Love in Times of Precarity
On climate, belonging, and living in Arizona
People ask, “Why do you live in Arizona? Don’t you know you’re going to run out of water?” The tone is usually joking, but there’s a quiver of anxiety underneath. Sometimes, the person follows it up with their semi-serious plans to escape to some verdant elsewhere, a place with plenty of water to drink and grow all the green grass, too.
I laugh along, shaking my head, perhaps repeating a joke already made about my alma mater, Arizona State (there are so many: 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Suits, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Bill Maher). Living in Arizona is made easier with a bit of self-deprecation.
My laugh falters in the face of how devastating this summer was and continues to be. Every single day in July hit 110 degrees or hotter. And July nights didn’t get cooler than 90. In Maricopa County, where I live, there have been 44 official heat-related deaths this summer (133 this year), and 341 deaths are still under investigation. Saguaros, a symbol of the desert’s endurance, started to collapse or lose limbs. CNN reports:
“Cactuses carry out essential functions at night. That’s when they open their stomata, or pores, and carry out a gas exchange in which they take in the carbon dioxide they use to photosynthesize during the day. But because nights in Phoenix have experienced record-high heat, McCue said this suffocates and stresses out the saguaros, which dehydrates them and makes them more susceptible to infections and insects.”
And still, some Arizona Republicans don’t want to talk about the heat and definitely don’t want to link it to climate change, as Hank Stephenson reports in Politico. I’m furious and also empathetic: I remember when I didn’t want to believe the extent of humanity’s impact on the Earth. But the longer climate change remains highly politicized, the higher the human toll will rise.
Why do I live in Arizona? Love is the simplest answer. My parents moved us as a family to Arizona in 2004 as an escape from a deteriorating situation in Pennsylvania, their hometown. Arizona had better jobs for my Dad, and my family found a community through homeschooling and baseball that glued us together and made us forever indebted to the state. I met my husband, a fourth-generation Arizonan, at Central Arizona Community College, and when we needed a place to return to after his grad school, there was no debate. We moved back home.
People have always lived in deserts. The idea that land is supposed to be lush and green is fairly Euro- and East Coast-centric. My ancestors lived in Ireland, immigrated to New York, and mainly lived in Pennsylvania until my parents moved west. Those who share a similar background to what I described often have it hardwired into us that green fields, forests, and lakes mean an environment is thriving. The Sonoran desert has its own incomparable environment and ecosystems.
When people talk about why one place or another is better or worse to live in, I wonder what makes any of us feel like we belong.
Moving to Phoenix and beholding the landscape was a shock to my system. But much of what looked bleak and barren to me was urban and suburban development that spewed cement and rock and planted non-native plants that demanded more water than indigenous species. Many complaints about the desert’s supposed lack of beauty are really complaints about how it’s been developed as more and more people moved in, like myself and my family.
A few nights ago, a long-awaited monsoon split the sky with lightning and thunder. My family and I stood outside looking up, letting the rain land on our skin. The air was heavy and humid, the sky bruised purple with clouds. In every raindrop was the reassurance that we made it through the worst of the summer.
But the bad heat is still recent enough that conversations on my lips, on my social media, are troubled with anxiety over how many more summers will be survivable. We worry about the heat, the electricity needed for A/C, the money required to pay for electricity, the rising rent and home prices, the lack of efforts historically to cool our cities, and speculation about whether current efforts will be enough. We worry about staying and about the privilege of leaving.
Is there anywhere I could move to escape the climate crisis? The effects felt in Arizona pale in comparison to the global south, and so, too, what I feel pales compared with what those who are unsheltered feel. There are some places in the U.S. where water is more plentiful, and it doesn’t get so hot. But if everyone (who was able to) moved to those places, wouldn’t that cause new problems? There’s no place for me to hide from knowing that the Earth I love is suffering and that one day my life will be over. And while that precarity is terrifying to observe and reflect on, it’s more truthful because life has always been precarious. But some people, primarily wealthy white people, were able to avoid noticing or caring because others were made to bear the brunt of diminished humanity.
In 2015, Claudia Rankine wrote an essay, ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,’ published in the New York Times:
“Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.”
Noticing the climate crisis might be the first time some people are experiencing atrocity that is made by humans and out of their full control. Personal responsibility is always a good mantle to pick up, but what else is needed? I think our greatest singular power is our ability to be in a collective. The work of climate solutions and social justice takes all of us, and even then–we are not guaranteed anything. But we never were guaranteed anything: Being a U.S. citizen doesn’t entitle everyone to personal freedom or safety. How could it entitle us to Earth continuing to function as we want it to?
