‘We need more shade’: US’s hottest city turns to trees to cool those most in need
It was a relatively cool spring day in Phoenix, Arizona, as a tree-planting crew dug large holes in one of the desert city’s hottest and least shaded neighborhoods.
Still, it was sweaty backbreaking work as they carefully positioned, watered and staked a 10ft tall Blue palo verde and Chilean mesquite in opposite corners of resident Ana Cordoba’s dusty unshaded backyard.
“If I ever retire, I’d like to be able to spend more time outside. The weather is changing, so I am really happy to get these trees. We need more shade,” said Cordoba, 75, a legal secretary, whose family has lived in Grant Park for more than a century.
Over the course of three days in early April, arborists planted 40 or so desert adapted trees in Grant Park, as part of the city’s equity-driven heat mitigation plan to create a shadier, more livable environment amid rising temperatures and hundreds of heat-related deaths.
Phoenix is America’s fifth largest and hottest city, a sprawling urban heat island which has expanded without adequate consideration to climate and environmental factors like water scarcity and extreme heat. Multiple heat records were broken last year including 133 days over 100F (37.7C), and 55 days topping 110F (43C).
Only around 9% of Phoenix is protected by tree canopies, yet this citywide figure masks vast inequities between wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods like Willo (13% coverage) just two miles north of Grant Park (4%). One census tract in the north-west of the city, Camelback East, has 23% tree cover.
“This is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods – and one of the most neglected,” said Silverio Ontiveros, a retired police chief turned community organizer who drummed up interest for the tree planting by knocking on doors and putting flyers through every neighbor’s letterbox.
“Our goal is to change the inequity and create enough shade to provide residents and passersby reprieve from the heat. For that we need many more trees, but we also need to take care of them,” added Ontiveros, as he walked through the neighborhood making sure the right families got the right trees.
Grant Park is a majority Latino community in south Phoenix situated next to a sprawling electrical substation – a hot and dusty neighborhood with 200 or so homes, but no stores and plenty of empty lots and boarded-up houses. It was once a thriving neighborhood – one of the few places where people of color could live due to discriminatory housing policies that lasted most of the 20th century.
Redlined neighborhoods like Grant Park still have higher pollution levels, less vegetation, more noise pollution and higher temperatures. In recent years, the local outdoor pool was shuttered and scores of trees cut down by a previous administration to prevent homeless people from gathering in the shade.
“This is one of the hottest parts of the city because the people here don’t have political power,” said Leo Hernandez, 78, the master gardener at the thriving community garden where he created a butterfly sanctuary for migrating monarchs. “We need shade, but trees also suck up carbon dioxide, create places to socialize and healthier, happier neighborhoods.”
Trees have multiple benefits in urban areas which include cleaner air, improved physical and mental health, water conservation, increasing wildlife habitat, CO2 storage and sequestration and lower temperatures through shade.
The city is mostly concerned with reducing the urban heat island effect and improving public health, and its 2010 shade masterplan set out a goal of achieving 25% citywide canopy cover by 2030. Amid little progress and rising heat mortality and morbidity, in 2021 Phoenix established the country’s first office of heat response and mitigation. Its community tree planting program is now being rolled out to public schools, churches and homes in qualifying census tracts – low-income neighborhoods with little shade.
Residents can choose from a list of 19 native and desert-adapted trees including the Texas olive, Chinese red pistache and Chilean mesquites. The trees, which are a couple of years old and pretty heavy, are planted by contracted arborists. For insurance reasons, they must be within the property – not the sidewalk – and not too close to walls or power lines. Each household also gets a tree kit – a 100ft hose, irrigation timer and instrument to measure the soil pH and moisture, as well as written care instructions.
This is the fourth tree-planting initiative in Grant Park, but the other schemes involved donations of smaller, younger trees which residents themselves had to plant in the dry, rocky earth. Several didn’t survive last summer’s heatwave when temperatures hit 100F (37.7C) on 31 consecutive days, while others died from overwatering or a lack of attention.
