Shade: The Forgotten Promise of a Natural Resource by Sam Bloch. Random House, 336 pp., $32.
Chapter Seven, Book Two, of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, “The Wonderful Forms of Different Nations,” is a peculiar part of a peculiar work. It’s basically a catalogue of “monster races” from places that aren’t Greece, an odd mixture of reference text and campfire tale. There are people with dog heads and the people with holes in their faces instead of nostrils and people who can kill you by looking at you. In India, supposedly, near the people with no necks and eyes on their shoulders, there are the Sciapodae. The Sciapodae are monopods, beings with one foot—one very large, very wide foot—said to reside “where there is no shadow.” In times of intense heat, the Sciapodae lay down on their backs, which seems like a questionable tactic except that they “protect themselves from the sun with the shade of their feet.” Imagine someone face up, their legs curled over them in a C shape, with a generous spatula-like awning at the top, and there you have it. Sciapodae means “making shadows from feet.” These “wonderful forms” were born to shield themselves from the sun.
The rest of us haven’t been blessed with such practical anatomy. On our own, we are defenseless against the fireball we happen to depend on for existence. This summer, scabrously hot and suffused with a steady flow of louring wildfire smoke from Canada, my partner and I found walks through our neighborhood becoming increasingly mazy and zigzagging. We crossed streets midblock. We considered what lay ahead at each intersection, trying to find the path least exposed to sunlight. We called it shade hopping. Luckily, there are a lot of trees in this part of Chicago, black ash and buckthorn and ginkgo and catalpa, so it wasn’t too onerous a chore. Nonetheless, without the shade, it felt like we were strolling through a blast furnace.
While not the cause of global warming, the sun—like the wind, rain, and snow—has with anthropogenic climate change mutated into something far more menacing than it was once perceived. Heat kills more people every year than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The sun burns, angers, fatigues, erodes. A working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, in Los Angeles, overall crime increases by 2.2 percent and violent crime by 5.7 percent on days when the average temperature is above 85 degrees. The spike is even higher in low-income areas. “The costs of extreme weather-induced crime [are] unequally distributed toward the poor,” the authors note, but the spread of thermal assholery is boundless: Another study found that baseball pitchers are likelier to hit batters deliberately in higher temperatures.
Simply put, there is insufficient political will to increase greenery or reduce sun exposure at the scale demanded by our warming planet.
If there were an abundant and naturally occurring provider of heat mitigation, it would not seem unreasonable to think that we would want to use as much of it as we could. Or at least not squander it or deny it to some or actively eliminate it. Sam Bloch’s Shade is a catalogue of all the ways we’ve managed to do things we shouldn’t have—through landscape architecture and building design and urban planning and policy and sheer wrongheadedness. It’s a spry, largely convincing text with an undercurrent of lament and indignation that is a little too subdued. This is understandable to an extent—doomerism doesn’t help anything—but it diminishes the force and urgency of his book.
It doesn’t take much to make shade. Just position something large so that it gets in the way of the sun and you’re set. Obviously, trees come to mind first (“pale beneath the blaze,” as Coleridge put it). But they aren’t everywhere, and shade can come from buildings, fabric canopies, anything sufficiently adumbrative. (“My shirt doesn’t know it’s a shadow,” wrote Pessoa.) The book originated as an essay Bloch wrote in 2019 for the journal Places about the owner of a barbershop on a largely shadeless stretch of North Figueroa Street in Cypress Park who jury-rigged a shelter for the people he saw outside his establishment, wilting as they waited for the bus. It was a simple structure: a tarp stretched between a street sign and a fence post, with wooden crates nailed together to form a bench. That the shelter was both desperately needed (and not just by bus riders) and removed at the city’s request is both disheartening and unsurprising. (Bloch never mentions history’s most infamous feat of private sun-blocking: when, thirty years ago, Charles Montgomery Plantagenet Schicklgruber Burns swathed the city of Springfield in darkness—a scheme to profiteer from higher electricity use. But Burns doesn’t exist outside of The Simpsons and got shot by a baby for what he did, so perhaps Bloch made the right call there.)
