Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource

by Sam Bloch Narrated by Shawn K. Jain

Overview

An extraordinary investigation into shade, this “compelling . . . conversation-starter draws examples from history, city-planning and social policy” (NPR) to change the way we think about a critical natural resource that should be available to all.

On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun's glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out in cities across the United States, and as Sam Bloch argues, we ignore the benefits of shade at our own peril. Heatwaves are now the country's deadliest natural disasters with victims concentrated in poorer, less shady areas. Public health, mental health, and crime statistics are worse in neighborhoods without it. For some, finding shade is a matter of life and death.

Shade was once a staple of human civilization. In Mesopotamia and Northern Africa, cities were built densely so that courtyards and public passageways were in shadow in the heat of the day, with cool breezes flowing freely. The Greeks famously philosophized in shady agoras. Even today, in Spain's sunny Seville, political careers are imperiled when leaders fail to put out the public shades that hang above sidewalks in time for summer heat.

So what happened in the U.S.? The arrival of air conditioning and the dominance of cars took away the impetus to enshrine shade into our rapidly growing cities. Though a few heroic planners, engineers, and architects developed shady designs for efficiency and comfort, the removal of shade trees in favor of wider roads and underinvestment in public spaces created a society where citizens retreat to their own cooled spaces, if they can-increasingly taxing the energy grid-or face dangerous heat outdoors.

Shade examines the key role that shade plays not only in protecting human health and enhancing urban life, but also looks toward the ways that innovative architects, city leaders, and climate entrepreneurs are looking to revive it to protect vulnerable people-and maybe even save the planet. Ambitious and far-reaching, Shade helps us see a crucially important subject in a new light.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Compelling . . . Bloch’s conversation-starter draws examples from history, city-planning and social policy to make his case and offer some tentative solutions going forward.”—NPR

“Despite overwhelming evidence that shade is indispensable to public safety and urban health, Americans have devalued it . . . Smart and compelling.”—The Baffler

“This engaging offering makes an eloquent argument for re-investing in and even re-inventing shade . . . logical and convincing . . . Bloch blends accessible science with real-world scenarios, evaluates the effectiveness of current interventions, and considers future solutions.”—Booklist

“Shade is my favorite kind of book: a history of something seemingly niche that secretly explains the entire world. Sam Bloch connects the decisions made by people hundreds and thousands of years ago to our present planetary crisis of heat and does so in a way that’s both informative and super entertaining. I never thought I’d enjoy learning so much about shade!”—P. E. Moskowitz, author of How to Kill a City

“This is a delightful book, driven by boundless curiosity and a serious sense of injustice. Sam Bloch succeeds in rehabilitating the reputation of the shadows, and a hot sunny day will never look the same again.”—Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise

“Shade is the book we need now. Through detailed research, Sam Bloch shows how the simple presence—or absence—of shade provides keen insight into our communities and their deep-seated disparities, and how it could be the key to a better, more resilient and equitable future. I have been trying to make this point for years now, and I finally have the ammunition.”—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

“A fascinating and detailed look how we cool the world around us—a question that’s never been more urgent or important. Sam Bloch offers a riveting exploration of the unheralded shadows that shelter us from the sun.”—Megan Kimble, author of City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

“Both a comprehensive history and an impassioned rallying cry, Shade is an eye-opening globe-spanning guide to our most underappreciated natural resource.”—Benjamin Lorr, author of The Secret Life of Groceries

“A thoroughly documented and thought-provoking book, certain to spark attention and discussion.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Bloch is at his best describing racial and socioeconomic inequalities in shade access: he presents data indicating that poor neighborhoods in L.A. and Portland, Ore., can have ambient temperatures as much as 20 degrees higher than more affluent areas, and notes that previously redlined neighborhoods have the highest land-surface temperatures. . . . Readers will find some solid information about how local communities are dealing—or not—with rising temperatures.”—Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

2025-04-04
Hiding from the heat.

Excessive heat kills more people every year than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The solution to this international concern, says environmental journalist Bloch, is a simple one: more shade. But simple doesn’t mean easy. Putting even a small dent in the amount of heat absorbed by the earth involves a multinational commitment to complex changes in the way we design not only cities but also neighborhoods, public spaces, and homes. Bloch begins each chapter with a story capturing various ways that lack of shade affects segments of the world’s population, including passengers at bus stops in Los Angeles, travelers to desert oases, and residents of big-city high-rises, all seeking relief from the heat. The challenges are many: Homeowners want windows for light, property developers find it cheaper to rely on air conditioning to cool buildings, and city planners have a hard time justifying the cost of barriers and shade trees in public spaces. Ideas to reduce excessive heat range from planting trees to brightening clouds to solar-radiation management to using space shades and other tactics to reduce the amount of sunlight the earth absorbs. The simplest option is also the most obvious. As Bloch writes, “It’s understandable that Americans have forgotten how sweet shade can be. As air-conditioning has become the default method of cooling down, theshade tree has disappeared from the lexicon….There is still no technology known to man that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree.” Bloch explores a catalog of possible solutions; none is examined in great depth, but the scope shows why this problem is not easily solved and presents an urgent need for continued conversation.

A thoroughly documented and thought-provoking book, certain to spark attention and discussion.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193442516
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

As the sun rises in Los Angeles, a dozen passengers wait for a downtown bus in front of Tony’s Barber Shop. On this barren stretch of Figueroa Street near the Pasadena Freeway, they stand one behind the other, still and quiet in the shadow of the person in front of them. It’s going to be another scorching summer day, and across the city, riders like these are hiding from the sun behind road signs, telephone poles, and whatever meager shelter they can contrive.