Tree planting has become increasingly popular among corporations, governments and environmental groups alike in recent years, with mixed results. In Turkey, 90% of the government’s 11m new trees died within months, while polluting industries including mining and fossil fuel companies have been accused of trying to greenwash environmental and climate harms.
“It is very hard to grow trees here, our environment is very extreme, so we’re doing everything we can to help them survive, which includes giving people the choice so they have species they love and feel excited about,” said Kayla Killoren, the heat office tree equity project coordinator. “There’s been a lot of greenwashing, and some people are weary and think it’s a scam at first, until they see their neighbors get trees planted.”
In Phoenix, a 75 to 80% survival rate would be considered a success, according to Killoren.
So far, 700 trees have been planted with scores more events planned throughout April and May, and will resume again in the fall after the summer heat. The project is mostly funded through non-profits, local and federal government grants including millions of dollars from the Covid stimulus package – the 2021 American Rescue Plan – and the Inflation Reduction Act.
There’s a long way to go and limited funds. According to American Forests, more than 800,000 more trees are needed to achieve 15% canopy cover for every residential block in the city.
The slow progress in improving tree coverage has frustrated many Phoenix residents, and in May, the heat team will present a new master shade plan to the city council, setting out more nuanced data-driven goals for homes, sidewalks and parks to replace the 25% citywide one. At the heart of the plan will be tackling shade inequalities that make rising temperatures increasingly deadly for the city’s most vulnerable communities, according to David Hondula, who leads the office of heat response and mitigation.
“The core concepts driving the masterplan are improving public health and livability by creating more shade in the places people spend most time,” said Hondula.
In Grant Park, the community celebrates every single tree but it will probably take years to create adequate shade to provide residents – including unsheltered neighbors and passersby – adequate protection from the worsening heat.
“We’ve always had to fight for everything here, we’re neglected but I love my neighborhood,” said Evangeline Muller, 75, who loads up her golf buggy with buckets to water the trees when it gets really hot. “Trees mean health, they give life, and I’m not going to stop fighting for my community.”
thering Heights, has been called the “Wes Anderson of the theatre world” for her idiosyncrasies.
During our hour-long conversation, they discuss the difficulty and joy of trying to distill a novel into a theatre experience. “After my first draft, Hanif told me I’d got it entirely wrong,” Rice says. “He’s consistently said the story’s got to be political and funny.”
Rereading the book, I am struck by how relevant it still feels, despite ending on the brink of Thatcher’s victory. There are numerous parallels between today’s society and the Britain of the 1970s, when inflation was high, workers were striking, and people took to the streets in protest against a government that ignored them. Kureishi acknowledges this but is quick to highlight some major differences.
“Everyone’s much more pessimistic now,” he says. “I think people in the 70s really believed in the future and were quite optimistic about it, certainly with regards to music, fashion, the media and photography. Karim and his friend Charlie really believe they can make it, that they can be pop stars. But I don’t think my kids are optimistic like that about Britain and the future at all.”
The world, Kureishi says, “is more likely to make you crazy” now. “People are aware that the issues facing us are so overwhelming, like climate change.” He lists other problems to do with the lack of social mobility, the failure of the NHS and the lack of housebuilding. “One of the things you notice about the young people in Buddha is they never talk about money. They don’t want to be rich, they want to lead fulfilling lives.
But that’s changed. My kids and their friends talk about money all the time.”
Though he calls the increased likelihood of a change in government “a shard of light”, he doubts “anybody is wildly optimistic about a Labour government”. The left, he says, “was much more active and coherent then. We don’t really have an organised left anymore.”
Rice also reflects on modern society’s sense of hopelessness. “I feel that we’ve been let down by everybody – by the church, by our politicians, by our TV presenters,” she says. “It’s hard to feel like anything we do at the moment can create change.”
What lights both Rice and Kureishi up, however, is the progress that’s been made in terms of identity and sexuality. When Buddha came out, it was still scandalous for Karim to want to “sleep with boys as well as girls”. “Now, it’s very liberating to see that there are so many new forms of sexuality; that the binary story just doesn’t provide enough opportunity,” Kureishi says. “It’s very creative and innovative. People are thinking and talking about gender, they’re exploring their own bodies and cultures.”
