(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Water, Again -- Strike for the Planet week 119 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-30 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 119 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 Provide SF with the basics for survival or SF won’t survive That’s why this week’s topic is Water, Again. Energy and water are fundamental to our survival With only those two things in place, we have a chance of a dystopian future, which is still a future nonetheless.1 Without them, it’s game over for SF, sooner and not later.2 This isn’t news and, at long long last, you’re starting to take the energy part of things seriously by getting the PUC involved.3 Good. It’s about time. However… Local energy is relatively easy in SF SF is awash in energy — solar, wind, wave and tide, heat differentials and more; it’s just a matter of funding and building the local infrastructure to tap into these. The technologies already exist and are dropping in price across the board, the personnel are available locally to design, build, and maintain all of these systems, and funds are increasingly available from both public and private sources at all levels to do this. The expertise is all out there.4 So yay! Get to it! But water is much harder Why? Because… We’re in a megadrought, so there isn’t water coming. 5 Available water is already historically low. 6 CA water commitments are greater than the water available even in non-drought years. 7, 8 And SF has little control over agriculture, the biggest user of water in the state.9 So what can SF do? We need to reduce, reuse, recycle, and reimagine our relationship to water, citywide and in our relationships to the state and nation. What does that look like? Reduce Ultra low-flow toilets10 and composting toilets11, aerated taps and shower heads12, fines for sidewalk “cleaning” or de-weeding with pressurized water and heavy means-based fines for water wastage, reducing and eliminating water used in demolitions, planting native trees — all of these are great strategies that absolutely must be implemented to reduce our water usage. But there’s a lot more SF can do beyond even these, and The Ahwahnee Water Principles for Resource Efficient Land Use13 are an excellent starting point for figuring out the details of the more we must do. Reuse If water is our most vital resource, we need to treat it as such and not flush it away, having made it polluted, dangerous, and inaccessible. That’s why we need bioswales everywhere, a massive increase in permeable surfaces (and enforcement of SF regs regarding permeable surfaces), and graywater pumped to living roofs and used in parks, medians, and farms. We need to be using our used water to recharge our groundwater to reduce the inevitable saltwater intrusion from rising sea levels.14 Reuse also means using natural ecosystems and constructed areas (such as athletic fields, so NO astroturf) to store the water we will be reusing. As such, reuse means not polluting the water with toxins by exposing it to pollution sources such as the artificial turf field lechates, motor oil, and cigarette butts. Reuse means our water shouldn’t be going away at all. Recycle Black water recycling is an absolute must, asap!15 If Namibia can do it, and has been doing it for 53 years, SF is probably capable of doing it as well.16 Reimagine We need to rethink everything about our relationship to and use of water. SF must be involved at state and federal levels to save water through prioritizing forest management and restoration to maintain system functionality and biodiversity, SF must restore degraded natural meadow and marsh systems for aquifer recharge and water retention and to reduce flooding, SF must promote and practice regenerative agriculture in SF, SF, SF must support good farm infrastructure outside SF though buying and promoting, and create good farm infrastructure in SF on our rooftops and in our warehouses, SF must work aggressively to fix the insanity that are the current water “rights” agreements including SF’s “rights” to water from the Hetch Hetchy water project 17 , , SF must work to reduce local evaporation by planting natives 18 , , SF must push agriculture to do the right thing and stop supporting destructive water grabs 19 , , SF should push the state into building ice stupas 20 in the Sierras, in the Sierras, and SF must restore natural water ways. If we don’t work with water, it will go away. What we absolutely can’t do Desalination — It is insanely destructive to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and does even more damage to a gravely ill biosphere.21, 22 Steal from the future — Tap out the groundwater and destroy the aquifer and you’ve done the hydrosphere equivalent of mountaintop removal; an aquifer, once crushed, won’t come back. See the Central Valley for examples.23 Truck it in — Not only is this terrible in terms of ecosystem impacts (Arrowhead and Nestlé, for example24) but it’s made even worse by the CO 2 and plastic involved. Sacrifice ecosystems to our desires — This is cutting off your leg to save weight. It will kill us. Glasgow’s coming up! There’s a LOT we can do about water25, just as there is a lot we can do and have to do about every other environmental issue we’re facing. Make sure SF is acting by the time we all get to Glasgow26, because this is it — our last hope. By Sumita Roy Dutta - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67410606 FOOTNOTES 1. Watch this clip from The Newsroom for a real good, and prescient, take on the climate catastrophe (and this was from 2014) — anyone who was paying attention has known about this for a long time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U A bunch of the stuff he says at the end are happening now. 2. Rachel Ramirez. “The amount of Greenland ice that melted on Tuesday could cover Florida in 2 inches of water”. CNN. 30 July 2021. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/29/us/greenland-ice-melting-climate-change/index.html . Remember, much of SF is also at sea level. 3. J.D. Morris. “San Francisco asks state PUC to name a price for PG&E’s local power lines”. San Francisco Chronicle. 27 July 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-asks-state-PUC-to-name-a-price-for-16343431.php . 4. Hayley Bennett. “The Orkney Islands: The energy revolution starts here”. Science Focus. 20 February 2020. https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/the-orkney-islands-the-energy-revolution-starts-here/ . 5. Ben Tracy and John Goodwin. “Megadrought Poses ‘Existential’ Crisis in California and the West”. KPIX 5. 18 July 2021. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/07/18/megadrought-poses-existential-crisis-california-american-west/ . 6. Dale Kasler, Ryan Sabalow, and Phillip Reese. “From Shasta to Folsom, shriveled reservoirs show depths of California’s drought disaster”. The Sacramento Bee. 8 June 2021. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article251954358.html . 7. Zack Burdryk. “Lake Mead’s decline points to scary water future in West”. Microsoft News. 18 June 2021. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lake-mead-s-decline-points-to-scary-water-future-in-west/ar-AALbQ8s . 8. Theodore Grantham and Joshua Viers. “100 years of California’s water rights system: patterns, trends and uncertainty”. Environmental Research Letters. 19 August 2014. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/8/084012 . 9. Heather Cooley. “California Agricultural Water Use: Key Background Information”. Pacific Institute. April 2015. https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/CA-Ag-Water-Use.pdf . 10. Joe Carrow. “Best Low-Flow Toilet Reviews — Definitive Guide in 2021”. Toiletrated. 12 April 2020. https://toiletrated.com/best-low-flow-toilet/ . 11. Erica Puisis. “The 8 Best Composting Toilets of 2021”. The Spruce. 17 September 2020. https://www.thespruce.com/best-composting-toilets-4693560 . 12. “WaterSense: Showerheads”. EPA. Accessed 3 August 2021. https://www.epa.gov/watersense/showerheads . 13. Celeste Cantu, Martha Davis, Jennifer Hosterman, Susan Lien Longville, Jeff Loux, John Lowrie, Jonas Minton, Mary Nichols, Virginia Porter, Al Wanger, Robert Wilkinson, and Kevin Wolf. “The Ahwahnee Water Principles for Resource Efficient Land Use”. Local Government Commission. 16 May 2005. https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/rwqcb2/water_issues/programs/stormwater/muni/nrdc/10%20ahwahnee%20h2o_principles.pdf . 14. “Climate Implications - Saltwater Intrusion”. Environmental Resilience Institute, Indiana University. Accessed 3 August 2021. https://eri.iu.edu/erit/implications/saltwater-intrusion.html . 15. Please see the numerous prior Strike letters on this, which include contact information for places state-, nation-, and worldwide that are already doing blackwater recycling. You can start with Strike letters 1, 20, 23, 28, 52, 76, 82, 95, 103, 107, 108, 109, 110, and 113. 16. Daniel Gross. “Recycling sewage into drinking water is no big deal. They’ve been doing it in Namibia for 50 years.” The World. 15 December 2016. https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-12-15/recycling-sewage-drinking-water-no-big-deal-theyve-been-doing-it-namibia-50-years . 17. Kurtis Alexander. “San Francisco sues state over bid to restrict its Sierra water supplies”. San Francisco Chronicle. 14 May 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/drought/article/San-Francisco-sues-state-over-bid-to-restrict-its-16178329.php . 18. “Assisted Migration”. Climate Change Resource Center, United States Dept. of Agriculture. Accessed 5 May 2021. https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/assisted-migration . 19. Kurtis Alexander. “San Francisco sues state over bid to restrict its Sierra water supplies”. San Francisco Chronicle. 14 May 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/drought/article/San-Francisco-sues-state-over-bid-to-restrict-its-16178329.php . 20. Lisa Goldapple. “Ice glaciers in the Himalayan desert”. Atlas of the Future. 13 October 2017. https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-ice-stupa-project/ . 21. Matt Simon. “Desalination Is Booming. But What About All That Toxic Brine?” Wired. 14 January 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/desalination-is-booming-but-what-about-all-that-toxic-brine/ . 22. Ray Hiemstra. “Desalination Destroys The Environment And Isn’t A Quick Fix For Southern California’s Water Woes”. Sierra Club Angeles Chapter. 4 March 2013. https://angeles.sierraclub.org/news/blog/2013/03/desalination_destroys_environment_and_isnt_quick_fix_southern_californias_water . 23. “Groundwater pumping causing Central Valley bridges to sink”. ABC 30 Action News. 21 July 2015. https://abc30.com/drought-and-the-cutoff-of-water-from-state-federal-sources-sinking-bridges-firebaugh-fresno-county/870713/ . 24. Maanvi Singh. “Drought-hit California moves to halt Nestlé from taking millions of gallons of water”. The Guardian. 27 April 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/27/california-nestle-water-san-bernardino-forest-drought . 25. Nina Aquino and Robert Brears. “A Circular Water Economy: Managing the Human Water Cycle”. Our Water Future. Accessed 3 August 2021. https://www.ourfuturewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/White-Paper-A-Circular-Water-Economy.pdf . [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/30/2202294/-Water-Again-Strike-for-the-Planet-week-119?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web 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/