Shade Inequality: Who Burns, Who Benefits

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This week on the Andrew Yang podcast.

It'S, it's really a shame that this is happening and you know, imagine what could happen if cities like Los Angeles encourage this kind of grassroots self improvement instead of punishing it. So I would really love to see LA and other cities instead of punishing this stuff, finding a way to like help these folks out a little bit, right? Maybe give them a little bit of technical support, maybe give them like a little tax abatement or something, or maybe just loosen some of the regs because I do sort of feel like these well meaning city agencies that all know that people want shade and want to make more shade, their hands are tied by their own red tape.

It is my pleasure to welcome to the podcast for the very first time journalist and author of the brand new fascinating book, Shade the Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource, Sam Block. Welcome, Sam.

Andrew, thanks for having me.

So, Sam, Shade, the fun thing for me is imagining you pitching the book to publishers. Your friend, you got like a fantastic publisher. When did you start this project and how did the inspiration hit you?

So those are. This project predates the book actually. So I was inspired to start writing about Shade when I lived in Los Angeles. I now live in New York City, but I used to live in LA in the 2000s and 2010s, and when I lived in Los Angeles, I lived in this kind of lush hillside neighborhood called Mount Washington, where, you know, 100 years ago people had moved in to sort of spruce up what became kind of like a mountainside resort or a hotel destination back before, you know, it was so easy to get around the city. And they planted, you know, a very lush canopy of oaks, sycamores, eucalyptus trees, and, you know, I was the beneficiary of that where I lived because I Would wake up in the morning and I would go out into my yard and I would see the sun, you know, raking through the leaves and feel cool and calm in this kind of verdant, shady paradise. But when I would drive down from where I lived onto the streets, I would notice people were who didn't have the privilege of me to first of all live in a shady neighborhood, but also didn't have the privilege of driving to work in an air conditioned car. I noticed them waiting for the bus and standing behind like telephone poles and street signs and just like the tiniest, most meager, you know, I'm not even going to call it shade infrastructure, but things that cast shadows, doing anything they could to get out of the sun's glare. And that was the first moment that I sort of, you know, my eyes opened up to shade. I thought, okay, you know, how did it come to be this way? You know, why do I get to live in this neighborhood that's so cool and calm? And other people who don't have the same privileges as me are just doing the. They're just scraping together shade to get out of the sun. How did this come to be? And then I also wanted to know, like, not just the historical sort of causes of this shade inequality, but what can we do to remedy this, right? Does it have to be this way? Are there other places around the globe that can do that, do better, that can serve as an inspiration? And those two questions, looking to the past and looking to the future, kind of propelled this book.

I can't believe you managed to get like a partially funded tour to Barcelona and other places being like, hey, I'm writing about shade, but I want to relate to you an experience that we've all had, which is we go to sit down at a restaurant and a table and, and they say sunny or shady. And even within your party you're like, oh, there's a sunny seat. Does someone want that? Do you not want that? If you want to be considerate to someone in your party, be like, oh, let me move you out of that spot. And I will share personally. When I was young, I never burned. The first time I got sunburned was in my twenties in the Caribbean. I was like, what is this uncomfortable sensation? And then my friend who was with me was like, it's sunburned, jackass. You know what that is? Then you get a bit older and, you know, now I have a little bit of sun damage. Like I don't tan the same way. And so now I avoid sun. It's really gone a very, very big 180 because before I was like, I was frankly a sun lover. And then now I'm like totally seeking out the shady area of the restaurant, the canopy. And I think I'm not alone in this. I feel like. So one of the points you make in the book is that people seek out shade wherever it occurs. More and more.

