Shade

Shade

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.