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• Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource - 2025 Random House, New York, NY

• Sam Bloch website - https://sambloch.com/

  I’m an environmental journalist and the author of Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource, published July 22, 2025 by Random House.

  I’ve written about the intersection of climate change and urban design for Places Journal, Slate, CityLab, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and the New York Times, and been published by L.A. Weekly, Art in America, Artnet, Commercial Observer and others. I was also a staff writer at The Counter, where I reported on food.

  And I’ve been awarded MIT Knight Science Journalism, Emerson Collective, and National Press Foundation fellowships and a Robert B. Silvers Foundation grant. And I’m a graduate of Vassar College, where I studied sociology, and the Columbia Journalism School.

  Besides journalism, I’ve also written for arts institutions, researched for private investigators and managed nonprofit communications.

  I’m based in New York, where I live with my partner and our son.

• The Breakthrough Institute - https://thebreakthrough.org/people/sam-bloch

  Sam Bloch
  Staff Writer, The New Food Economy
  Sam Bloch has written about arts, culture, and real estate for publications including The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, and Artnet. His essay about Los Angeles' "shade deserts" will be published by Places Journal this spring.

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  Sam Bloch

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable. Please help improve this article by looking for better, more reliable sources. Unreliable citations may be challenged and removed. (February 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
  Samuel S. Bloch
  Sam Block
  Bloch delivering food via helicopter to remote areas affected by hurricanes Helene and Milton in the southern United States (2024)
  Born January 1979 (age 46)
  New Jersey, United States of America
  Nationality American
  Known for Humanitarian aid; first response to natural disasters and conflict zones
  Sam Bloch's voice
  Duration: 43 seconds.0:43
  Bloch on his approach to humanitarian relief
  Recorded 2016
  Samuel Steven Bloch (he/him; pronunciation: Block or [blɑːk]) is an American humanitarian aid entrepreneur specializing in first response to natural disasters and conflict zones.

  Career
  Bloch's career began in Thailand in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Bloch went on to co-found Communitere International, first serving the 2010 Haiti earthquake[1] and then expanding operations to The Philippines in 2013, Nepal in 2015, and Greece in 2017.[2] Bloch and Communitere supported local businesses,[1] participated in maker faire conventions,[3] and aligned with the early efforts of Burners without Borders.[4] In 2018, Bloch began as the director of emergency response with World Central Kitchen (WCK),[5] focusing his efforts on hunger and food insecurity. Bloch has since been involved in relief for Cyclone Idai in Mozambique,[6] Hurricane Dorian in The Bahamas,[7] the 2020 Aegean Sea earthquake in Turkey,[8] the 2023 Hawaii wildfires in Lāhainā,[9] the Russian invasion of Ukraine via Poland,[10] and the Gaza war in 2024.[11] As of 2025, Bloch has stepped down from his position at WCK and serves on the advisory board of Watch Duty.[12]

  Awards and appearances
  Bloch has spoken at TEDx,[13] Re:publica[14][15] and other international conferences[16] about the impact of resource center models in humanitarian relief. In 2017, Bloch won the Humanitarian STAR Award,[17][18] in Disaster Relief and Recovery, from the Sierra Madre Rotary club. In 2022, Bloch's work was shown in documentary film We Feed People with the World Central Kitchen and chef José Andrés.[19] In 2023, Bloch was interviewed by CNN's Christiane Amanpour while organizing relief in Morocco after the Al Haouz earthquake.[20] In 2024, Bloch was interviewed to discuss addressing hunger on the Gaza Strip by CNN[11] and The New York Times.[21]

  Personal life
  Bloch was born in January 1979 in New Jersey and is one of nine children. In the 2022 documentary film We Feed People he discussed how grief from the death of his brother, who sacrificed his life to rescue Sam from an accident, fuels the conviction needed for this relentless work. In the film, Bloch also shared his troubles with "holding down a relationship" because of the unpredictability associated with disaster relief.