Yeah. So, Andrew, let me just back up for a second. I'm not going to let that dig at Barcelona go just slide under the radar here. Part of the reason why I went to cities like Barcelona is because my sort of germ of an interest about shade and sort of how it affects getting around the city and our sort of personal comfort hooks into this much bigger issue that I'm sure you're aware of, of climate change and global warming. Right. You know, the planet is getting hotter, especially cities. Cities are warming twice as fast as, you know, rural areas because of the way they're built, because of something called the urban heat island effect. And especially in Europe, where they don't have as much air conditioning as we do in the United States, they're very concerned about how to cool down cities and lower temperatures so people, so many people don't die in the summer from heat. And part of what I was doing in Barcelona was going to see this strategy that they were working on at the time to simultaneously mitigate climate change and adapt to it by redesigning some of their transportation networks. So their thought was that, you know, if we start planting trees in the road where there used to be driving lanes or parking lanes, we're discouraging people from driving, which, you know, both of us, as New Yorkers know, is now like a sort of in vogue strategy for climate with congestion pricing and that impacts greenhouse gas emissions tremendously. But also by replacing those driving lanes with trees that shade the street and cool the air, you're also adapting to climate change by mitigating that heat. So I just want to explain quickly, just for a second that, you know, okay, fair enough, fair enough. But, but, but to your point, I mean, yeah, seeking out sun and shade is a real thing. I mean, you're, you're hooking into something that I spend a little bit of time talking about in the book, which is ultraviolet radiation exposure. So the sun basically has, when, when sun hits the Earth, it kind of has three forms of energy in it. It has visible light, right? So, so we're able to see things. About half of the energy that comes to us in sunlight is infrared, which converts to heat the big thing that I talk about in the book, but then the smaller sort of chunk of energy that comes to Earth from the sun is ultraviolet radiation. That's the smallest chunk, but it's the most powerful. And yeah, I mean, to your, to your point, when you're younger and you know, you don't really care about any of these sort of long term health effects, I think a lot of us probably enjoy like flocking to the sun and, and feeling the way that, you know it. I don't want to say punishes our bodies, but kind of like the physical exertion of it. I think we sort of enjoy that, that feeling of being worn out. But yeah, I mean, when you get a burn when you're younger, you're far more likely to develop skin cancers when they get older. So sun protective behavior, you know, I don't think it's something that we really practice in the United States to the extent that people do in other countries. One example that I talk about in my book is Australia, where skin cancer is a huge problem because there's so many, you know, fair skinned, pale people living so close to the equator and all that, and all that sunlight. So for the past, I think four decades or so, there's really been an all of society kind of campaign or approach to, to stigmatize sun tanning. Right? Like sun tanning is not cool. That's, that's the message there now, which I think is sort of, you know, funny and square and that, and that sun, sun protection and sun avoidance and sun smart behaviors are really critical for public health. And over there, they accomplish it in so many ways, right? Like they know to cover up when they go outside on sunny days. They know not to go outside in the middle of the day when the sun's rays are strongest. But also a lot of their playgrounds and schoolyards are shaded by, you know, shade. Sales are a huge thing over there. But then also tree canopies because, you know, in addition to shading, they also cool.

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Absolutely. So yeah, to your point, I mean it is true that heat tolerance is, how do I put this? Everyone doesn't have the same heat tolerance. Right. Like our physical characteristics determine so much of that. I mean, your physical fitness determines a lot of that. I ended up going to U.S. army Research Facility a couple times actually and just talking to some of the scientists there because the U.S. army has been, I think, at the cutting edge and the forefront of heat research, at least in the United States for most of the 20th century and some of the 21st. And I spoke to some scientists there who told me that like the climate where you were born and the climate where you spent your earliest years are determinative of how you tolerate heat later in life. So they were trying to tell me that like, because so I live in New York now, but I grew up in Chicago So they were trying to tell me that like, my, you know, I haven't really thought this one through, to be honest, but like, based on my sort of, you know, internal expectations and physical expectations of, of the different seasons, that now has sort of irrevocably shaped how I deal with heat today. The other thing that I talk about in the book is that, you know, so, so putting aside just sort of the climate where you, where you come from and you spent your formative years, but also that like, you know, there is the public health element of heat and we'll talk about that in a second. But, but I think most of our sort of day to day experience of heat is, is. Scientists refer to it as something called thermal comfort, which is like your satisfaction with your surroundings. You know, if you don't feel too hot, if you don't feel too cold, you have the absence of discomfort, which equals thermal comfort according to them. And there are studies from all around the world that show varying levels of what people consider thermally comfortable. In the United States, engineers who design air conditioning systems have basically assigned somewhere around 70 to 74 degrees as what they believe most Americans consider comfortable. But you know, I cite a study in the book that shows in Burkina Faso, in Africa, where temperatures are so much higher than they are in most of the United States, there are some studies that show that the Burkina Bay considers something like 84 degrees to be more comfortable for them. So there is this tremendous range, you know, depending on who you are and where you live. So this stuff is not fixed to your, to your question about sort of more sustainable ways of cooling down. You know, again, I don't want to dismiss air conditioning outright because we are, because of a changing climate, entering a world where we are more frequently being faced with weather conditions that threaten human health that in some cases push us beyond the limits of what we are as humans physically capable of enduring. So I don't want to say that we're not going to need some artificial cooling to survive that stuff. The goal should be to use as little of it as possible because it taxes our energy grid. As you say, it belches heat into our cities that warms them up. You know, the, the, the cost of interior comfort are more hellish conditions in the exterior outdoors. So in the book I spend some time talking about passive houses, which are like this new form of eco architecture, that their whole point is to minimize energy use. So everything they do is designed just to leave the smallest energetic footprint. So one thing they're big on is insulation really thick Walls sealed airtight to basically form a barrier between inside and outside. The other thing that they're really big on is solar protection. So this is a sort of, I think, lost art in America. You know, I spent some time talking to an architect of a passive house in Portland, Oregon, where he has these huge windows that face south. Because in Portland, Oregon, in the winter, you want the sun's light for its warmth. But in the summer, and, you know, in the story I tell of this book, during a lethal heat dome where the air temperature at the Portland airport hit, I think, 116 degrees, I mean, the last thing you want is more sun entering your house. So he and other passive house architects rely on exterior shades. In his case, venetian blinds that metallic Venetian blinds that pull down outside the house over the glass, that block and reflect the sun's heat before it enters. And between the insulation between the solar protection, between his ability to open the windows at night and sort of let cool air in and then seal it in during the day, he was able to keep his house at 84 degrees when, as I said, the air temperature outside was 116 degrees and he didn't have any air conditioning. So it's pretty incredible what he was able to achieve. Just with good design and with good engineering.