“Also, I don’t think people are pressured into having sex to the same extent that we were then, when it was considered to be almost revolutionary. When you think about what you do all day, you spend so little time actually having sex.” He smiles. “It only takes about five minutes.”
“I feel very optimistic watching my stepkids grow up,” adds Rice, “not labelling themselves in the way we did.”
And what of racism today? As Kureishi has noted, there aren’t gangs of skinheads pushing excrement through people’s doors any more. But some discourse remains familiar – the government is still tying itself in knots over asylum-seekers and immigration figures. It’s something the writer has been reflecting on in hospital.
“I could see that the NHS is entirely run by immigrants,” he says. “Most of the nurses doing the all-night and weekend shifts – and all the care workers – are recently arrived immigrants. If you cut that off, then you’re going to have an ageing population that isn’t going to be taken care of.” He calls this “a real dilemma” at the heart of Britain. “You can’t fill those institutions with indigenous people. It doesn’t work, everybody knows that. And sending a few people to Rwanda isn’t going to address the problem.”
How will they be invoking all of this in a stage play? “The sound design is really key. We’re using archive political footage,” Rice says. “I’ve also used a construct to make a bridge between the 70s and now: Karim speaks into a mic a bit like the early standup comedians, really telling the audience where the conflict was.”
But for Kureishi, sound – and music in particular – has been a source of pain recently. When he guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last year, he said he couldn’t bear to listen to music any more because “it would be too moving”. But with music being so interwoven into Karim’s story, did he find a way to cope? “I’ve gone back to music now,” he says gladly. “I just couldn’t listen to all the stuff I loved in that horrible, depressing atmosphere with nurses and doctors. But I’m back at home now, and I’ve got my kids, my friends and my world around me. I’m trying to resume my working life again.”
Kureishi has been working hard on physio and has gained some strength in his arms and legs, although he has been told by doctors that movement in the hands is the last thing to return. Still, he remains optimistic about his current situation. “Although I’m tetraplegic, I’ve started to feel like a normal person. Writing gives me a sense of selfesteem and dignity. That I’m not just a broken body. I still have health issues; every day is a lucky day for me. Working really keeps me believing in something worthwhile in my life.”
One of the things he’s working on is his forthcoming memoir Shattered, which is based on his writings on X and on his Substack, The Kureishi Chronicles. The posts began several days after the accident, when Kureishi was still in ICU and trying to make sense of what he calls his “Kafkaesque metamorphosis”. He began dictating his thoughts to his son Carlo, who duly transcribed them. Since then, the dispatches have attracted thousands of global subscribers – many of whom write to Kureishi about their own tragic experiences. His X following has quadrupled.
Just as he did when he was younger, Kureishi says he finds himself writing “to communicate with a wider world, with other people who will be sympathetic”.
“I really needed to do the blog,” he continues. “It’s a new way of writing for me because I have to dictate it to a member of my family – one of my sons or my partner Isabella. My kids call me The Great Dictator because I shout at them and they write it down. It’s like a spontaneous bop chain of words. You kick off and off you go – you don’t know what you’re going to say, and you make sense of it by the end. I’ve started to really enjoy writing in this way. I write much quicker. The other day I wrote for two hours, dictating, and I did 3,000 words, which is a shitload for me.”
The Buddha of Suburbia follows on the tail of a stage adaptation of My Beautiful Laundrette, which was revived at Leicester’s Curve theatre. I wonder what makes theatre the right medium to tell these stories? “Buddha is a love letter to theatre,” Rice says. “That’s what drew me to it. And there’s an immediacy and a humanity to theatre. You’re going to feel close to an orgy, close to a racist beating. You’ll feel the heat coming off the actors when they dance. Unlike TV, theatre also brings imagination and suggestion – the audience can go anywhere.”
“Writing, theatre, acting and music are really what we’re good at in this country,” concludes Kureishi. “That’s our reason to be optimistic.”
• The Buddha of Suburbia is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 18 April to 1 June
The young people in Buddha never talk about money. They want fulfilling lives. But my kids and their friends talk about money all the time