“Finally an architecture magazine that doesn’t just interview celebrities or cost ninety dollars.”
Sunlight occupies a rare position of aesthetic, social, and clinical exaltation. Bloch has a good phrase for these attitudes: “solar fetishization.” (In the pantheon of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mystifying public health claims, his tweet last October that the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of sunshine would soon be over has a special place.) But people of all political stripes—dirtbag lefties and anarcho-libertarians and hollow centrists—flock to the sun and willingly throw themselves on its mercy. Arguing against sunlight is a hard sell. One only need consider the prevalence of melanoma. Estimates put the number of new cases in the United States last year at over 100,000. Per the Melanoma Foundation, 90 percent of skin cancer cases are considered preventable. And even though we have allowed the sunshine apocalypses of Phoenix and Las Vegas to exist and expand (what’s the part of the US that just doesn’t stop growing called? Oh, right, the Sun Belt), Americans are far from exceptional in their heliolatry. The incidence of melanoma is rising faster in Europe than that of any other cancer; of the estimated 55,000 annual deaths it causes worldwide, almost half of these are in the EU.
The sun does have indisputable health benefits. Nobody wants rickets or seasonal affective disorder. But the idea that the sun can actually cause harm, and isn’t necessarily a divine source of good, bucks thousands of years of cultural conditioning. There are few places on the planet where solar deities haven’t been venerated at some point, and the mythologies around them are elaborate and varied. Through the first half of the twentieth century, heliotherapy was an accepted treatment for tuberculosis and lethargy and was even recommended as part of prenatal care. Florence Nightingale insisted her patients receive natural light because, to her, the sun cured basically everything. (In 1926 an item headlined “Perrysburg—A Mecca for Heliotherapy” in the American Journal of Public Health is pretty much an advertisement for a sun therapy sanitarium outside Buffalo, of all places.)
The near-simultaneous developments of slum clearance in Manhattan and the explosion in population growth in Southern California were both driven, at least partly, by a perceived need for sunshine. As Mike Davis noted, on the West Coast boosters were touting their land to pasty Easterners as “Our Mediterranean! Our Italy” (or, as Davis had it, “Walden on LSD”). The influx of newcomers meant more open space was needed. Southern California has lost 50 percent of its large trees since 1930.
The war waged by progressives against slums was a good thing—with some mildly catastrophic aftereffects. In order to prevent dismal, tubercular urban canyons from reemerging, zoning boards fell in love with setbacks and other measures to engineer light into cities—or, rather, to prevent the “stealing of light,” to quote New York’s original zoning ordinance. Skyscrapers are a relatively recent phenomenon in Los Angeles—concessions city planners made grudgingly, and only in specific areas, to the demands of capital. From 1928 to 1967, LA’s tallest building was downtown’s twenty-seven story city hall.
Sunlight occupies a rare position of aesthetic, social, and clinical exaltation. Bloch has a good phrase for these attitudes: “solar fetishization.”
How much difference can shade make? Bloch follows Vivek Shandas, a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University. Portland is no one’s archetypal hot zone, but perhaps that’s part of the problem: Perception has not caught up to the damage done by climate change. During a 2021 heatwave that brought previously unknown temperatures to the Pacific Northwest, Shandas drove through the city with a thermal camera to gauge the actual ground temperature:
He looked around and saw all the ingredients of urban heat. Asphalt: two four-lane roads intersecting near a twenty-thousand-square foot parking lot. A cluster of tall and dark buildings, both absorbing solar radiation and impeding natural airflow. A few passing cars spewing waste from their combustion engines. No vegetation, except for some dry brown grass. And no shade, but for a few thin trees and the forbidden shadow of the overpass. … He pointed his thermal camera at the pavement. It was 180 degrees and could have melted the skin off his feet in a second.