Someone should make awesome exterior blinds so that we can get some more passive houses built. One of the very, very strong narratives in your book, and you referred to it a little bit before, is the. These bus passengers in Los Angeles who are stuck outside for, you know, 30 minutes or more and just getting bludgeoned by the sun and the heat. And they're all, like, trying to. To take shelter any way they can. So they're taking shelter behind telephone poles or whatever. And then Los Angeles says, okay, let's try and give you some shade. And so then they have a design competition to design an awesome canopy for bus passengers. You also have a story about how a barber saw all these people suffering at the bus stop and then put up a shade, and it became a hit. And he even had a bench, and people were sitting there. And then the city came and told him to tear it down because it was unsafe. And it broke various regulations. He had to do that. And I was like, oh, well, that's sad. When you were relating this story, it was very discouraging in some ways. I mean, it seemed real to me. I'm sure it is real in the sense that, you know, like, the designers, by the way, the designers were like, look, we're not idiots. We know that this is not the ideal design, it's just this is the ideal design that the regulations allow for that you could actually put on the ground in real life.

It's, it's, it's, it's a bad situation. You're referring here to sort of, I would say the sort of two poles of, of, of, of shading Los Angeles, right? You're alluding to the story that I tell in the book of this guy, Tony Cornejo, who owned a barber shop in Los Angeles and he saw those people just standing outside trying to get out of the sun and he's like, well this is ridiculous. Like they're burning themselves out there, I got to help them. And he contrives his own sort of shade structure. He grabs a canopy, he grabs a roof, grabs a bench, sort of makes this place for people to wait and get out of the sun. And people love it, obviously, but it has to come down because it doesn't meet the city's very narrow definitions of what can go on the street. So when I was reporting this out, I ended up talking to Mike Davis, the late celebrated scholar of Los Angeles, who when I relayed this story to him, he said something to me to the effect of like, it's really a shame that this is happening. And you know, imagine what could happen if cities like Los Angeles encourage this kind of grassroots self improvement instead of punishing it. The example that he shared with me, which didn't make it into the book, is of this, you know, so called guerrilla gardener, this guy Ron Finley from South la, who was growing his own vegetables in the sidewalk parkway, like that strip of grass. And that was illegal until he was able to get some city councilors to work with him to basically legalize that kind of improvement. So I would really love to see LA and other cities, instead of punishing this stuff, finding a way to like help these folks out a little bit, right? Maybe give them a little bit of technical support, maybe give them like a little tax abatement or something, or maybe just loosen some of the regs. Because I do sort of feel like these well meaning city agencies that all know that people want shade and want to make more shade, their hands are tied by their own red tape. And it creates this kind of bureaucratic inertia that results in these so called solutions like this La Sombrita, which for those of you who aren't totally dialed into shade discourse in 2023, this was like the world's most famous shade structure. It went viral. It was a good time to be writing a book about shade. And the reason it went viral is because the city was so excited to unveil this thing, which, you know, Andrew, as you said, it's like a redesigned bus pole. It's like, you know, this like skateboard shaped teal piece of, of metal that was perforated for wind resistance and bolted onto the infrastructure that already was there. And, and the reason why the solution was so bad, you know, part of it is because, as I say in the book, like, cars just have such primacy of the built environment in LA and other cities. So a lot of street design, a lot of street regulations in LA are meant to privilege drivers, right? You don't want to get any. Anything in the way that could impede traffic or impede visibility. All that stuff has to go. And there are good safety reasons for that. But, you know, when all you're really thinking about is cars, it really comes at the expense of the sidewalk and pedestrians and transit riders. And the other thing too is that these designers who are trying to make this solution, they just felt like they could not work with other city agencies to get this done. They felt like it would be way too hard and way complicated for the transportation department to coordinate with the streets department and for the streets department to coordinate with the county transportation department and to bring in all these different areas of government together to give Angelenos the shade they deserve. That is, I think, like an understandable problem when you work in a big organization, be it in the private sector or in the public sector, like in city government. And to me, this just sort of points to a failure of leadership at the very top. I mean, if you have a mayor who's telling all of her department heads, you know, I don't care what you have to do, you have to make shade for bus riders who are getting scorched by the sun. I think these people would find a way to sort of break out of their sort of bureaucratic, you know, silos is the word that everyone uses and figure out a way to work together on this stuff. I mean, it's not rocket science. It just involves someone telling them they have to do it.