How the climate crisis shows itself in the rising heat in Phoenix is in our faces, not over there, elsewhere, avoidable. I am not rejoicing that things are bad enough that more people have noticed. And I also know that avoiding looking at the problem exacerbates the problem.
I’ve been aware since a young age that men could decide to take things from me: My attention, my body, my credibility. Being afraid to walk alone through a city, having tools and tips from other women to deal with unwanted advances, staying hyper-alert – all of this was an acknowledgment of the precarity of my life. In my bones, I’ve known that I’m dependent on the care or violence of others. But I also have layers of insulating privilege that protect me.
I’m reading In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. In the Wake is described by Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, as a “consideration of the violation and commodification of Black life and the aesthetic responses to this ongoing state of emergency.”
In the book, Sharpe writes about a film, Allan Sekula and Noel Burch’s The Forgotten Space–A Film Essay Seeing to Understand the Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea that studies how shipping containers move around in the water and on land; “it is a film about the global capital and wreckage it leaves in the wake.” Sharpe writes about her disappointment in what the film leaves out: “No surprise, then, that the film does not address the history of the trade in abducted Africans; does not locate that trade as the key point in the beginning of global capital.”
I’m bringing this quote into this newsletter because I want to write about global forces, capitalism, and the unchecked U.S. “progress” at the expense of so many. It’s all connected to the moment when the humanity of Africans was decided by European men to be less important than the potential of growing more sugar, coffee, tobacco, etc. Everyone in the U.S. is in the wake of this horror.
Sharpe asks,
“What, then, are the ongoing coordinates and effects of the wake, and what does it mean to inhabit that Fanonian ‘zone of non-Being’ within and after slavery’s denial of Black humanity?”
“How does one, in the words so often used by such institutions, ‘come to terms with’ (which usually means move past) ongoing and quotidian atrocity?”
“How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally in the register of the intramural, in a different relation that that of the violence of the state?”
I read an article in my local paper about the people who bury the unclaimed and unsheltered dead of Phoenix. There is no way to move past that, even as the seconds tick by. I’m trying to figure out how to stay with the interminable horror and not retreat into overwhelm.
Settlers moved to Arizona without thinking about the water running out. They rushed, hoped, presumed on the Earth, and took what they wanted from the Indigenous people. Urbanization has blurred reality, but this is still happening, and I’m part of it. There’s another piece of the story: Arizona is my home, and I hold it dearly as it holds me. Mortality, my own and my state’s, my country’s, my planet’s, is a constant. I can’t presume on the future, near or far. In the meantime, I’m living where I am and taking care of the place that cares for me. Even as we are both decaying.
Sharpe writes, “At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as total climate. At stake, too, is not recognizing an insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being. How might we stay in the wake with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and live lives meant to be unlivable?”
Sometimes, I feel morbid, but then I think that’s the state wanting me to look away from the horrors it perpetuates. Sometimes, I worry my writing sounds ‘preachy’ or ‘shouty’ or isn’t perfect enough to engage with the topics I’m still learning about. But then I think that the climate of antiblackness and widespread injustice that Sharpe writes about thrives when we refuse to recognize it. Waiting to write before I have conclusions would keep me silent, probably forever.
To depend on each other is precarious, especially when we know how much violence is possible. But we are what we have. Relationships, interdependence, connectedness, and complexity are always necessary, especially in times of precarity. For now, with all my unanswered questions, I live in Arizona, building community and working toward mending the future, finding worthiness in that every day, regardless of what will come.
Reading: The Burden of Joy by Lexi Kent-Monning (Coming out Nov 1 – pre-order!) and In the Wake by Christine Sharpe. Up next: Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde (found on eBay) and Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton by Sister Therese Lentfoehr.
Writing: Just what you see here plus many, many more words that didn’t make the cut.
Cooking: I made vegan rice pudding (above) with oat milk and cardamom. I used Jasmine rice because it’s what I had, but it didn’t give me the texture that I was looking for and I’m going to make it again soon.
This is really beautiful, Devin! This imagery got me. "The air was heavy and humid, the sky bruised purple with clouds. In every raindrop was the reassurance that we made it through the worst of the summer."
Love the connections you're creating and exploring in this piece! <3