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PHOTOGRAPHS BY BY ELLIOT ROSS
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That same fault line between rich and poor is visible in U.S. cities too, when it comes to the first defense against heat: Shade. Los Angeles (pictured at top), Alejandra Borunda writes in our second story, is battling the reality that “poorer, Blacker, and browner parts of the city” typically have far, far fewer shade trees than whiter, more affluent ones. A photo series by Nat Geo Explorer Elliot Ross documents the disparity along a six-mile stretch of Vermont Boulevard—cooled by Moreton Bay fig trees in Los Feliz, it’s a sun-baked landscape of concrete and asphalt in Pico-Union, to the south. (Above left, L.A.’s Rolling Hills, where residents can afford to care for the trees; right, low-income, Hawthorne). Here and in other American cities, the disparity is a legacy of “redlining” and other discriminatory housing practices. Though formally abolished, they’re still affecting people’s lives.
Heat makes drought worse, but the West’s multiyear megadrought is also making heat worse. Soils are so dry now in some regions that less sunshine is being diverted to evaporating moisture—it’s all heating the ground and air. “The ground is burning like a hotplate,” meteorologist Simon Wang of Utah State University told the Guardian last week. “And we’re standing on it.” (Below, a worker plants a tree in L.A.'s Watts neighborhood.)
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