No Justice, No Shade

Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam Bloch. Random House, 336 pages. 2025.

Shade saves lives. That, with little more complexity, is half of Sam Bloch’s remarkably simple argument in Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. It’s a persuasive and solutions-oriented counter to the increasingly frantic warning from climate writers and scientists that, to quote the title of Jeff Goodell’s haunting book, “the heat will kill you first.” Extreme heat, particularly in cities, is the leading direct cause of weather-related deaths; each year, it kills about 489,000 people worldwide, and it’s only getting worse. One recent study has estimated that taking little action to lower global carbon emissions will result in over 2.3 million additional deaths by the end of the century in European cities alone. Today, more than 600 million people are exposed to temperatures above 85ºF for life-threatening periods of time. By 2070, that number could rise to 2 billion. In other words, a heat-related holocaust is upon us, unfolding in broad daylight.

Almost nothing in the organization of our society would suggest this. Americans in particular have trouble taking extreme urban heat seriously. How many of us heed the National Weather Service’s warning system for heat? Why don’t we personify heatwaves with names like Katrina or Betsy? Where are our evacuation plans? (The rich, of course, have always had summer evacuation plans: they’re called The Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard.) In a heat wave, we turn to air conditioning, but otherwise attempt to go about our day like it’s normal. Meanwhile, the public messaging is chaotic: texts from the city alert us to avoid outdoor activity and remain in air conditioning; warnings from private energy corporations beg us to lower our use of air conditioning because the energy grid tends to fail in extreme heat, when we need it most. This is one of the many shortcomings of air conditioning as both a short- and long-term solution to urban extreme heat. That and the fact that it’s making our world hotter. “We could have embraced shade,” writes Bloch. “Instead, we doubled down on AC.”

In a 1997 article on the radical possibilities of shade, Mike Davis offers another reason why cities fail to respond to extreme heat as an actual emergency. “Heat waves . . . do not produce mega-billion-dollar property damage and economic disruption like hurricanes, floods and great winter storms,” he writes. “They are thus of minimal concern to the insurance industry, the decisive shaper of federal and state natural disaster policy.” For many of us, the climate crisis looks like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods—at least, more destructive ones. But we can’t see heat, only its effects. Extreme urban heat, then, poses an aesthetic challenge for someone writing about it, who can come off like a kind of tin-foil-hat Cassandra, describing a dangerous (but invisible) present that others understand only as a distant, unimaginable future.

One of Bloch’s strengths is in meeting this formal challenge. As readers, we don’t need to see the heat; we can feel it. In one chapter, we learn about the tragic death of pregnant, seventeen-year-old migrant worker Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, who, in May 2008, died of heatstroke on her third day of work tying grape vines to trellises for eight dollars an hour. Exposed to the full, direct, California sun for hours, Jimenez “burned up,” collapsing alongside her teenage fiancé in the fields. By then, it was too late. Bloch explains the physiology in wincingly clear prose:

When the brain senses heat, it vasodilates, bringing blood to the skin surface. But when this goes on for hours, and the internal organs are starved of blood flow, they begin to break down. The gut weakens and leaks toxins into the bloodstream. Those toxins threaten white blood cells, and they launch a defensive response by creating blood clots, which in turn leads to organ failure. This is the beginning of an irreversible domino effect. One part of the human body fails, then another, and another.

Jimenez’s death was entirely preventable. In fact, water coolers were stationed at the ends of the vineyard rows, but accessing these meant wasting labor, and Jimenez was ordered to meet a quota. Even more damning is that, three years prior, California labor unions had fought for the right to shade structures but “workers had to ask for them,” despite the fact that U.S. military studies have clearly proven that prolonged sun exposure warps our sense of whether we need water or shade. Army recruits marching in full sun will almost never rest and hydrate without being ordered to do so. And so a system of labor that incentivizes workers to skip breaks—to forego water or shade—is a death trap. It bears repeating: as the planet heats, this is getting worse.

How effective is shade in saving lives like Jimenez’s? “Most of us probably think about heat in terms of air temperature, not sun exposure,” writes Bloch. Maybe we’ve also learned to consider humidity too. But, as one scientific experiment found, on a 105ºF day in Phoenix, Arizona, direct sun exposure “transfer[s] ten times as much heat to [a] human [body] as the air” does. Another experiment concluded that an elderly woman—often the most vulnerable demographic in extreme heat—could spend up to three hours in 95ºF heat outdoors without any health risks if hydrated and shaded. “It’s often said that the wall of hot and dry air in Phoenix feels like an oven,” continues Bloch. “By comparison, the sun is a microwave, shooting heat energy straight into our flesh.”

Shade, then, is almost too good to be true: a “technology” that’s not what Naomi Klein dismisses as a “techno-fix” but something truly sustainable. On the scale of public infrastructure, it could mean the difference between surviving the next, hotter chapter of urban living and not. And yet, for city-dwellers, shade—especially in its most powerful form, the tree—remains a luxury.

But why? As I said, the fact that shade saves lives is only half of Bloch’s argument. The other half is far more knotty and, to my mind, more intriguing: despite overwhelming evidence that shade is indispensable to public safety and urban health, Americans have devalued it, reviled it, destroyed it, and, ultimately, rejected it. We remain drunk with sun. We hate shade.

