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In 1635 the Great Colonial Hurricane sent a 22-foot storm surge tearing through Narragansett Bay. One year later, Roger Williams colonized the land that he began to call Providence. Generations since have transformed the local topography, stripping the landscape of natural protections against storm surges and rising waters. In 1938 and 1954, two more large storms hit Providence, flooding vast swaths of Downtown. Government leaders built a hurricane barrier a decade later, but they didn’t take into account rising seas due to climate change. Now, another 1635-like storm would nearly overtop Providence’s only defenses, and the low-lying industrial facilities at the port of Providence—such as Shell’s Providence Terminal—would be destroyed, unleashing toxic waste into Narragansett Bay.

The Conservation Law Fund (CLF) is suing Shell for failure to prepare their facility for climate change, provoking larger questions about how the city will adapt to rising water, bigger storm surges, and the power of massive polluters like Shell. Preparing Providence for climate change requires shattering the myth of a static, never-changing landscape. The city can choose to do nothing and eventually be destroyed, or build new coalitions around ambitious designs in pursuit of a radically re-imagined, climate-adapted Providence.

The Providence Shell Terminal and the Conservation Law Fund’s case

The Providence Shell Terminal is one of dozens of industrial facilities that reside on Allens Avenue, a long stretch of road that runs alongside the Providence River, away from Downtown and towards Fields Point. The east side of Allens Avenue is manmade; the land rests on an area that was once a marsh estuary. Maps from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management show that the waterfront slowly expanded over decades through a combination of dredging and dumping of city trash. Most of the riverfront is inaccessible to the public or littered with scrap—old tires, rusted manhole covers, and even a decommissioned submarine—and other toxic waste. A flood here would be catastrophic for the ecosystem of the Narragansett Bay and the Rhode Islanders who depend on it. In 2017, the Conservation Law Fund sued Shell in Rhode Island federal district court, alleging that the company is aware of climate-related dangers to their 75-acre facility but has done little to mitigate such risks. Last September, the lawsuit moved into legal discovery in federal court, requiring Shell’s team of lawyers to present evidence to defend their

A CITY BY THE (RISING) SEA

The Shell Terminal and the future of Providence

facility. The CLF lawsuit is based on a federal law passed in 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which acknowledges that most environmental laws are not properly enforced— mostly due to bipartisan austerity measures—and so allows for ‘citizen’ reporting. CLF’s lawsuit accuses Shell of numerous violations of the RCRA and Clean Water Act, mainly concerning visible oil sheen, failure to correctly report pollutant concentration, and a lack of disaster preparedness. The most compelling accusation CLF puts forth, however, is an allegation of a “Failure to Prepare SWPPP [Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan] in Accordance with Good Engineering Practices.” The suit claims that Shell knows of sea level rise and the extreme weather events expected as climate change occurs, but has failed to take this knowledge into account in the design of their Providence terminal.

The CLF has precise legal arguments and sophisticated scientific climate modeling on its side. In addition, the federal judge hearing the case, William E. Smith, has a reputation for being friendly to environmental causes. Nonetheless, CLF President Brad Campbell told the College Hill Independent that his team of lawyers are in the middle of a David versus Goliath fight. Shell is the seventh largest company in the world and has nearlimitless legal and lobbying resources. Shell’s lawyers have already attempted a variety of diversionary legal tricks, like claiming that the CLF’s case doesn’t have standing in federal court or that debates about climate change don’t apply to Shell’s permits. A representative from Shell told the Indy that the company does not comment on ongoing litigation.

Campbell told the Indy that a successful suit would finally make the economic cost of climate inaction transparent, putting a price tag on rising sea levels. The case would also set a precedent in federal court that could impact low-lying fossil fuel facilities nationwide. Companies like Shell exercise vast influence over the political systems meant to keep them in check. A CLF victory would be a triumph of the legal system—and citizen advocates—over the immense corporate power of Shell. Fossil fuel giants in coastal communities across the US might have to spend huge sums of money on retro-fitting their facilities. But, as CLF is only able to sue for permitting violations and debatable language in the Clean Water Act, it cannot use the law to put on trial the very existence of such fossil fuel facilities and the huge amount of damage—like rising sea levels—they are causing to the city. The case’s scope is narrow, and the chances of victory slim, but CLF’s lawsuit could mobilize public support against the existence of companies like Shell and extract moral dues from polluters. Finally, after decades of knowing, Shell would have to acknowledge and pay for some aspect of the climate change they’ve caused.

