ON MY COMMUTE to work, I pass an entrance to the northbound 110 freeway on Figueroa Street in Cypress Park. A local gas station operates behind a busy bus stop that Northeast Los Angeles residents use to get across town. During peak hours, bus riders dot the street, passing the time on their phones and lightly fanning themselves from the heat that rises from car emissions and asphalt. In the dead of summer, all of them retreat toward the gas station and wait underneath the roofed gas pumps, running out to the curb only when their bus finally arrives. I’ve long thought about how noxious it is to wait out public transit delays on privately owned rest stops for car owners, who rarely think about the lack of tree canopy coverage because of our addiction to air-conditioning.
Sam Bloch’s new book Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource is an essential text for the summer. With over five years of research and reporting, the journalist uses science, urban planning, and interviews to expand on the cultural and natural history of shade. Perhaps it may affirm what an engaged public knows about shade being a comfort and privilege, but the book excels at capturing the jouissance of collapsing beneath a shady tree after hours in the sun. It shouldn’t be so political to want this basal pleasure for laborers, athletes, pedestrians, and idlers alike.
Heat is silent, an invisible destructor. While tornadoes and storms violently announce themselves before razing buildings and infrastructure, heat often takes the lives of human beings without tearing down structures. Around the world, there are cities hungry for solutions. In Barcelona, Spain, mayors have deputized appropriate departments for greener, shadier spaces. In Portland, Oregon, pilot projects exist to plant trees in underused parking spots. Yet in Los Angeles, a city bathed in perpetual brightness, Mayor Karen Bass signed off on an austere city budget that made deep cuts to city workforces and resources that mitigate extreme heat in favor of restoring the Los Angeles Police Department to its former hiring levels. This is an amnesiac’s response to heat, one that treats it as an ephemeral phenomenon while measuring devastation by the loss of property instead of people.
For all of its communitarian focus on fighting extreme heat, Shade has also changed my individual approach to torrid summer days. I adapt to less light in indoor settings, I check the wet-bulb globe temperature before I go for a swim, and I tell my neighbors about the value of exterior window treatments in addition to the curtains that flimsily protect our homes. Seasonal affective disorder uniquely haunts me in the summertime, but for once, I feel motivated to get through our hottest days, with everybody else.
Ahead of Shade’s release, I spoke with Bloch about Los Angeles’s rollbacks on solutions to extreme heat, challenging demonizing narratives about shade, and shade advocacy that isn’t rooted in volunteerism (no shade to volunteers). {read}