For years, Cypress Park’s bus riders suffered the pulsing star’s enervating rays on a pitiless street. City officials dismissed their pleas for a bus shelter with a roof and a bench, claiming the sidewalk was too small to fit one in. Puny trees dug out of the dirt withered without water or care. All the while, the sun beat down on a hundred-foot span of asphalt and concrete, heating the hard ground and warming the air.

The conditions might have been more tolerable if the bus came more often, but thirty-minute headways are the norm on some routes in this part of town. An unshaded wait is enough to ruin a typical commuter’s day, and for others—the elderly, people in poor health, and those with physical disabilities—it’s the beginning of something more serious. Doctors have medical terms for the illnesses that result from heat exposure, but Tony Cornejo, the barbershop’s curmudgeonly proprietor, had his own way of describing what happens to bus riders on Figueroa: “They’re burning themselves out there.”

The old-school Cornejo had a soft spot for them. In 2014, a leafy banana tree and a metal pole appeared in an unsealed patch of sidewalk near the curb. He swore he didn’t put them there, but he admitted to hooking a gray canvas to the pole and stretching it over the sidewalk to create a public canopy. “We needed something like that for the ladies and children,” who otherwise stood in his shop to get out of the sun, he explained.

To make the canopy more inviting, Cornejo borrowed some wooden crates from the supermarket next door. He dragged them into the shade and nailed them together to make two parallel benches. Now the families had somewhere to sit while they waited. “They loved it,” Cornejo said, beaming. Initially, he thought bus riders would be the beneficiaries of his street shelter, but over time it seemed the whole neighborhood came to sit in his shade. Men thumbed through magazines. A Metro bus driver scrolled on his phone before his shift. A frail old-timer waited patiently for his ride, hands folded over a quad cane. Even a local can collector came by, dragging his shopping cart to the streetside oasis. When wind and rain ruined the canvas, Cornejo replaced it with a sturdier wood roof. He was just taking care of the sidewalk, he told me, no different from sweeping it clean in the morning.

But in 2015, the city’s sidewalk inspectors heard about the shelter, and ordered Cornejo to take it down. According to city rules, sidewalks have to be safe and secure, and apparently, it posed a threat. Sidewalks also have to be accessible to people with disabilities, and according to the authorities, the seat in the shade made Figueroa Street more hostile to the man with the cane. As temperatures rise, the definition of public safety could include protection from the sun. But L.A.’s sidewalk codes have in fact become more punitive and quashed grassroots improvements in underserved neighborhoods like Cypress Park. Cornejo didn’t want any trouble. He asked a customer to help him break down the lumber and return the sidewalk to its previous condition, just in time for L.A.’s worst heat wave in twentyfive years.

We need to manage heat to live. We have an effective and democratic way of doing it. And yet, as the planet warms, the powers that be reject it. Why?

Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined, but the fatalities often go unremarked, perhaps because the danger is invisible. There’s no twister that uproots a neighborhood, no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat’s imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn comes, and temperatures come back down to earth, it leaves no visible trace.

Scientists are certain the earth is getting hotter. L.A. summers, and those just about everywhere else on the planet, are already two to three weeks longer than they were in the 1950s. By the end of the century, the warm season in the United States could last six months, and extreme temperatures could force us to spend much of it indoors. Supercharged heat waves will settle over cities for weeks at a time and cause epidemics of death. The survivors will suffer heart attacks, kidney disease, and brain damage. What we now call winter will be a brief, two-month interregnum that mostly feels like spring.

What are we going to do? Your first thought is probably a reasonable one: Stop burning coal, oil, and natural gas, the fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. You’re right. It’s the best way to stop this madness from getting any worse. But those gases aren’t going anywhere. Carbon dioxide takes three hundred to one thousand years to leave the atmosphere and return home to the deepest sediments of the earth. Even if every single power source becomes a renewable one and we stop emitting carbon, the planet’s surface won’t start cooling. The temperature will continue to rise for a few years before gradually tapering and leveling off. And then we will be living on an artificially heated planet for a very long time. It will take “many, many centuries,” NASA estimates, to end the global greenhouse effect, perhaps no earlier than the year 3000, if not much later. It is a sobering truth that cutting emissions isn’t enough. We also need to begin a new life on a new earth.

What if the key to that new life is as old as civilization itself?

Shade is what public transit riders want. They deserve to wait for the bus with a basic level of comfort and dignity. Shade is what outdoor workers need. Farmhands and construction crews are most at risk from heat’s fatal impacts, and amid the hottest summers in human history, their advocates have called on legislators to ensure the right to water, rest, and shade.

Shade is what environmentalists desire. Across the United States, a network of nonprofits have fanned out to plant trees in neighborhoods that need them most, arguing that in the climate change era, green and shady streets are necessities for everyone. Their work is bolstered by powerful research that traces today’s urban heat disparities back to redlining, the racist lending policies that denied Black Americans and other people of color the capital they needed to buy a home and invest in their neighborhoods.

And shade is what heat experts suggest. They used to make their case in the pages of obscure scientific journals, but now that extreme heat is front-page news, they are taking their message to Americans on Capitol Hill, cable TV, and chart-topping podcasts. “We all know that cities are cooler when we have shade, but we’re not really planning for it,” said V. Kelly Turner, an urban planning and geography professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In the future, that’s something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about, what does shade infrastructure look like?”

Turner believes shade could be America’s next long-term investment in public health. What safe drinking water and clean air were to the twentieth century, shade could be to the climate-changed twentyfirst. Scientific models bear her out. If we can get emissions under control and put the planet on the path to moderate warming, then by 2050 getting out of the sun could be the difference between fortyone days of unsafe heat in humid New Orleans and none at all. Between 102 days of lethal temperatures in bone-dry Phoenix and nine days of danger. Between the oppressive conditions of an unshaded bus stop that push a vulnerable person to the brink and a safe place to hang outside.

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