The Fox Point Hurricane Barrier and the topography of Providence

In 1954, Hurricane Carol dumped 12 feet of water in Downtown Providence, causing $1.9 billion in damages, adjusted to 2021 dollars. In the years that followed, thanks to federal funding and public outcry, planning and construction began on the hurricane barrier. State and federal leaders chose to build at Fox Point, deciding against other proposals, such as floodgates at the mouth of the Narragansett Bay or across Fields Point, because they were economically and ecologically infeasible, despite protecting port infrastructure. The massive barriers further south of Providence would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and could have destroyed the fragile estuary ecosystems at the head of the Bay. Still, as it stands, the Fox Point barrier protects only the wealthiest parts of Providence—such as Downtown and the cluster of historic buildings at the base of College Hill—leaving marginalized communities in Olneyville and Washington Park vulnerable.

Providence’s natural topography, formed by glaciers thousands of years ago, has typically protected the city from large storm surges. Most of the residential areas of Providence are above sea level, a byproduct of powerful ice sheets moving back and forth over the land, creating the narrow channels, bluffs, and hilly terrain that today define much of the city. Before colonization, the head of Narragansett Bay was also a thriving marshland and estuary. Indigenous peoples of the region, such as the Wampanoag and Narragansett, worked the land to provide food and shelter for their communities without destroying the local ecosystem. Since colonization, Europeans, exploiting the labor of enslaved Africans, have levelled hills and pushed earth into the Providence River, altering parts of the landscape that once acted as carbon sinks, rainwater storage, and natural barriers against storm surges.

Specific parts of Providence, such as Fields Point, are victims of the terraformed landscape, and are now only a few feet above sea level, but most of the city is protected by gentle hills. In cities without rolling terrain, such as low-lying Miami, New Orleans, and Boston, building protective dikes and tidal gates is economically infeasible, but in Providence, a smaller barrier could protect most of the city. However, the current Fox Point Hurricane Barrier wouldn’t protect the city in the

A CITY BY THE (RISING) SEA

long-term, according to Executive Artistic Director of WaterFire Barnaby Evans, but it would be a good place for a larger dike to be built, due to its placement at the narrowest point of the river. Evans said the new structure, which would have to be resilient to long term pressures of higher tides and rising sea level predictions, as well as storm surges from hurricanes, would cost over a billion dollars and might take a decade to build.

Such a solution, however, is not without its risks. Manmade infrastructure disrupts natural estuary systems and such a dike still leaves the port area— including fossil fuel facilities like Shell’s—completely unprotected. Abandoning such low-lying land might be the only feasible option for Providence to adapt, Evans told the Indy.

Urban resilience experts, like Brown University professor Kurt Teichert, advocate for natural climate change solutions like regreening, allowing the land to naturally rewild by removing manmade structures and replanting estuary environments. Newlygreened areas would absorb excess water from storm surges and extreme rainfall events. The community could even reconstruct Sassafras Hill—a dune area that used to protect the coast along Fields Point— restoring Providence’s pre-1900s topography. Evans told the Indy that such solutions might unburden the Earth of what generations of humans have done to it.

City officials so far have failed to act on either re-greening or armoring approaches to adaptation. Leah Bamberger, director of Providence’s Office of Sustainability, told the Indy that the city has yet to hold formal discussions or do any planning for a re-imagined hurricane barrier. Bamberger said that while the current barrier only has 20 to 30 years of useful life left before it needs to be completely rebuilt, such a project is difficult to set in motion. Infrastructure projects of this scale require a robust public process, are unexciting to residents, and are extremely expensive. As current Mayor Jorge Elorza sets his sights on a gubernatorial run in 2022, he seems content to pass this generation-defining problem off to the next mayoral administration.

What would it mean to transform ‘Providence’? Providence as it is today did not exist before Roger Williams, and it is shortsighted to assume the city will always be the same. Companies like Shell thrive when their power and the environment they’ve created seems inevitable. Instead of bowing to the status-quo, the community could embrace adaptive tools like re-greening, dikes, and abandonment to imagine a radical future city that places racial, economic, and environmental justice—not profit motives—at its center. The climate crisis demands change. Even the definition of a city as a home we currently imagine as being stable and constant could alter as we come to grips with land that might no longer be recognizable as Providence.

Community-organized environmental justice and white environmentalism

Monica Huertas, a Providence-based environmental justice activist, has a vision for a city that gives the most marginalized residents a waterfront view. Huertas’ neighborhood, Washington Park, is one of several Black and brown communities most impacted by economic and environmental injustice. The area around the port also has one of the highest per capita rates of asthma in the state. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Huertas told the Indy about La Perla, a poorer neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico that looks over the Atlantic Ocean. She envisions a similar, rising-waters-ready future for her neighborhood in Providence: clean air and water, green space, water access, and playgrounds. Most importantly, in her vision, polluters like Shell are gone, regulated out of existence by state law.

In 2015 Huertas began organizing with the Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG) Collective against the $180 million liquified natural gas (LNG) facility proposed by National Grid on Allens Avenue. The LNG facility is barely a mile away from the Shell terminal, but when Huertas asked CLF to provide legal help for FANG’s organizing, CLF wouldn’t help. She said that FANG was forced to hire a sub-par lawyer that failed to properly represent them at a hearing during the permitting process. The facility eventually won approval despite the community backlash and construction is almost complete. While Huertas said that CLF lawyer Amy Moses had reached out to her about the Shell lawsuit, Huertas felt that CLF had ignored the local community’s needs. “They need to go out there and ask what the community wants,” Huertas told the Indy about CLF’s outreach. “It’s not very meaningful, it’s very tokenizing and not involved [with the community] at all. They need to get their act together.” Huertas is skeptical of white environmentalism, which she sees as a ploy by well-educated lawyers to pose as environmental champions in anticipation of future political careers or corporate board memberships. “All of these national environmental groups are based on eugenics, and the idea that we want to conserve the environment for the white race and white people not for anybody else,” said Huertas. “It’s conservation for who?”

Campbell, the president of CLF, said that public support for their cases was important and that local communities, even if they were not one of the plaintiffs, often played a central role in litigation proceedings. In a follow-up, the CLF emphasized that as a small nonprofit, they don’t have the resources to take on every campaign, such as the case against the LNG facility. “In all of our cases, we do our best to reach out to the community throughout the process to ensure we’re all working towards the same goal,” CLF Press Secretary Jake O’Neill told the Indy in an email.

The tension between community organizers like Huertas and environmental organizations like the CLF is important because whoever defines the climate agenda in the coming years will also control the built environment of the city. For centuries, marginalized communities and their pursuit of climate justice have been ignored. If the concerns of community organizers like Huertas aren’t centered, the same systemic inequities will be repeated as Providence is reimagined in the coming decades.

Climate catastrophe, visionary design, and the future of Providence

In 2021, Providence is already in the midst of climate catastrophe. While CLF’s case could set a powerful national precedent, a decision is years in the making. Another 1635-like mega storm could hit the city while CLF and Shell lawyers dither about in the courthouse, arguing over permits while the rising waters lap their black-heeled dress shoes.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rhode Island School of Design architecture Professor Anne Tate has taught studios focused on radically adapting and reimagining the port of Providence area. Student proposals for the port area have varied wildly. One student called for re-greening the land and separating Fields Point from what was once Starve Goat Island, allowing water to fill in between the two. Another proposal called for a conversion of the then-decommissioned storage tanks into affordable housing units or a series of connected nightclubs. Several address practical concerns for the city, like building a row of windmills on the port or building a gravity flow sewage treatment facility which benefits from the port’s low elevation. Because of the abundance of stakeholders who would be affected were the area to be transformed, Tate told the Indy that she doesn’t have a favorite solution—each proposal addresses a different priority.

Tate’s approach—ambitious, specific, and community driven—is exciting, making it easier to galvanize political momentum toward a project’s completion compared with more general top-down municipal plans. “Sometimes you have to begin with crazy bold propositions and see what can accrue to that,” she told the Indy. Visionary design can present compelling solutions that bring together disparate voices, forming new consensus and galvanizing broad support for transformative projects, even if they are less feasible in the short term. “The role of design can be catalytic in that way,” said Tate. “If there’s a vision of where we want to go, then we can get there together.”

Climate change is a massive disruption to the status-quo, but also a huge opportunity to reimagine Providence. The city’s port is exposed to storm surge and rising waters. The hurricane barrier is aging. Providence’s estuarine ecosystems have been destroyed. Proposals for adaptation exist— regreening the land, building a dike, reimagining the port—but a spark is needed to jumpstart change. The CLF’s underdog case against Shell could provide that initial push, or a speech by an organizer like Huertas, or aggressive action by city officials. A broad coalition—designers from RISD, portside community members, local Indigenous communities, the mayor—could together meet the climate crisis with creativity, seizing the momentum and power from polluters like Shell who thrive in stasis. As climate rhythms continue to shape the organization of our communities, Providence will either buckle under new stresses or redefine its discrete physical and historical borders—regardless, the future demands the end of the city as we know it.

PEDER SCHAEFER B’22.5 and LUCAS GELFOND B’23.5 are ready to (re)plant Sassafras trees on a newly (re)built Sassafras Hill.