Well, I thought this was an important story because this same conversation is playing out around housing. You know, it's not just, can you build a canopy for bus passengers? It's like, can you build affordable housing? Can you build energy infrastructure, like green infrastructure? And one of the things I'm sure you've seen is that there's a lot of red tape at every level, and then there are various intentions or Interests who jump in there, there and be like, no, no, can't do it. And then it was like, oh, can't do it. I think it's a red tape problem. Like you can say it's a leadership problem, which I might also agree with. But there's, you know, like one of the frustrating things though is that for someone embedded in one of these agencies, the safest thing to do is just follow the effing rules. You know what I mean? And then you be look up and be like, hey, someone should change the rules.

Perhaps that's why I think it's a leadership thing, because no one who ever works inside an organization is going to be empowered to change these rules. I mean, they just work here, right? Like maybe they have good ideas, but you're part of some bigger system. I mean, you know, one example I talk about in the book, like there is a place where there was a very powerful leader who really wanted Shade and he made sure it got done. And that was Singapore.

Yeah, you talk. The Singapore story was fascinating to me. The fact that Lee Kuan Yew was slightly obsessed with Shade strikes me as a very Lee Kuan Yew type story.

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So that there are some very, very big ideas in this book that I quite enjoy and agree with. Number one, we should have more shade, more mindfulness about shade. Shade is actually a positive thing for pedestrians, certainly for bus riders, for homes, even like you know it, it is the easiest way that we can manage like rising temperatures. Number two, best source of shade, probably trees. Trees have all of these cooling superpowers and that ancient civilizations used to use them as de facto gathering places and havens. But in a lot of places, like in various buildings, it's not going to be trees. It can be other things. And so I thought these were some very, very positive ideas that you brought to the table that I totally agree with and one reason why I wanted to talk to you. There's another third thing I want to dig into because I've been mildly fascinated by and obsessed by this for a number of years. Your final chapters are on a topic that I've been very, very fascinated by, which is Geoengineering, social radiation modification. And so some people see this stuff and they're like, yo, that sounds terrible. That sounds like dystopian movie come to life. And I think we have had movies about, about this, we have about, about this going wrong. But to me it's only a matter of time before someone starts going in this direction because in some cases their society survival might be on the line. Like, you know, it might be that they're this island nation that that's going, going to be submerged and they look around and be like, you know, what mean, like, and there aren't actually very many international rules on this stuff. And so what the heck is social radiation management?

Solar radiation. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Solar radiation management or solar radiation modification is a term, like a blanket term that refers to all these different ways that we can globally, you know, control the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by our planetary system. You know, one sort of the, the ground level version of solar radiation modification is albedo modification, which is making the surface of the Earth more reflective. You know, there's a lot of, been.

