(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Sacrifice Zones -- Strike for the Planet week 84 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-20 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 84 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 Creating and sanctioning sacrifice zones for corporate profits is bad business. So this week we’re looking at Sacrifice Zones. What are “sacrifice zones”? A sacrifice zone is an area that has been permanently degraded by environmental damage or economic disinvestment. Sacrifice zones often are in low-income and minority communities1, 2 because, as Naomi Klein says, Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.3 Sacrifice zones are also found in areas humans destroy so thoroughly, either by accident or in the process of exploitation, that they become uninhabitable. As Hop Hopkins says, We’re in this global environmental mess because we have declared parts of our planet to be disposable.4 Where are these sacrifice zones? Everywhere. Love Canal, New York Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania the Gulf of Mexico Cancer Alley in Louisiana Church Rock, New Mexico Standing Rock, the Dakotas West Oakland, California the Richmond oil refineries metam sodium at Dunsmuir, California Chernobyl, Ukraine the Farallones Hinkley, California and Cr 6 the Central Valley Aquifer, California Agent Orange in Vietnam Bhopal, India the Aamjiwnaang First Nation reserve the Brazilian rainforest (what’s left of it) all of the ocean Minamata, Japan Cadiz disaster, France the Aral Sea Mono Lake Owens Valley Valdez, Alaska Fukushima, Japan Kesterson Reservoir Kingston Fossil Plant Lake Okeechobee Flint, Michigan Martin County, Kentucky Hanford, Washington St. George, Utah the Berkeley Pit in Butte the Niger delta Summitville in Colorado Times Beach, Missouri West Lake landfill in St. Louis and so many more.5 But not in San Francisco? Did you miss the Farallones in the list above? We’ve also got plenty of sacrifice zones where people live: at former industrial or commercial sites (gas stations, oil change or car repair shops, waste sites, dirty manufacturing, etc.), wherever the military was (Hunters Point, Treasure Island), and everywhere that was redlined or had heavy industry (see below). So there are sacrifice zones in San Francisco — why should we care? Corporate business practices based on greed create these sacrifice zones.6 What’s being sacrificed is the biosphere — the ability of the area to support life. The biosphere is what gives humans life. So I want to make sure the logic is clear here: sacrifice zones kill. You realize that we’re talking about actual human sacrifice, right? The humans in SF being sacrificed to corporate greed include children, the medically fragile, the majority of San Francisco’s BIPOC populations and, as climate change progresses, everyone else, too. Okay, but what does this have to do with SF government? It’s your job to keep all of SF from becoming a sacrifice zone and to fix the sacrifice zones you’ve inherited and allowed. And I can’t imagine human sacrifice is a good resume item. Fine, you convinced me human sacrifice isn’t good to have on my resume. Great! It’s about time. But how do we get rid of the sacrifice zones in SF? We do this by: Giving communities control of the land, Making water a human right, Investing in democratically controlled energy, Enacting an Essential Workers bill of rights, Building only affordable green housing, Allowing only clean transit,7 And setting up bio-buffers and building up system resilience. Now is the perfect time for SF to make these changes, while established, corporate-influenced building arrangements in SF are getting FBI attention, and SF’s runaway “growth”8 has fallen apart at the first gentle impact of climate change (the pandemic). Need details on how to do any of the above? I’d be happy to point you to the many other Strike letters that have the details. Are there any benefits to getting rid of sacrifice zones? Yes!! We have the chance to survive. Our city has the chance to survive. It is the right thing to do, at long last. And isn’t it about time you do the right thing for San Francisco? Either we stop old-school rape-and-loot capitalism, or we lose everything. There are, at most, 5 weeks left in which to start the necessary big actions if we’re going to survive.9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 In a little over a year, we have lost 10 years time in which to act. The U.S. has now been out of the Paris Agreement for 28 days, and every day out is making our situation worse. ACT NOW! National Geographic artist reproduction of Chimú executioners at a mass sacrifice at Huanchaquito. There is evidence that environmental disaster led to this mass sacrifice of children, baby llamas and baby alpacas — basically the future of the Chimú people. Art by Samson Goetze.17 FOOTNOTES 1. “What Are Sacrifice Zones?” Center for Health, environment & Justice. Accessed 1 December 2020. http://chej.org/issues/sacrifice-zones/ .2. Jessica Roake. “Think Globally, Act Locally: Steve Lerner, ‘Sacrifice Xones,’ at Politics and Prose”. Washington Post. 22 September 2010. https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2010/09/23/steve-lerner-book-sacrifice-zones/ . 3. Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything . Penguin Books. 2014. 4. Hop Hopkins. “Racism Is Killing the Planet”. Sierra. 8 June 2020. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/racism-killing-planet . 5. A good go-to source of up-to-date disasters is the “List of environmental disasters”. Wikipedia. Accessed 2 December 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_disasters . 6. Muriel Kane. “Chris Hedges: America’s devastated ‘sacrifice zones’ are the future for all of us”. Raw Story. 30 July 2012. https://www.rawstory.com/2012/07/chris-hedges-americas-sacrifice-zones-being-destroyed-for-profit/ . 7. Dieynabou Barry. “Too many Americans live in ‘sacrifice zones.’ Let’s fix that.” Grist. 4 September 2020. https://grist.org/fix/americans-live-sacrifice-zones-lets-fix-that/ . 8. Runaway growth is a description of cancer. An economic system or a city based on the need for runaway growth, unlimited growth, or continual growth has a fatal disease by definition and will die. 9. 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 . 10. 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 . 11. 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 . 12. 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/ . 13. 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 . 14. John D. Sutter. “Vanishing”. CNN. Accessed 30 June 2020. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/specials/vanishing/ . 15. 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/ . 16. 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/2023/9/20/2193530/-Sacrifice-Zones-Strike-for-the-Planet-week-84 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/