And how to be within both.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who need to marshal their energy and attention.
My friend Phil Eil asked if I’d write an Earth Day essay for Providence, which I did. Phil was one of the first journalists to write about the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth (RIP Providence Phoenix) and the essay, like the booth today, reflects the kind of changes that you see and inhabit if you live somewhere for a long time: the trees that bloom earlier, the humans whose troubles are sharper, but also the ways to redistribute relief, sustenance and connection within the webs of life in a particular place.
Another friend, Michael Tod Edgerton, got San Jose State University to bring me to make some webs of life and talk through some future visions with students, staff and faculty there. They generated their future visions in pairs, using the exercise from Chapter 8. One of the best moments was when the president of SJSU’s Sustainability and Climate Innovation Club (Imaan Siddiqui, who’s quoted in that article) used the Q & A time to invite everyone present to share their future visions with one another. They did. One pair said they “mostly just used the time to get to know each other”—the goal of all of this, in a way. I love it when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; I love it when people are better at doing the stuff in my book than I am.
This actually happens fairly often. Earlier this month I had the honor of doing some grant writing for a beautiful future vision: a Resilience Hub that the Providence Racial and Environmental Justice Committee, whom I’ve worked with on other occasions, want to found in South Providence. I suggested that they might want to use some of the funds to train people in the neighborhood in psychological and mental health first aid (training I do recommend). One of the heads of the project explained to me, gently, that they had plenty of trained people living in the neighborhood, including the other founding members and partners: educators, birthworkers, counselors, organizers, land stewards, builders, health care providers… What they need at the moment is a place—a building, a place within a place— for those people to share and distribute what they’ve learned. They want to renovate the building for energy efficiency and sustainability: renewable technologies like solar energy and heat pumps will mean that it’s not worsening climate conditions, and offer a model of how these technologies can be useful and effective.
In ordinary times, the South Providence Resilience Hub will offer therapeutic art activities, art and exercise classes for all age groups, workshops on gardening. Emergency preparedness training and mental health resources will enable them to counter and care for their own and each other’s climate-induced anxieties and health disparities. Advocacy training, and checking in together about local conditions, will provide opportunities for the collective agency and power of people of South Providence to emerge.
And in emergencies, the Hub will make available to all South Providence residents necessary things like portable power supply distribution, EV charging stations, public warming and cooling spaces, and rainwater collection for access to clean water. It will also provide critical relational infrastructure: ways for people to gather in difficult circumstances, receive skilled and trained support, share goods and resources, and plan cleanup and recovery.
Part of the reason I was writing that grant is that like so many groups and organizations, the REJC had some of their planned funding frozen by the current federal administration. These motherfuckers want most people immiserated, disoriented, desperate, and turning on each other because we are most people. Because the inequalities among that “most” can be exploited. Because they believe that those inequalities are innate, not induced by their ancestors and their policies. Because they are wrong, and they can’t stand to be wrong. Because everyone, contrary to that small but loud minority opinion, deserves a place to live and thrive and connect, no matter how tough things get.
So on May 1, 2025, I’m joining Tarshire Battle of Roots2Empower and Brianna Craft—two authors who have been working and writing for environmental justice, on multiple fronts, for years—to pool what we’ve learned about that work and learn from one another, for the benefit of the REJC and the South Providence Resilience Hub. It’s also for your benefit. If you attend, you’ll learn something, if not from us then from your fellow attendees: the whole point of the Hub is that when you get a bunch of thoughtful and caring people together in a room, something bigger and brighter and longer-lasting can emerge. Get your tickets today.
Here’s a small exercise that you could try during each of the days between now and May 1.
QUESTION: What plants are blooming or leafing out right now where you live? What’s aging or dying back?
PRACTICE: Pick one of these growing or dying things that you’re near each day anyway: near your workplace, your home, your kid’s school; a potted plant, a wild meadow, or grass in a sidewalk crack. Every day between now and May 1, pause beside it, look at it or touch it. You don’t need to do anything besides that, and you’re not in trouble if you forget, but practice deliberately breaking your stride each time to remember that you share the world.
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I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.