• KneeDeep Times - https://www.kneedeeptimes.org/making-shade-a-priority-in-la-an-interview-with-sam-bloch/

  Making Shade a Priority in LA: An Interview with Sam Bloch
  by Maylin Tu | Oct 14, 2025

  A blue bus stop structure designed to give people shade only casts a small, thin shadow
  I first met Sam Bloch, fittingly, at a bus stop in LA. I was there to see La Sombrita, a tall, green, perforated metal bus shade that went viral for providing only a minuscule amount of protection from the sun.

  In 2019, Bloch’s article about the inequities of shade in LA went viral. Now, his new book “Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource” is out. It’s a long-form meditation on the nature and function of shade in cities, and a critique of how LA fails to protect its most vulnerable residents from the sun.

  We talked about how many Americans don’t stand on sidewalks, how you get something like La Sombrita in the first place, how cities weaponize sunlight against “undesirable” people, and whether or not LA has made progress on its shade goals.

  Book cover and author.

  Q: The book started with an article about shade. Can you talk about how you came to write the article?
  I got interested in shade because of bus stops. I live in New York now, but I lived in LA in the 2000s and 2010s [mostly in] Mount Washington, a cool, shaded, tree-filled neighborhood. In fact, the tree canopy cover is somewhere around 50%, easily one of LA’s shadiest neighborhoods.

  I don’t think I really appreciated how shady it was until I started paying attention to what the neighborhoods around it looked like. I would pass by streets where there were no trees at all and bus stops where passengers were waiting for rides, standing behind street signs and telephone poles, trying to catch a little sliver of shadow to get out of the sun. That was the reality I observed through the window of my air-conditioned car.

  But that was the reality, not just for the riders in my neighborhood, but also for the hundreds of thousands of people who ride a bus in LA every day. Within city limits, three quarters of [bus stops] have no dedicated shelter where they can sit and get out of the sun.

  It didn’t seem fair to me, especially in a city like LA that’s getting hotter and drier every year and the heat is becoming more extreme and more dangerous, especially for transit riders who not only are exposed to that heat just by virtue of the long waits in the sun for the bus, but also who are demographically the most vulnerable to the health effects of heat because of their socioeconomic status.

  I tell the story in my article about this guy, Tony Cornejo, this barber who was seeing people standing in the sun suffering. He built his own DIY bus shelter because the city refused to, and it was this beautiful thing. He made something out of nothing, and people in the neighborhood appreciated it. But when the city caught wind of it, they decreed it to be illegal, a sidewalk obstruction, and made him take it down right before the worst heat wave in 25 years rolled through LA.

  Since then, for the past 10 years, I’ve been thinking about, how did it get to be this way? Why is this thing so basic and elemental actually really hard to find in LA and actually actively punished?

  Q: Has anything changed?
  I’ll go on radio shows to talk about shade, and pretty consistently I get calls from people who want to talk about the need for shading parking lots, because that is the way that most people in America get around — in cars. Even the idea that the bus stop would be a location of inquiry or a location to advocate for is foreign to a lot of Americans who simply don’t stand on sidewalks.

  One of the LA Metro commissioners, Janice Hahn, famously sometimes takes the bus to her board meetings. That only one transit commissioner sometimes takes public transit to the public transit meeting is perceived as a big win in transit circles just speaks to how rare that experience of standing on the sidewalk is for people.

  Culturally, there’s been progress, but materially, in terms of making more shade in LA, we’re still lacking.

  I do think it’s now a more mainstream issue. And I’m not even going to credit my article and my reporting on this. I’m going to credit La Sombrita, because it was such a huge debacle. A lot of people in LA started to think about the shoddy state of sidewalks and bus stops and about shade as something that the city is failing to do.

  Crealock and McCarthy at a local stable near Fairfax, where beloved horses remain at risk in a fast-moving fire.
  Of the 8,100 bus stops in Los Angeles, the city has built 213 of these new shelters since 2023 (the goal is 3,000). Photo: Maylin Tu

  Q: Do you think that people got [La Sombrita] right? Wrong?
  It’s taken on a life of its own. No one actually knows what it is, they just know it’s this joke or material representation of municipal dysfunction.