Fascinated by, for quite some time. Here is one of my bright ideas. Literally we, we should cover some of the ice caps that are melting with some kind of reflective surface to slow the, the rate. You know, it's just like putting pockets of, you know, like white plastic or whatever the heck like in place that doesn't, you know, like damage wildlife and so that, you know, so this is method one, but continue.

Yeah, so. And yes, that literal bright idea. You know, there are some people who are thinking about that or at least exploring it sort of academically, you know, painting the roofs of our houses white. That's another way that we can, you know, make the surface of the Earth more reflective. And just to get a little wonky here, the way this works is like when, you know, I was talking about how sunlight has, you know, sunlight is radiation and when that radiation strikes the surface of the Earth, it can either get bounced back to space and pass through the atmosphere, or it can get absorbed terrestrially, converted to a different kind of longer wave radiation. And that longer wave radiation is what is what gets trapped by the so called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide. So the idea is don't convert it, just bounce it back out before it even gets here. So some of that can happen on the ground. Some of that also happens just above, not just above, but you know, in the sort of grand scheme of things, just above the surface of the ocean. This is called marine cloud brightening. And there are scientists who are trying to do these kinds of things where they're again increasing the reflectivity of some of these lower lying clouds again with the hope of bouncing the radiation back to space before it can get absorbed by the oceans and warm things up. In Australia they've been doing this for a few years to try to protect the coral reefs there. The coral reef. And then when you move a little higher, when you move, you know, sort of out of the troposphere where the weather is, and you move to the stratosphere where we are on international flights at cruising altitude, there are scientists there who are trying to do something very similar where they want to basically inject this area of the atmosphere with reflective particles. Um, sulfur dioxide is a sort of popular choice. And again, the idea is that if you can just make, make that level of the atmosphere, you know, 1 or 2 or 3% more reflective, you could. And you being globally the planet could theoretically bounce enough sunlight back into space to offset all the heat trapping effects of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And one of the reasons why I spent a lot of, why I spent my sort of final chapter in the book about this is because sort of for the scale of it, right, I started a bus stop and I want to go as big as possible. I want to go to outer space and the sort of outer reaches of the planet.

Yes.

But two, this idea that, you know, if, if we don't figure out sort of as a society and as a global society, like a tremendously challenging project, how to collectively manage our stratosphere and our atmosphere, private actors, and in some cases rogue actors are going to do it themselves. And you know, I spoke to someone in the book who was one of the architects of the UN's Paris Agreement. This is a guy who had done so much and invested so much, he.

Joined a firm and is like, all right, we're going to be, you know, like acting.

Well, to be fair, he disputes that characterization. He consulted with an Israeli startup firm to advise them on the development of this technology. But yeah, he saw the writing on the wall. He saw that cutting emissions, cutting carbon was no longer going to be enough and we have to start doing something else and we have to start doing it responsibly.

By the way, I have no issue with his, you know, like joining or consulting to a firm that was taking action in this space. Because I'm someone who's like, look, there's going to be action in this space. One of the ideas I've been most attracted to, and I do not know, if you came upon this in your research, is that is an idea of sending retractable reflective materials like that can unfold and fold up like parasols. Yeah, like a giant parasol. And this is not based on the Simpsons episode, though partially inspired by it. But I read an article.

Hey, he's. Mr. Burns is a hero in my book.

Okay, yes, Mr. Burns is a genius, but I read an article years ago about this idea of sending essentially, space mirrors that can expand and retract.

There are a lot of scientists who are thinking about something to this effect. I mean, there are, you know, there were academics, like, a few decades ago who sort of floated this idea, and it was all just theoretical. But there is now, I think, like a registered nonprofit called, I believe it's called the Planetary Sunshade foundation, that I think last summer went to Capitol Hill to lobby people on this idea. You know, never say never, right? Who knows? You know, 100, 100 years ago, I think people would have been astounded by the technology we have today. So I don't think it's impossible that something like this could ever happen. You know, it won't be in our lifetimes, I don't think. But it does seem like, you know, to your point, Andrew, I mean, we're. We're making space junk. We're not making atmospheric junk. So maybe there's less risk to us with something like that.

I think it'll happen in our lifetimes, man. I mean, you're so young, you're going to live for so long, Sam. And I have a feeling the Earth's going to need some shade, like with our life.

Well, I'll settle for bus stops and trees. And then, you know, maybe. Maybe my. My. My son will be around to see the space shade.

