Micro-Care: Small Acts of Resilience for Living within the Earth’s Carrying Capacity

In April of 2020, while we and the world scrambled to come to terms with a global pandemic, a small group of us assembled to respond to a Policy Horizons Canada report called The Next Generation of Emerging Global Challenges: Living within the Earth’s Carrying Capacity. This 114 page report felt so heavy, so intimidating—and yet so important—to reply to. How could we, from the humble makeshift workspaces of our kitchens and bedrooms, generate something in response? And how could we do this while managing our own mental health and well-being through a time where everything felt like quicksand? This project began from a place of searching for optimism and agency in the shadow of massive and systemic forces. We documented and discussed modest actions of resilience and care for ourselves, each other and the systems surrounding us, our weekly discussions themselves became a typology of care through the tumultuous spring of 2020. This publication holds our divergent but intersecting reflections on care, beginning from the smallest seed of ourselves. Through remaining humble relative to the global challenges laid out in the Policy Horizons Canada report, we hope our work can create a container for complex and meaningful interactions to spill from.