 20. See Strike letters for weeks 5, 6, 11, 16, 22, 42, and 59 covering multiple topics related to the text cited. 21. See Strike letter for week 68: Electrification. 22. See Strike letter for week 42: Resilience and self-sufficiency. There will be an upcoming letter on funding these efforts, though weeks 61 and 62 on a CAF are a good place to start. 23. See Strike letters for weeks 8, 14, 17, 18, 26, 30, 37, 40, 41, 43, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, and 66 for a lot more related to the text cited. 24. Matt McGrath. “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. BBC News. 24 July 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736 . 25. Heather Smith. “Climate Change: Even Worse Than We Thought”. Sierra. 8 October 2018. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/climate-change-even-worse-we-thought-ipcc-report . 26. Michael Grose and Julie Arblaster. “Just how hot will it get this century? It’s worse than we thought”. Phys Org. 18 May 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-hot-century-worse-thought.html . 27. Amelia Urry. “The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought”. Grist. 22 March 2016. https://grist.org/science/the-scientist-who-first-warned-of-climate-change-says-its-much-worse-than-we-thought/ . 28. Rafi Letzter. “Today’s Climate Change Is Worse Than Anything Earth Has Experienced in the Past 2,000 Years”. Live Science. 25 July 2019. https://www.livescience.com/66027-climate-change-different.html . 29. John D. Sutter. “Vanishing”. CNN. Accessed 30 June 2020. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/specials/vanishing/ . 30. Peter Castagno. “Biodiversity Loss Worst in Human History — 1 Million Animal Species Risk Extinction”. Citizen Truth. 6 May 2019. https://citizentruth.org/biodiversity-loss-worst-in-human-history-1-million-animal-species-risk-extinction/ . 31. Kristen Callihan. “Earth’s Currently Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Is Worse Than We Thought”. OutwardOn. 7 August 2017. https://www.outwardon.com/article/earths-currently-ongoing-sixth-mass-extinction-event-is-worse-than-we-thought/ . [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/4/2191182/-Climate-Strike-Getting-Everyone-Involved-week-70 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/