The initial Spanish settler village where Los Angeles was born was built at 45 degrees to the north-south axis, ensuring regular access to shade. Cities in ancient Sumeria and Mesopotamia were also laid out in diagonal grids with narrow streets, thus reducing exposure to glare and leaving the cooler, shaded air at human height, while the hotter air stalled above. Today, the portici of Bologna and toldos of Seville, man-made canopies, create comfortable, shadowed walkways even in days of brutal Mediterranean heat. Singapore has 125 miles of covered walkways: “Try to imagine if New York’s ubiquitous construction scaffolds were permanent sidewalk architecture” is how Bloch describes them.
Scaffolding isn’t always attractive, but neither are urban heat islands segregated by race and class. Formerly redlined neighborhoods have significantly fewer trees than historically white ones. “On average, predominantly Black and Latino areas have 44 percent fewer green acres per person than do predominantly white neighborhoods,” writes Bloch. A 2019 survey found that almost 20 percent of Los Angeles’s total shade canopy is concentrated within just in five census block groups—two in Brentwood, one in Pacific Palisades, one in Los Feliz, and one in Shadow Hills—neighborhoods that collectively house less than 1 percent of the city’s population.
Southern California has lost 50 percent of its large trees since 1930.
Historically, LA powerbrokers have used public safety as a casus belli against trees. Downtown’s Pershing Square, once a sprawling, lush park, was steadily whittled down and denuded at the whims of business owners, who wanted the space cleared of “rude panhandlers, deviates [sic], and criminals” ostensibly operating in the furtive shadows of palm trees. (“Shade is synonymous with insult,” Bloch points out. “When something is dubious or seems criminal, it’s shady.”) In 1995 Los Angeles’s Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design task force produced an Orwellian document called “Design Out Crime.” Per its guidelines, trees are to be kept short and pruned to foster “an inhospitable environment for criminals.” A handy list of “Security Landscaping” items is provided: three full pages of things with thorns and spiky, serrated leaves to organically barb fences and “deter unwanted entry”—an affront to any notion of green space as a place of comfort and community. One wonders what its authors would have made of the 2001 study of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, which found that areas with higher levels of greenery had violent crime rates 56 percent lower than areas without tree cover, and 48 percent less property crime.
In 2001, Manhattan photographer Benjamin Swett began taking pictures of a Callery pear tree on Eleventh Avenue between Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Streets. It was a decent-sized, solitary tree in front of a parking lot. He shot it every season, capturing its simple splendor against the hard shrug of the city. In 2008 the tree was removed. The reason given was to make space for buildings needed as part of the western expansion of the 7 train. The MTA said it needed three buildings; by 2019 it had only built one. A Mark di Suvero sculpture was put up where the tree stood, then removed, and the proposed Hudson Arts Building—not really an “Arts Building” in fact but a “highly flexible” commercial office building optimized to “fully support modern workstyles”—awaits its moment there now. No more progress has been made than a computer rendering. As Swett lamented this past summer in The New York Review of Books, “the tree had, it seemed to me, been cut down for nothing.”
If there were an abundant and naturally occurring provider of heat mitigation, it would not seem unreasonable to think that we would want to use as much of it as we could. Or at least not squander it or deny it to some or actively eliminate it.
For all the infuriating, persuasive information Shade lays out, its author is bent on “consider[ing] the bright side of a dark future.” There is some cause for hope. City Plants, an urban forestation initiative, provides Angelenos with free trees, from plucky California buckeye to soaring coast live oak. Public-private schemes like Million Tree projects (which originated in LA) have been adopted by cities like Denver and New York, but with access to federal funding now deader than dead, reliance on state money and nonprofits seems dicey at best. Simply put, there is insufficient political will to increase greenery or reduce sun exposure at the scale demanded by our warming planet. (Picture toldos over Phoenix and it looks like a miserable Christo knockoff crossed with a used car lot’s inflatable tube man.) Bloch is a better explainer than point maker (“We think shade is yucky,” he writes in the introduction—a claim I’ll leave without comment); he is thorough and measured but never fully reckons with how needless or capricious or cruel so much of what he details truly is. The failures Bloch describes deserve anger, a lot of it.