Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, let's talk about the heat, and let's talk about the shade. Here in New York City, Mayor de Blasio is wanting to keep cool as a matter of safety not just comfort as a heat advisory is in effect today and tomorrow. The heat in New York doesn't hold a candle to what's happening on the other side of the country, where the Pacific Northwest is in the midst of a heatwave never before seen. Portland, Oregon hit 112 degrees on Sunday, overtaking the previous all-time record high there by a full 5 degrees. Seattle experienced its first back-to-back 100 degree and plus days in history and went for the hat-trick yesterday.

Hat-trick means three in a row in hockey, or hockey played in a cooler arena on a surface of ice. Oftentimes left out of the conversation is what happens to the most vulnerable during these times of extreme weather. Our next guest's new article, however, addresses it head on the topic of shade. Joining us now is Alejandra Borunda, former Climate Scientist, and a National Geographic Writer now on Climate Change Adaptation and the Environment. Her new feature is called A Shady Divide, and is the July cover story for NatGeo. Welcome to WNYC, Alejandra. Glad you could join us.

Alejandra Borunda: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Your piece focuses on an area in Southern Los Angeles that is less than 40 blocks from where your father grew up in the first home that your grandparents bought, but it is also an area of built on the appeal of the sunshine. Can you start us off by talking about that personal context?

Alejandra Borunda: Yes, of course. Thanks so much for asking. My grandparents moved to Los Angeles in the '50s and they lived in a bunch of places all around South and East of Los Angeles before landing about a mile away from one of the places we profiled in the story. They moved away, moved south by the time I came along, but we'd go back up to that part of town and visit friends and family. I just remember being a small child, just hot all the time, baking in the sunshine that, at the time, I loved, but now recognize as this sign of this big disparity in the city and in cities across the country in terms of who has access to cool and shade.

Brian Lehrer: Did the overall urban design of the city of LA play a part in the problem you discussed in the piece? I see you write, "Nearly 20% of the trees are in five census blocks where 1% of the population resides."

Alejandra Borunda: Yes. That was a really fascinating thing to see both in the maps and in the data. There are a lot of things that feed into this big disparity in tree cover and other kinds of shade cover in Los Angeles and beyond. One of the really important ones is historical. It's about the urban planning decisions made both by the city and by the federal government starting back in the 1930s and even beyond. In the 1930s the Federal government instituted this policy that we now colloquially call redlining, where they literally drew red lines around some neighborhoods and green lines around others to mark whether these areas were suitable to be supported in federally backed housing loans.

Since housing is one of the main ways that we've used in this country to generate wealth, this started off a huge pattern of wealth inequality and disinvestment in some neighborhoods and investment in others. One of the clearest ways you can see that is with the tree cover, the canopy cover in different parts of the city. In parts of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills and the fancier neighborhoods, there's trees everywhere. It's shady, it's cool, it's beautiful to be in. It's a totally different experience than if you drive just a couple of miles south into neighborhoods that were formerly redlined and have a single digits canopy cover in Huntington Park where we were, the canopy cover was about 3%. That's essentially nothing.

Brian Lehrer: I love how you write, "A city's tree canopy can be considered infrastructure." In that context, President Biden has been completely re-imagining what the term means in this country right now involving the care infrastructure, things like that, not just roads and bridges. The problem of shade is not exclusive to Los Angeles. Do you think shaded areas should be included in talks of infrastructure funding?

Alejandra Borunda: I would love to see that happen. I have not yet seen it explicitly discussed, but I think what's interesting about shade, in particular, is that you can get it in a lot of different ways. Like it's partly about trees, it's partly about architecture and design. At the heart of it is this question about what we want our public spaces to be and who we want them to be for. One of the things in LA, but this is relevant in a lot of other cities across the country, is that as the emphasis on car culture evolved a lot of the trees, at least the public street trees, that did exist in the city got taken out as streets are wide and those parking spots were expanded.

