Fixing Litter & Homelessness in the Bay

Can Cal Con Con help?

Listen in/Call in Thurs 26 April, 10am-11am PST: Independent CA Radio.

This article started off as a need to rant about littering since, every day, I walk along the frontage road - from Berkeley to Emeryville - and am devastated and heart broken by the amount of trash I see that gets blown into the Bay and then eaten by our wildlife. I pick it up. I feel like an unwilling participant in a nightmare that I can't escape. Why are we at this juncture, where it looks like a) people don't care about the one thing that gives us life; our environment, and, b) people don't care about people, either? It turns out that littering is connected to our Bay Area homeless community; a by-product of our insane housing costs.

Let's start with the homeless situation in Berkeley, specifically, just around the corner from beautiful 4th Street.

There are encampments all along the western edges of the East Bay, where I live. But the one I found yesterday, by accident, just two blocks away from our illustrious and wealthy 4th street Berkeley shopping area, floored me. I had to stop and explore what the hell is going on that causes our peers, our fellow humans, with the same needs as us (to be healthy, happy, included, respected), to be living in conditions that mean they live with rats and a complete lack of security, social inclusion, the ability to cook - or even wash, sometimes? These conditions are not only unacceptable ways for humans to be living, but they also cause huge piles of trash on the streets that then compromise our overall planetary health and social wellbeing.

In this conversation, you will meet Thomas, a two year resident of this particular encampment, who was gracious enough to introduce me to his 'spot' and show me how he lives. He has been on the streets for over 20 years.

I was told that the police come along routinely to tell them they must move along and they get up to 72 hours to do so. This is no mean feat for some of them. And the issue of not having an address, not being able to charge a cell phone (perhaps not being able to buy one without an address?), makes it much hard to get jobs to get out of this cycle of disenfranchisement, of poverty. They have some help, from Osha Neumann (whom Thomas mentions in the interview above), an attorney who does advocacy work for East Bay Community Law Center, and people like Ben Bartlett, another attorney (now running for State Assembly) who is advocating for building affordable housing with blockchain technology, and comes from a long line of civil rights activists. However, it certainly doesn't help their efforts when we have people like HUD Ben Carson, in Washington, proposing raising rent on low income families on federal housing. This kind of conflict of interests and ideologies, by the way, is one of the big reasons that CA is beginning to identify with the advantages of being a distinct nation, untroubled by these unsettling policy contradictions.

The connection between the homeless and the issue of litter that is showing up on our shores is due to infrastructure and failing systems: where the homeless encamp, there are not regular places to discard of their accrued trash, so it literally gathers up on street corners or flies in the wind to the beaches, where it joins the trash dropped by people who actually do have homes.

In the pictures below, these are the beaches that many of us walk by, drive by, dump into, try to help, try to ignore, right here in Emeryville and Berkeley. Please be one of the people that picks up trash - let other people see you do it. Talk to the Public Works about having trash cans with fixed lids on them that are closed so no trash can get blown out of it, by the wind, or by birds.

There are things we can do, things we must start to make a part of our daily routine, e.g. talking with people in the Consumer food chain. For instance, I just spoke with Whole Foods - a progressive environmentally aware store - about their use of single use plastic for selling fruit. I told them I can't buy their fruit until they stop using that, that Cal Con Con is working to remove pollutants from the environment. They are going to call us back so we can see if we can work with them to raise awareness and change the way they do business. Each of us, as 'consumers' can do this, we can address the issues that keep us up at night, that affect our moral compass, that cause us to feel the shame of participating in a system that negatively impacts our future. What can you do? Are you looking for ideas? Do you have things on your mind about littering and/or homelessness? Solutions? What do you think about these solutions popping up here and there? The feedback I've heard is that even a Berkeley judge is not excited about them, calling them 'refugee camps'. So, what will happen?

Tomorrow - Thurs 26th April - I'm on a radio show Independent CA, tomorrow, with Sue Hirsch (host) and Marcus Ruiz Evans (President YesCa) and Ben Bartlett, on Berkeley City Council (running for State Assembly). Maybe some solutions will get discussed that you can take and run with. Maybe you have some solutions that need more traction? We have to fix this together. Please listen in, please call in between 10am-11am PST: 929 477 1653.

Cal Con Con's solution is to make the US Constitution guarantee people's rights to a home and to Universal Basic Income, and it's also making it unconstitutional to litter, damage, pollute our environment - on any scale. Come check it out - we are here to collaborate and participate in creating viable solutions, together.

Thank you for reading.