Nowtopian

Things Are Heating Up!

posted originally at sf.streetsblog.org…

I was glad to see “We Are the World” on the ridiculously inadequate Climate Change bill that finally emerged from the corrupt U.S. Congress. Sadly, the bill could only emerge with the support of a number of mainstream environmental lobbyists in DC, who clearly have sold out to get something, anything, in the direction of addressing the climate catastrophe. Here in San Francisco there’s an inordinate amount of enthusiasm for the Bike Plan getting okayed by part of the city government, even though it’s still under an injunction, and even when that finally gets lifted, it’ll take three years to finish this Plan, one which will have relatively little effect on this car-dominated city. In some strange way the Climate Bill and the Bike Plan are eerily similar: sources of great pride to those who believe in incremental change, “the best we can do in the current political climate” to political realists, but falling way short, sorely disproportionate to the actual needs they ostensibly address. (An article in the UK Guardian Weekly June 5-11 edition “Climate Change Creates New “˜Global Battlefield’” quotes a new report from Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum that there are already 300,000 deaths a year due to the warming climate, and 300 million people have already been affected!)

New Bike Plan! Let's Get Naked and Celebrate! Critical Mass San Francisco, June 2009.

I’m not saying anything that most people can’t readily see if we pause from our daily frenzy long enough to think about the bigger picture. I’ll go out on a limb (barely) and say here and now that the Climate Catastrophe conference scheduled for Copenhagen, Denmark in December will fail to do anything meaningful. It’s not hard to predict, since even with a 60-vote Democratic (comedian-reinforced) Majority in the U.S. Senate, there’s no chance of a treaty being ratified that addresses the structure of the U.S. economy or the geographic arrangement of our dwellings, our transit infrastructure, or our energy use. And yet, this is simply what is necessary to have ANY CHANCE AT ALL of averting catastrophic ecological and economic collapse”¦ funny to think that things are that stark, and hard to see if we don’t stop and look, but there it is.

Bike and Irreligious Pride! Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence indulging in the June 09 Critical Mass...

I get a lot of readings coming my way. Here’s a few to help you source what I’m arguing, in case you’re not sure” “this all seems rather hysterical,” “the sky isn’t really falling is it?”, and so on”¦ In the June 29 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the NASA director who was shut up by Bush Administration decree, but wouldn’t go quietly. He’s still at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and in the article, Kolbert traces his emergence as one of the world’s most eloquent and urgent climate catastrophe bell-ringers. More »

July 6th, 2009 | Tags: climate change, coal, gardens, One Lane for Food | Category: History, Nowtopia, Technology? | Comments (2)

Work Worth Doing

Plum tree bursting with fruit at Mullen and Franconia on the north side of Bernal Heights, June 2009.

I’m deep into researching a new book project these days, covering San Francisco history from the late sixties to the late seventies. It’s incredibly fun to be in discussion with a couple dozen great writers and historians, learning as I go how much more complicated and nuanced all these stories are than my first (rather glib) overview. It goes hand in hand with the ongoing push on the wiki FoundSF.org, which is getting almost 5,000 visitors a month already. We redesigned it a couple of weeks ago, so if you only saw it once a few months ago, have another look. And we’re going to have a much simpler system for submitting material by the end of summer. Part of the fun of that project, and part of what makes it so damn infinite, is getting turned on to new resources. Case in point: via my friends at the Bernal History Project I learned about this amazing photo collection by Charles W. Cushman at Indiana University.

A couple of great books on local history have further enriched my work. Just out is “Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo” edited by Annice Jacoby (full disclosure: I have a short piece in it about Mona Caron‘s Market Street Railway Mural, but in fact it only bears a passing resemblance to what I actually wrote, which was not a big deal anyway.) Jaime Cortez has a great article in this book, as do another half dozen contributors, but the best thing is having a fancy coffee table book with such fantastic reproductions that really captures the breadth and depth of the street art scene in San Francisco going back to the 1970s. The other book that transported me to a time before mine is “Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts.Â Between the amazing photos, reminiscences, and narrative text, it’s an incredible history all in one volume. Drives home the sense of loss regarding the black community in San Francisco, which of course is a story still unfolding, though the geographic focus has shifted to Bayview-Hunter’s Point from the once vibrant Fillmore.

That photo I started with highlights another theme I’m increasingly interested in, urban agriculture. In San Francisco there are a couple of efforts underway, one called SF Glean, and the other Produce to the People. They are discussing a closer working relationship on one of the lists I’ve been lurking on, but in any case, they’re each doing great work connecting hungry people, willing workers, and untended fruit trees in the city, of which there are many. I came upon that plum tree above yesterday, with a rich bounty ready to eat, and a couple of weeks ago I found this loquat tree on the south side of Bernal: