It’s Only Getting Hotter

Lisa Kwon talks with Sam Bloch about his new book “Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.”

By Lisa KwonJuly 21, 2025

• Politics

• Environment

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).

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LISA KWON: What has been the most surprising thing that you’ve come across while researching for the book?

SAM BLOCH: I was delighted to talk to this archeologist who specializes in ancient Mesopotamia, and to hear how germane and important shade was to ancient cultures in the Middle East. It blew my mind to think about an entire society, one of our greatest first cities, with an entire cosmology and worldview based on sunlight and shadow. That says to me that either this was an incredibly different time, where their worlds were so small that darkness could be a spiritual omen and the sun an awesome power, or it was just a more elemental time. If we were just shorn of everything modern and our progress as human civilization, where would that leave us? I think it would leave us with sun and shadow being way more important than they are today.

It’s also interesting to read about early urban design, even in cities like Los Angeles. Shade used to be integral to the urban design of American cities. This was when pedestrianism was the default, and you needed to have shade just to make sure that streets actually worked for people. There were so many different manifestations of shade, like oak trees and sycamores being the original native shade, and even Spanish-derived urban design like arcade sidewalks and awnings as ways that streets were sheltered. It’s really hard to imagine what that world must have been like because the only place where you can really get a glimpse of that [in L.A.] today is Venice Beach’s arcades.

You name examples of experiments in known “heat islands” in cities like Phoenix and Portland. We’ve long studied heat islands, actually, but then major cities don’t go on to make specific plans for addressing it. Why are these cities so paralyzed for solutions?

The city isn’t paralyzed, necessarily. At this point, everyone knows that planting trees helps with cooling in so many different ways. I really think the problem is a matter of political conviction and political courage to spend money on this. The people who need shade most are probably the most politically disenfranchised in the city. I talk in the book about going to [the L.A. neighborhood of] Pacoima and spending time with a community organizer there who’s trying to get bus shelters for the people who have to stand out in the sun. The way municipal politics works, you don’t have the time or the money or the resources to be at city hall and constantly go to city council meetings if you’re not wealthy and well connected. I don’t think L.A. is paralyzed so much as L.A. hasn’t decided to make it a priority. It really just takes a mayor who says, “I’m going to use this money that’s available to me for these projects.” We haven’t seen that mayor yet in Los Angeles.

Are you familiar with Karen Bass’s new budget for the city? In regards to her cuts to tree planting and tree maintenance, I’m wondering what caught your eye about these points.

If the mayor has any ambitions of achieving tree equity, then she’s totally screwed. I don’t know if she does. I think maybe that dream may have died with [former mayor Eric] Garcetti, but by zeroing out public support for this, you’re entrenching this pattern that already exists of volunteers planting their own trees on their own private properties and making the inequality situation worse.

This is actually part of a long pattern, a long trend, of the city disinvesting in tree planting and tree maintenance in the first place. In [L.A. City Controller] Kenneth Mejia’s assessment of the city’s street tree management program, he pointed out that the chief forestry officer said she was going to plant 90,000 trees in three years. They didn’t reach that number, and two-thirds of the trees that were allegedly planted went to City Plants, an organization whose primary mission is to give away trees to people. But most people aren’t gardeners or planters. They want these things, but is it really their responsibility to make them happen? I don’t know about that. So when I saw that tree planting and tree maintenance budgets were getting cut, I thought, What’s new? We’re just accelerating the way this already exists here. No shade on volunteers. We should all be planting trees, but that’s not how you address urban inequality.

This is my question for you: what has been the pushback from constituents on the climate zeroing out in her budget? I would assume that if there were some sort of loud and vocal outcry telling her that this is a huge mistake and there’s going to be hell to pay for her at the ballot box, maybe she would think differently about it.

I think there’s a bit of compassion fatigue. I think it also has to do with priorities stacking on top of each other. Development is so rapid. There are at least conservancy projects and autonomous groups that push back on it, but I don’t know if the point is being made that this is detrimental to our own need for shade as a public good. Maybe it’s just a lack of knowledge?

It’s funny. Even when I started writing the Places article, the City of Los Angeles was talking about mandatory setbacks for developers where you have to spare room for trees on your property, which is great. Since 90 percent of Los Angeles’s urban forest is on private land, you need to have these checks on private developers. But to your point, it does seem like there’s a lot of lost opportunities for so many different things. Lost opportunity to clean land that we know is toxic, lost opportunity to rebuild housing that’s more energy efficient and more sustainable and resilient, and lost opportunity to spare more room for trees.

I don’t think that there is any deliberate planning around these sources of funding. I think they’re being used to fill gaps, and every so often a project comes up for this kind of funding. But it would not be hard for a mayor who cared about this issue to deputize someone in her streets or public works department to, say, pick 15 or 20 streets in Latino neighborhoods that need more trees and slate those for redevelopment. The money is absolutely there. It’s just a question of priorities, right?

I was surprised to see that you reached out to some L.A. cops about their role in weaponizing environmental design in surveillance because of how they’ve long associated shade with criminal activities. What did your conversations with them affirm for you?

It was just so obvious to them that shadows were a problem and that giving places for criminals to hide was a problem. It wasn’t even really a controversial thing to assert that you need more space, more visual clearance, and more lighting; that’s just what they’ve been taught in environmental design training.

On the page, I push the reader toward this argument that if you think about the other things that shade does, maybe this is a problem. There’s a lot about heat that we still don’t really understand or that’s still becoming part of public discourse. Even the idea that shade can keep people saner, healthier, and cooler—that’s well established in academic literature and in epidemiological literature, but that’s not the way everyday people think about the world. So I can’t really fault [the LAPD] for just looking at things and saying, “Well, if people hide there, you’ve got to get rid of it.” But in the book, I try to make the argument that L.A. police infamously spend a lot of time in their cruisers. If they were spending more time on foot, they may, I don’t know, appreciate the calming effects of shade and how this could actually support public safety in a way that weaponizing sunlight doesn’t.

I guess I’m just wondering how much of our fight against extreme heat should be about challenging the surveillance state or the police state’s assumption about shade and shadows.

I hope I can give you a satisfying answer. I think it begins with how we reimagine what public safety means in Los Angeles. Currently, public safety on our streets means making streets work for cars. Currently, public safety in our neighborhoods means making sure they’re visible and that police are able to see what’s happening. I don’t think public safety has evolved yet to include protection from heat. I don’t think public safety has evolved to include even public accessibility as a form of public safety. If it’s too hot to use the sidewalk, is anyone going to use it?

I think what I’m trying to say is that, so long as Los Angeles and most other cities think about public safety as efficiency in catching criminals, there’s not really going to be that kind of conversation about abating heat. I say in the book that there’s lots of academic literature about how trees and shaded cooling actually protect people and make them calmer; they don’t get hotheaded, literally. I don’t know what it’s going to take, but you can’t really have these conversations about the LAPD respecting shade until they have a different idea of what public safety means.

In the end, I care about informing my neighbors and my friends more than I care about trying to convince the LAPD and our electeds to see the value of shade. What is some practical advice for readers who want to mobilize their neighbors and friends around shade?

I know we just talked about policing being anti-shade and about how the city struggles to marshal the resources to make the shade that they say they want, but I don’t really think of shade as a political lightning rod issue. I think most people will intuit and understand the benefits of shade. It’s probably just about building political will toward it, the way that any of us can organize for anything better in our communities. If you’re a parent and you want a safer, more comfortable playground for your kids, or if you’re a neighbor who wants a safer bus stop, it begins with having conversations that introduce the idea of shade and how it can solve some of these problems in your neighborhood.

And try to find out who in your community has levers of power, who in city hall is making the decisions when it comes to playgrounds, bus stops, and tree canopy, and find ways to approach them and convince them. It could be through city council meetings or op-eds in the local paper. I think people need to organize and advocate for shade the way they organize and advocate for a stop sign or any other thing that makes your neighborhood safer and better.

With that, I want to uplift what you write about the creativity that exists in predominantly Latino neighborhoods, like DIY tarps over sidewalks and public spaces. Maybe it’s also about broadening the scope of imagination for all these different solutions.

Totally, but I think that gets us back to the question that you had about policing. In the book, I talk about how DIY tarps were actually considered dangerous because [the practice] allegedly was cluttering public space and making it less accessible. Yes, I completely agree that homespun, DIY solutions are huge and they work. There’s a reason why [urban planner] James Rojas talks about Latino front yards in [East L.A.’s] Boyle Heights that are filled with all kinds of shade features; they work for people who have to be outside or can’t afford air-conditioning. But when you spill over into the public realm, then I think it becomes trickier. How do you convince the rule-makers and policymakers in public works or even the police department that this is an improvement?

We could have made natural shade our friend, but we opted for AC instead. Are you optimistic about a reversal?

Let’s try to be optimistic about this. It’s only getting hotter, but the extreme temperatures are one thing—I’m a little more concerned about the gradual prolonging of summer. At a certain point, there are going to be very serious quality-of-life impacts akin to the way that wildfire smoke already has a quality-of-life impact in Los Angeles and even here in New York. There are things that we’re not going to be able to do that we’re going to start to miss. There are going to be schools where kids don’t really play outside anymore. There are going to be neighborhoods that get really desolate and quiet, where people aren’t really going to see each other or maybe only at night, which is a different way of living. It might even come to a point where transit ridership might even start to plummet because you have riders who don’t want to deal with these conditions and they would rather drive instead.

Once these quality-of-life issues become inescapable, I do think that a stronger constituency for shade is going to emerge. I do think that there’s going to be a real political movement for it. My only regret is that by the time this stuff becomes a problem, it’s going to take a long time for the solution to arrive, at least in terms of trees. As I talked about in the book, there are other ways of doing it, but I am optimistic that people are going to want to find ways to reclaim their lives, or they’re going to want ways to still be outside together. I think that they’re going to turn to shade as this natural solution that is uncontroversial and apolitical in a way. It doesn’t have to be a blue or a red solution.

It would not shock me to see Donald Trump getting really into shade as his horrible way of dealing with climate change. But it doesn’t have to be a political thing, and it can be a way to make neighborhoods more lively and economically vibrant. And most importantly, it can be a way for people who don’t have somewhere to go to be outside.

How has this book changed the way you endure heat?

For one, I’m sitting in a room right now where there are no lights on, and I’m by a window. We don’t need all this light and all this heat. Early on in the book, I talk about how the human eyes are incredibly adaptable; they can see in the brightest light and they can see in the dimmest dark. It’s just a matter of calibrating. I’m trying to be more careful about my decisions and what I use and what is sufficient enough for me.

I talk a lot about thermal knowledge and thermal behavior, and it’s a privilege for me to talk about that stuff. In the summer when it’s hot, I don’t have to work outside. I can just find a cool corner and stay safe that way. I’m not a farmworker, and I’m not stuck outside. As a writer, my situation is totally different, but I now enjoy the challenge of trying to stay comfortable and knowing that comfort is itself quite elastic. If you live in the United States, you think comfort is 74 degrees, but if you live in Burkina Faso, you think comfort is 84 degrees. If you live in Libya, you might even think it’s 91 degrees. All this stuff is mutable to an extent. So knowing that I have some agency and that, psychologically, there’s a lot that I can do to prepare myself is huge. But again, I’m not a laborer. I’m not stuck outside and grinding in heat, working my ass off. It would be a totally different situation for me if I was. That’s why I’m more full-throated about the need for a serious program for this shit, because I think asking people to do it on their own isn’t good enough.

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Sam Bloch is an environmental journalist. Previously a staff writer at The Counter, he has written for LA Weekly, Places Journal, Slate, The New York Times, CityLab, and Landscape Architecture Magazine, among others. Bloch is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, and a former MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow and Emerson Collective Fellow. He is based in New York City.