Well, I'm a both. And we should do the trees, we should do the bus stop shade, and then maybe even some kind of space mirrors solar parasol that can cool us down a little bit while we wait for cheap, renewable, infinite energy, which would also obviously help.

Right? And that's, you know, I'm sure you're aware of this, but, you know, every scientist and every academic who I talk to about solar radiation management and geoengineering and all these technologies, they are adamant that we have to cut emissions, right? That is. That is the goal here. But they're also just realists, and they know that it's not happening fast enough. So it has to be both.

I'm saying. I mean, I'm all for cutting emissions, but then also watching the curves and also knowing that even if we succeed in reducing them, they're going to be with us for a long time.

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Yeah, and I will close on Something that pains me pretty deeply is that I remember when I was a kid we had something called summer camp and we just ran around outside all day. And outside was considered a perfectly appropriate environment for 12 year olds to run around in the summer. And I do not think that's the case now. Like, I feel like now if you have a summer camp, you need shade, you need indoors, you like need to get the. You know what I mean? Like you can't expect kids to be able to be comfortable or healthy outdoors in the same way that you could even, you know, a couple of decades ago. And that makes me sad, but it just does call to mind. I think the brilliance and urgency of what you're describing is something I think you said, like shade can cool you down 30 degrees, you know, relative. I mean, and it's something, it's very achievable.

To your point, do you remember, I guess it was end of June, I think it was the end of the NYC DOE calendar year, the official first weekend of summer here in New York. We had, I think like an unseasonably hot and sticky heat wave. And this being the first weekend of summer, you know, I live in the Lower east side, usually like a pretty happening neighbor with a lot of people around. I thought the streets would be packed. I thought the parks would be packed. But to my surprise, they were pretty vacant and desolate. I mean, I went on a little Walk with my son. Because, you know, we're talking about air conditioning. Like all the air conditioning in the world doesn't stop your son from going crazy inside after two or three hours, right? So we got to get outside and you know, we're walking around and I see all these empty basketball courts, and I see, you know, empty handball courts, abandoned playground slides. And then we sort of turn a corner and we find this like, you know, public courtyard, let's say, that's filled with, you know, playground equipment. And, and, and to my surprise, like, it's full of life. I mean, you have like older people playing dominoes there. You've got grandparents kind of sitting around and watching life pass them high a little bit. You've got kids on scooters zooming around. My kid, my son, who's almost 2 years old, you know, ambled up the playground equipment and went down the slide. And the reason that this place was full of life and the other neighborhoods, parks were not was because it was in total shade. And I'm not even talking about the shade of the London plane trees, which there were a few of in the courtyard. I'm talking about the shade of a 26 story building next door casting a perfect afternoon shadow on this courtyard. And you could really feel the difference in there. And this is why I'm adamant in the book about shade of all kinds being important. You know, I think we know sort of from the climate literature that too much development amplifies the urban heat island effect. But if you do this stuff right, the shade can during the day offset those warming effects and create a more pleasurable environment. So we need shade of all kinds. Yes. Trees offer other kinds of cooling just besides shade. They sort of, they, they, they, they, they missed a little bit and they cool the air. But I don't think this idea that summer has to be like winter, like we have to be staying inside in summer because the conditions are too extreme. It doesn't have to be this way. We have the tools to sort of, you know, mitigate this stuff.

Bring back the outdoors, bring back shade.

Now we're talking. Thank you.

What a fascinating cost. But I genuinely believe that you're spot on and that urban planners should take this very much to heart. And it's a whole other dimension. You can imagine different measurements. And by these measurements, Los Angeles bus passengers would have gotten there their proper shelter years ago because people would be like, oh, you know that like this score is a zero. This is. Yeah, this is unacceptable.

Yeah. No, Andrew, I am hoping I've been talking to some planners about this, and they're like, you know, this just wasn't something that we got taught in planning school, like, shade, that that just wasn't really on the curriculum. And so I'm sort of hoping now that as more people talk about this, this can be part of what it means to be an urban planner. I mean, I think no one used to talk about parking in the same way they do now. Now that's like the hot button issue in urban planning. Maybe shade can be the cool button issue in urban planning.

Sam Block, Shade, the promise of a Forgotten Natural resource. Congratulations, man. You, like, are calling attention to a much underrated and an overlooked topic.

Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate you having me on.