  Pedestrians and bus riders are not prioritized, and they are basically given scraps and made to feel appreciative of that.

  The designers and the LA Department of Transportation wanted to do something quickly, and they felt they could not work with the other city agencies that control street space.

  The streets are never going to be safe, and LA is never going to be climate resilient if the streets department refuses to work with the transportation department and they refuse to work with the engineering department. All these agencies have to be on the same page and aligned behind a capital infrastructure plan that prioritizes climate resiliency.

  Q: Why is it so hard for them to work together?
  The bureaucracy and red tape might be so onerous and so difficult to navigate that agencies rightly worry that their projects are going to get slowed down or maybe scuttled entirely if they have to go through these collaborative channels. But when you don’t collaborate and you don’t plan together, then you get shit like La Sombrita.

  Q: In the book, you introduce characters who are affected by the heat or trying to mitigate heat. And one of those people, Debbie Stevens Browder, is living in her car.
  The homeless are so much more vulnerable to heat because, like transit riders, they are just exposed to it. They spend more time outside. And unlike the rest of us, who can hide from the heat in the air conditioning, they often have no escape. Homeless people are far, far, far more likely to die from heat exposure than housed people. In Phoenix, officials say that homeless people are 200 to 300 times more likely to die from heat than a housed person.

  We regrettably see these bus shelters where you have homeless people sleeping because they have nowhere else to stay. We — myself included — might scoff, like, ‘Oh, now that space is unusable,’ but they have nowhere else to go. Obviously, the answer for homelessness is not more shade, the answer for homelessness is building more housing. But people who live on the street are vulnerable, and they need protection, and it’s tragic and sadistic when city officials and police officers and homeowners conspire to remove their shade cover to spite them or to get them to move their problems elsewhere.

  Crealock and McCarthy at a local stable near Fairfax, where beloved horses remain at risk in a fast-moving fire.
  Photo: Maylin Tu

  Q: Bus shelters are being funded through advertising revenue. The city’s in a budget crisis. Where do you think the money for more shade infrastructure should come from?
  I think there are three pots of money that decision makers and policy makers could start to draw down to make a shadier, greener, more equitable, more climate resilient city. Proposition 4 is the new [state-wide] climate bond that passed last year — there’s $10 billion for climate projects.

  Measure W is a county parcel tax. Every year, property owners pay 2.5 cents per square foot of impermeable land like roofs, driveways, hardscape, and that goes toward creating stormwater infrastructure projects. Measure W funding could be used to de-pave parking spots and roads and plant them with trees. Trees create shade, and then the soils capture runoff and return it to the aquifers.

  Measure M [an LA County sales tax] money could easily be used to rebuild sidewalks and make them big enough to support proper shelters instead of La Sombrita, and to support larger tree wells. Between those three pots of money — two of them are county, one of them is state — that seems like a lot of money that can be used if a decisive, courageous and imaginative policy maker wanted to pursue these projects.

  Q: You write about the backlash against shade and “shady people.” How does this look today?
  There’s this tradition in reactionary urban design to expose people to sunlight. In turn-of-the-century New York tenement houses, it was believed exposing [residents] to the sun would make them into more upstanding citizens.

  [Tenement residents] were believed to be these degenerate immigrants who were physically and morally unhealthy. That weaponizing of sunlight has morphed in LA to getting rid of [homeless people] all together. Shade and sun can be a weapon that people in power wield against and deploy against unwanted members of the public.

  This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-only-getting-hotter/

  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

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

  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).

  ¤

  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.

  ¤

  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.

Bloch, Sam SHADE Random House (NonFiction None) $32.00 7, 22 ISBN: 9780593242766

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.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Bloch, Sam: SHADE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325728/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fa11e504. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.