Well, here we are on earth.

It’s spring in Providence and the federal government is actively, gleefully attempting to dismantle a lot of the tools and methods we’ve developed to limit the damage that war-making and profit-making cause to all the lives and systems that make up what we call “this planet.” The sun is shining and the crabapples are budding by the river and while it’s getting less deadly if you’re forced to sleep outside, that’s a pretty low bar. The smell of death is on the wind, birds are yelling about sex, humans are serving free breakfasts at Kennedy Plaza and lunches in Dexter Park, and life is renewing itself.

All these forces are at work, in our city as anywhere. My question for you for this Earth Day is: which of them do you want to work with, to nourish with your presence and strengthen with your effort? Who is inviting you to join them, and which of those invitations do you want to accept?

Since 2014 I’ve sat at the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, mostly within these city limits: in Burnside Park, at the Sankofa Market and other farmers’ markets, at events like PVD Fest. There, I’ve listened to my fellow Rhode Island residents—boatyard owners and service workers and high school kids and city councilors and college students and medical professionals and people striving to get sober. People tell me how the climate crisis is making them feel. Sometimes we talk through ways to let those feelings guide them into connection and action. Sometimes, they just want to know that they’re not alone.

My invitation is an invitation to talk, and they have accepted it. They’ve talked about their climate anxieties because they have them and because that’s what it says on the sign: the disappearance of beloved beaches elsewhere in the state and the horrors of wildfires out West, dilemmas about children they may never have and apartments that are already too hot for their kids to sleep in. They’ve also talked about their other anxieties because they have those: the housing they’re afraid will fall through at the last minute, the ongoing wrangle with DCYF. And now, there are also threatened cuts to funding for people’s jobs or the services they use, the heightened menace of ICE agents lurking outside adults’ workplaces or kids’ schools. What will the extremities of summer weather do to people with no home but a tent? To people who grow food, and depend on that work to pay their mortgage or their rent? To the people whose job it is to care for them when they are sick, broke, grieving, or enraged? To the trees and plants that hold soil together, filter air, direct water and offer shade from the heat of the sun?

Please hear and feel this today: humans are part of the ecosystem. We are all bound together. We can’t avoid this. But we can adjust the tightness and the looseness of our bonds, weakening some, enriching others. What you’re looking for—the invitations I want you to listen for, and to accept, as we celebrate the earth, our only home—are the invitations to sustain life, shared life. By finding or making sustenance and slack anywhere there is strain, we create room to move.

What does that actually involve in Providence? It might mean clamoring to move money from one part of the budget (maybe the police supply budget?) to another (maybe the community libraries?). It might mean helping a neighbor put in a rain garden to reduce flooding, or taking a Community Emergency Response Team training course to be more prepared to respond to disasters, or, yes, planting a tree. It might mean—to give an example I use often— offering childcare or elder care so someone else can speak at a hearing, attend a training, or take a break. I believe that it certainly involves calling for rent stabilization in our city. It might also mean encouraging our neighbors to join us in larger, national fights: lawsuits and union actions, targeted protests and boycotts, and mass mobilizations, including for justice worldwide.

If any of these suggestions alarm you, I ask you to pause, and to ask if your well-being is actually threatened by any of these changes—and if so, how you might shape said changes to make that less true. Another thing we can do for ourselves and our neighbors is to recognize the relative nature of threats, and to react according to the reality and the size of the threat.

Some of the threats are big, there’s no denying. Climate scientists have presented the concept of planetary boundaries or limits: these describe the activities of air, water, soil, and living beings that combine to create livable conditions. They caution that when any of these change drastically, it puts a strain on the others, as well as increasing the difficulty of living in its own right. When chemical pollution (“novel entities” in the jargon) kills off a certain number of plants and animals, it can make a place difficult for other animals, including humans, to live in; it can also alter the nutrient cycle and affect the growth of land systems like forests, further limiting the number of places where life can thrive.

Cities also have limits, limitations, on how well people can live as conditions change. There is only so much land—but who inhabits how much of it? There is only so much money—but how is it spent? People can also change conditions. We can move stuff around. We can dig deep. We can offer care, and we can also ask for it. And again, by doing these things in one part of our lives or our city, we make room for others to do more, different, complementary things on another block, another street.

Here on earth, on the part of the earth where the Narragansett people evolved with, and shaped, the land, where they continue to live alongside the descendents of the people who invaded those lands and the people who were kidnapped and enslaved to work here and the people who came here later—for a better life, sometimes, sometimes because this country made their lives elsewhere worse—this place, this city, this here, has taught me that everybody has to be somewhere. If Providence is here for all of us, then it’s the best site for us to be here for the earth, and for each other.

 

Kate Schapira, author of Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live With Care and Purpose in an Endangered World, has lived in Providence for 22 years. She teaches nonfiction writing at Brown University.