BIGGER FISH

Nina confronts Finn with some hard truths about his start-up company GreenGos, and one of the roommates makes a surprising decision.

These days, everyone has a one-size-fits-all solution to fight climate change. Electric cars! Solar powered prisons! Sticking your head in the sand and pretending it’s not real!

Unfortunately, many of the so-called solutions currently under debate are being proposed by the very same corporations and politicians that have caused the problems, exploiting our peoples and the planet for generations. These “false solutions” claim to reduce global warming, but many times actually exacerbate the climate crisis and have extremely harmful social and environmental side effects. Examples include liberal policies like carbon offsets, corporate favorites like cap and trade, and sci-fi/governmental fantasies like cloud seeding, synthetic biology, and Monsanto’s top choice: genetically modified, climate-resistant crop seeds that only produce for one generation called terminator seeds.

Is this the future we want for our children? Trees grown in a lab? Clouds controlled by the government? Or will we build real, community-based solutions like worker owned cooperatives, collective housing, sustainable farms, and access to the land and resources required to live sustainably?

Bringing the false solutions theme back home to the Bay Area and beyond, our communities are demanding that greenification should not lead to gentrification. Farmers markets and bike lanes are cool, but they’re often used as a way to market “up-and-coming” black and brown neighborhoods to wealthier white people, leading to displacement. Solving one environmental problem while creating another is no solution at all. We need holistic, community-led solutions from the neighborhood level all the way up to the atmosphere.