The depave movement, at least in some places, is gaining momentum, but not in Rhode Island, where we like to smother the natural world under widened highways, oversized homes, solar panels, and parking lots.

This rabid obsession is on full display on Moshassuck Street in Pawtucket, where developers and local officials want to turn the only public park in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood into an asphalt wasteland.

Morley Field resides in the lowest-scoring city neighborhood when it comes to tree cover and green space. In fact, the neighborhood has one of the lowest scores in all of Rhode Island.

Three-plus years ago, city officials introduced the idea of selling Morley Field for half a million dollars, so the only green space in an environmental justice neighborhood could be turned into a parking lot for a redeveloped distribution center next door.

Pawtucket City Council member Clovis Gregor, local residents, advocates, and the Conservation Law Foundation have since been fighting the proposal.

(In July and again in November CLF sent letters to the National Park Service, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and the city of Pawtucket outlining its concerns with the project.)

The Woodlawn neighborhood, along the Providence line and the banks of the Moshassuck River, is 74% people of color, with 59% living at or below the poverty line. Nearly 30% of the neighborhood’s population is children.

The park offers the city’s only public access to the Moshassuck River without having to cut through a cemetery. This slice of green space in a highly developed neighborhood has been locked behind a chain-link fence since 2021.

The city has claimed that redevelopment is necessary because of the neglected and dangerous state of Morley Field. Ironically, the park is trashed because it’s a property City Hall abandoned in a neighborhood the city doesn’t seem to care about.

Rhode Island likes to take from those with the least to make those with more happy.

“At what point will a state agency or a federal agency say enough is enough? You know, like we have reached capacity for this watershed and you can’t develop anymore, and we haven’t seen that yet,” Kate McPherson, Save The Bay’s riverkeeper, said last month during an interview about a hotel project in Bristol. “And the case that comes to mind is Morley Field. I mean, if you look at the Moshassuck River, I think that really illustrates a great point. Morley Field is the last scrap of green space on the Moshassuck in Pawtucket, and Pawtucket wants to pave it. If you want to talk about cumulative impacts and the literal last spot of green space, that’s a great example.”

The cumulative impact of Rhode Island’s continued bulldozing, clear-cutting, asphalting, and otherwise trashing of the natural world is sickening. It’s also making us and Mother Nature ill.

Nearly 30%, some 43 square miles, of the nine municipalities, including Pawtucket, that make up Rhode Island’s urban core are covered by roads, rooftops, parking lots, and countless other hardened structures. Much of this hardness surrounds vacant car dealerships, big-box stores, and strip malls and abandoned office space left behind to build anew in the woods.

These impervious surfaces collect particulate matter from the atmosphere, nitrogen oxides from vehicle exhaust, rubber bits from tires, debris from brake systems, oil, antifreeze, algal bloom-feeding nutrients from residential and agricultural fertilizers, lawn pesticides, litter, and bacteria from pet waste and bird droppings.

All these pollutants and other nastiness are then sent speeding into local waterways, including the Ocean State’s signature resource.

Some 14% of the Narragansett Bay watershed is covered in surfaces that don’t allow the infiltration of water. (About 60% of this watershed is in Massachusetts, but 90% of Narragansett Bay’s waters are in Rhode Island.)

When impervious cover is between 10% and 25%, streams show clear signs of degradation. When impervious cover is more than 30%, efforts to restore water quality to pre-development conditions are unlikely.

In Rhode Island, impervious cover by municipality ranges from 3% to 40%. When impervious cover is less than 10%, streams support a wide range of life. Only 17 of the state’s 39 municipalities feature less than 10% impervious cover.

Yet, we continue to mindlessly replace green with black and gray, to build gas stations, fast-food joints, hotels, ground-mounted solar installations, corporate office parks, and unaffordable homes. We ignore already-developed parcels because it’s more lucrative to rape and pillage the natural world.

There’s about 3,200 square feet — the size of one of those unnecessarily large homes we like to build — of built impervious surface per person in the United States. A thousand square feet of impervious surface generates some 28,000 gallons of runoff annually.

When asphalt and concrete are poured over the natural world, soil is compacted, imprisoned, ruined; insects and microorganisms suffocated; wildlife habitat destroyed; free ecological services lost.

Minimizing our use of asphalt and concrete or replacing drab colors with shades of green would better connect communities (see Providence, Olneyville), help lower summer heat, reduce flood risks, lower stress levels, reduce air and noise pollution, and restore local biodiversity.

We could start by grabbing a seat on the aforementioned depave movement. Softening the state’s urban core and other over-hardened areas would reduce toxic stormwater runoff, help address flooding problems, and create places for kids to play and neighborhoods to gather.

In recent years, the depave movement has begun to spread across the United States and Canada, as extreme heat and flooding have made some cities rethink the wisdom of covering up their space with heat-absorbing, impervious surfaces.

Depave, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit founded in 2007, promotes the removal of unnecessary pavement to create community green spaces and mitigate stormwater runoff. In Providence, the mayor wants to dismantle bicycle infrastructure.

The Rhode Island Green Infrastructure Coalition and the Stormwater Innovation Center share a similar mission with Depave but need more support from municipal and state government, the business community, and residents.

If we’re unwilling to give a little back, perhaps we can charge more for taking it.

A stormwater utility district, an idea first introduced in the United States in the mid-1970s, is a fee designed to generate funding for stormwater management and to discourage the overuse of asphalt and concrete.

Basically, it’s to stormwater what a sewer utility is to sewage, or what a water utility is to drinking water. A stormwater utility district generates revenue through fees that are based upon the amount of stormwater generated on a property. The revenue generated supports the maintenance and upgrade of existing storm drain systems, flood-control measures, and water quality programs.

Some 2,000 U.S. municipalities employee such districts, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, but none in Rhode Island.

Rhode Island municipal and state government need to change the paradigm to better protect water resources, the environment, and public health in the face of a ballooning crisis. Our elected officials can’t keep relying on nonprofits, volunteers, and underfunded agencies to address our addiction to asphalt and concrete.

Following the same paved path will lead to a dead end.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.