Even if we did actually have that infrastructure in place, it was devalued in order to give cars and the things that go along with cars, more space. I think there's a really great opportunity in a moment here to rethink how we want those public spaces to be, and shade's of a really good way to think about that. If you make pedestrian areas comfortable, if you make it nice for people to be outside in public spaces, then you can really change their experience as well as the shape of the city.

Brian Lehrer: Your story is mostly focused on LA, but can you compare New York and LA or other major cities and LA in this respect? Is it particular to a place like Los Angeles, which is in a dry climate, so there wouldn't be as much naturally growing shade tree cover? Is this an LA story or is this a national urban story?

Alejandra Borunda: Oh, this is definitely a national urban story. We focused on LA because it actually is really emblematic of this problem that we see nationwide, and also has a pretty active plan to at least try to fix the problem. You can see these disparities in cities across the country. Portland, Oregon actually has one of the biggest temperature differences driven, in part, by tree cover between neighborhoods that were formerly graded, A, under the redlining schema, and those that were redlined. Right in the middle of this heatwave or are feeling this extra impact. Those who live in formerly redlined areas are feeling extra heat impacts right now that is partly related to whether or not there are trees in a neighborhood.

Brian Lehrer: Portland obviously is anything but a dry climate. It's interesting that you bring Portland into this. What is this plan to address it that you refer to regarding LA?

Alejandra Borunda: LA has a version of New York's Million Trees Initiative, but they're focusing really explicitly on getting trees into the ground in places that have not historically gotten the tree investment that other parts of the city had. They're planting tens of thousands of trees partnering with a bunch of nonprofits and private citizens and everything to get just tons and tons and tons of trees into the ground in parts of South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles and places that haven't had the trees that places like Beverly Hills, have had in the past.

I loved every moment that I spent with the folks working on this project. They're so passionate and so energetic, and you drive or walk around different parts of LA now and you can just see this whole mini forest of baby trees, essentially that are going to take 10, 20, 30 years to get to the point where they provide the beautiful shade that you can find in other neighborhoods. It's this really exciting start and people care so much about fixing this problem.

Brian Lehrer: That is so good to hear somebody sound optimistic about something where justice is concerned. How do you see this fitting into larger questions of climate justice and environmental justice in this country?

Alejandra Borunda: That's a great question. I think what's one of the really important things to that I took away from this, and that I hope our readers take away is that climate change is real and its effects are having very different impacts on people, even just a few miles away from each other in the same city. In New York, for example, the excess heat that people are feeling in Brownsville or in the South Bronx or in parts of the Rockaways during heatwave can be several degrees more than those who live in neighborhoods with more trees and cooler temperatures. That has really serious health impacts. Yes, it has really serious impacts.

I think, in New York, the statistics is that older Black New Yorkers are twice as likely to die during a heat event than older white New Yorkers. That's an enormous disparity. That stands in many cities across the country. These things matter. They matter, they have real-life impacts on the ground. At this point, not taking justice into account and looking at the historical reasons that our cities look and feel the way they do is wildly irresponsible. I'm really glad to see justice and climate justice and environmental justice getting some more attention both from the federal government and at the state and city level.

Brian Lehrer: In our last, just 30, 45 seconds, do you have a take as a climate scientist on these all-time record highs way over 100 degrees in Portland and over 100 in Seattle, or the building collapse in Miami, which some people say might have been a secondary effect of climate change with rising sea levels and softening soil?

Alejandra Borunda: I think what we're seeing in the northwest, in particular, is really a taste of what's to come and shows how risky climate change is going to be and how much it's pushing what we're used to being able to deal with, and what our infrastructure is built to deal with beyond the capacity that it might have. I just feel so deeply for everyone out there who's experiencing something that they never really expected to have to deal with. I think, at this point, we just have to be really clear-eyed about the fact that this is happening and the fact that we have to build our systems and build our resilience in a way that's going to protect us all into the future.

Brian: Alejandra Borunda's article in National Geographic is the July cover story, and it's called A Shady Divide. Thank you so much for joining us.

Alejandra Borunda: Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day.

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