Cultural bias against shade is neither contemporary nor American. “The belief that trees are accessories to crime is as old as the hills,” write Bloch. In Ancient Rome, shaded porticoes attracted people of all kinds—merchants, drunks, sex workers, the homeless—and a disdain among the cultural elite for those gathered in the city’s public spaces became a new insult: “the umbratici, literally ‘shady people.’” European folk and fairy tales express intense fears about shadowy woods. Some of this reflects a traditional (and understandable) view of nature as dangerous, the untamed home of hungry beasts and wicked pickpockets. The word savage, Bloch reminds us, comes from the Latin for forest, and in that connotation we can hear the binary between nature and civilization. The fear of shade isn’t so much a fear of random violence per se as of anarchy, a latent anxiety from the elite that all those shady people might, under the porticoes, get the bright idea to organize and revolt. The hatred of shade is, in other words, the hatred of public space and its democratic potential.

European colonists brought these cultural biases with them in their slow invasion of Turtle Island. If, as John Locke once wrote, “all the world was once America,” the deforestation of America quickly transformed it into something else, something brighter and more authoritarian. “Before contact, trees covered the entire Eastern Seaboard,” writes Bloch. “Within two hundred years, about half of them were gone.” Liberal economic order took the form of open fields, the monocropping of cotton, indigo, and tobacco that was the plantation system. The order of the plantation depended on surveillance of the enslaved—i.e., the absence of shade. (By contrast, those escaping slavery found refuge in densely wooded places like the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia, one of the many ways that shade has come to connote criminality.)

This association of shade, particularly trees, with criminality persists in our culture and legal landscape. Consider the Hollywood noir, “in which long shadows and unlit corners represent the criminal underworld.” Perhaps Bloch’s most memorable chapter is on the contemporary police surveillance of Watts, a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, whose lack of trees or public infrastructure is the result of past redlining. Watts residents are far more vulnerable to death and illness by extreme heat than almost any other Angeleno. Planting and nurturing dense rows of trees throughout the neighborhood, a measure that treats trees like public safety infrastructure, would address this vulnerability to a remarkable degree. Unlike manmade shade, trees have additional benefits, including actively cooling the air around them by evaporating water through their leaves—not to mention the ecological and social cohesion they bring. But in high-crime neighborhoods like Watts, the LAPD see trees as obstacles to public safety. For decades, the LAPD has undergone a deliberate defoliation program to increase surveillance and even gone so far as to convince community leaders that trees prohibit them from doing their jobs. Bloch quotes “a veteran street cop” who runs the LAPD’s Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design program: “Natural surveillance is easy . . . That just means you have to have the landscape pretty much clear.” Take this with the fact that growing a tree to maturity takes time, money, and community effort. Compliance with Los Angeles street ordinances makes planting new shade infrastructure nearly impossible.

We see this in the history of downtown LA’s Pershing Square too. In its earliest 1910 iteration, as Bloch writes, “brick-lined paths carved through a dense urban wood. Under the tropical leaves of banana trees and birds-of-paradise, a white-collar lunchtime crowd read newspapers and books from a library cart and congregated to hold forth on global affairs.” (I can hardly glimpse LA in this description.) But, in 1951, the city razed the park and installed “a three-story underground parking garage.” Bloch warns us not to see this as merely allegiance to “the peak automobile era.” “The destruction of urban refuge,” he concludes, “was part of a long-term strategy to discourage gay cruising, drug use, and other shady activities downtown . . . Sunlight was weaponized against these undesirables.”

This defoliation of public space in an attempt to root out “undesirables” has dire consequences: it robs them of the chance to “participate in public life.” And on a swiftly heating planet, it means actively exposing them to life-threatening heat. It’s nothing short of warfare against the poor, drug users, the homeless, communities of color, and the sexually deviant. “Every time we weaponize sunlight, we make shade more of a private luxury,” writes Bloch, “and less of a public resource to be shared by all.”

Here is Bloch’s real subject, I think, though, at times, he doesn’t make it so explicit: while the shade benefits are clear, the strategy for implementing them is not. The problem is not that we don’t know what to do in a heating world. Bloch gives plenty of evidence for places implementing climate solutions, but almost none of them are in the United States. Most tellingly Bloch pinpoints Singapore as highly successful at implementing “both green and gray” shade as public infrastructure: “125 miles of covered walkways” and an “urban forest” of 1.4 million trees, most of them planted in the last fifty years. As a result, the city has grown denser with shade and flora. He asks an arboriculture researcher why Singapore has been so successful. The answer is telling: “Some would characterize [Singapore’s prime minister] Lee Juan Yew as a strongman, or semi-authoritarian figure, and to some extent that’s very true. But [widespread shade] is one good thing that came from that system.” Bloch admits that “it’s unlikely that American governments can be as effective as Singapore’s, an autocratic nation-state long ruled by a strongman with a personal interest in shade.” (Lee believed the heat damaged Singapore’s economic health.) The problem, then, appears to be how to implement these solutions in a democratic way. “Let’s not pretend it’s impossible,” writes Bloch. And yet it’s difficult to imagine exactly how.

Lately, I’ve admired the anarchist conception of decision-making, which requires either complete consensus or the splintering off into smaller groups in order to reach consensus. This is far removed from our current forms of republican and parliamentary democracy, let alone the tyranny of local community boards. Bloch’s smart and compelling investigation of shade left me with a burning question that was less technological than ethical: If implementing shade is necessary for survival, how do we reorganize our political systems so that it’s possible to implement? And if by “community” we mean “planet,” as is the case with geo-engineering solutions like darkening the sky with sulfur dioxide, how do we make decisions that affect the entire world while getting the consent of everyone alive? And if we can’t, then how do we act? Like strongmen, dictating moves in the name of public health? Or do we retreat into individual or small community action and watch as the rest of the world burns? “Shade,” wrote Mike Davis, in that 1997 article, “has become an inalienable human right.” But almost thirty years later, the sentence reads like a feverish hallucination. “Should,” certainly, but not “has.”