Sam Bloch
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journalist, author of SHADE: THE PROMISE OF A FORGOTTEN NATURAL RESOURCE (@randomhouse 2025), samuel.bloch@gmail.com
Articles by Sam Bloch
Tree-Mendous: City Officials Must Do More To Create Shady Conditions As Temps Soar
On May 19, I walked down to Pier 42, a former industrial pier on the Lower East Side that the city transformed into an eight-acre waterfront park. New York was entering a heat wave, and I wanted to measure the temperature’s effects on the park’s playground. I knew the playground would be hot. It is bereft of trees, unshaded and covered in rubber surfacing. The swings, slides and climbing structures are fully exposed to the sun.
La obsesión de Singapur por la sombra que la convierte en un modelo en el mundo para combatir el calor
Singapur podría contar ya con la mejor infraestructura de sombra de cualquier ciudad del planeta. [Getty Images] El calor es la amenaza climática más letal para la humanidad; cada año mueren más personas por el calor que por las inundaciones, los huracanes y los incendios forestales sumados. Y el riesgo es mayor en las ciudades, que se están calentando el doble de rápido que el resto del planeta debido al efecto isla de calor urbano.
How Singapore became obsessed by shade
In 2016, my then-wife and I took our one and three-year-old children from Los Angeles to Bali, Indonesia. It took 21 hours of flight time with one …
How Singapore became obsessed by shade
How Singapore became obsessed by shade Getty Images The sweltering island nation has long prioritised adding greenery and shade at every corner. Here's what other cities can learn from it. As dangerous temperatures become more common, the leaders of cities around the globe, from Paris to Phoenix, are strategically planning to throw more shade. But it's the sweltering island nation of Singapore which may well already have the best shade infrastructure of any city on Earth.
Dreading Those Sunny Days: The Perils of Surviving Without Shade as a Homeless Person
Debbie woke up and peeled herself off an imitation leather interior. A rail-thin woman with an infectious smile, the sixty-six-year-old retired schoolteacher became homeless in 2017. After she lost her childhood home in Compton, she laid her head down in women’s shelters, first for a spell in San Francisco before returning to South Los Angeles. In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she caught the virus and the shelters kicked her out.
AC Units Are Stifling More Sustainable Ways of Cooling Homes
Americans are too reliant on air conditioning, an energy-hungry technology that worsens climate change. Artificial cooling already accounts for 10% of global heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, and the share could double in the next 25 years. Yet many of us live in homes that would be stuffy and uncomfortable without AC, and in extreme conditions turn dangerous. It’s not an overstatement to say that the pollution we generate for cooling inside is burning the planet outside.
All Praise Shade Original
Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There’s no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat’s imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn arrives and temperatures relent, heat leaves no discernable trace.
We need to learn to love tall buildings
As the heat index pushed 105 degrees Fahrenheit one weekend in late June, my toddler and I were on foot, searching for a cool oasis. We found one in the wide, pale shadow cast by a 26-story apartment building on the Lower East Side, on a courtyard filled with the sounds of slapping dominoes and children on scooters, zooming around playground equipment. Although New York and other American cities badly need more shady spaces like this, it's far too difficult to create them.
Opinion | We Need to Learn to Love Tall Buildings
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. As the heat index pushed 105 degrees Fahrenheit one weekend in late June, my toddler and I were on foot, searching for a cool oasis. We found one in the wide, pale shadow cast by a 26-story apartment building on the Lower East Side, on a courtyard filled with the sounds of slapping dominoes and children on scooters, zooming around playground equipment.
Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource
Description An extraordinary investigation into shade, bringing together science, history, urban design, and social justice to change the way we think about a critical natural resource that should be available to all. On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun’s glaring heat.
SHADE | Kirkus Reviews
A thoroughly documented and thought-provoking book, certain to spark attention and discussion. 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.
Conversations in a Changing Climate: A Hike for the Future in Malibu
Have you ever wondered how your friends really feel about climate change? Are they as worried as you are? Do they have different ideas about what we can do? With wildfires blazing and droughts parching California, talking about climate change isn’t justa good idea — it’s essential. As someone who’s training to become a certified California Climate Steward, I decided to put this idea into action. I gathered 13 friends from all walks of life and invited them on a hike to a hidden grotto in Malibu.
The Ridiculous Story Behind L.A.’s Instantly Mocked “Shade Structure”
Metropolis L.A. earned instant mockery for a device that protects bus stops from the sun. Here’s how the debacle happened.
Leveraging louvres to turn off the sunshine in L.A.
In June 2020, as record-breaking, triple-digit temperatures roiled California, the state’s energy companies faced a situation that was long feared by architects, engineers, scientists, and federal housing officials: there simply wasn’t enough electricity around to power everybody’s air conditioners, and if their customers kept demanding it anyway, cataclysmic events could ensue.
Why do Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, and Mars get the best real estate in grocery stores? Because they pay for it.
Food manufacturers spend $50 billion a year to promote and place their products in supermarkets. A public interest group says those deals, known as “trade promotions,” are anticompetitive and bad for public health. Why do so many American supermarkets look the same, with the same products, laid out in the same place, in the same kinds of displays? A public interest group says it’s because huge food and drink companies pay more than $50 billion a year to keep it that way.
Is giving our drinking water legal personhood the best way to protect it?
A New Hampshire legal battle highlights the complications of using rights-based ordinances to protect natural resources. For two years, residents of Nottingham, New Hampshire, a town of less than 5,000 people, have backed an unusual law to protect the drinking water they pull from their wells.
Valentine’s Day during a pandemic? Now, more than ever, say food companies
From heart-shaped pizzas to seasonal wings, we read the press releases so you don’t have to Every February, the food industry’s PR machine floods our inbox with too many Valentine’s Day-themed promotions to count.
America’s biggest retailers and foodservice companies have already agreed not to sell GMO salmon
AquaBounty says its first bioengineered salmon will be harvested in March, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to buy. For decades, Americans have been teased with the impending arrival of genetically engineered salmon. If a boycott campaign continues apace, they may have to wait even longer.
Analysis: In easy confirmation hearing, Vilsack fielded questions on climate change, pandemic relief, and trade
by H. Claire Brown + Jessica Fu + Sam Bloch 02.02.2021, 4:22pm The former (and likely future) Secretary of Agriculture faced few tough inquiries. Former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on Tuesday morning faced questions from the Senate Agriculture Committee during his confirmation hearing to reprise the role under President Biden. Despite serious concerns about his past tenure, he is expected to be confirmed with broad bipartisan support.
After years of struggle, New York’s street food vendors win long-sought reforms
The city voted to issue 4,000 new permits over the next decade, among other changes. Advocates say it’s a pathway to financial relief and less police harassment. Even before the pandemic, New York’s street food vendors often struggled to earn a living hawking hot food and water bottles to residents and tourists. Now, their advocates say, the only major American city with a hard cap on legal permitshas extended a much-needed helping hand.
After 10 months of minimal oversight, Biden orders OSHA to get to work
An executive order directs the federal agency to ramp up enforcement and look into new rules designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Last week, as one of a flurry of executive orders, President Joe Biden directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to ramp up workplace safety enforcement and look into “emergency temporary standards” to force employers to do more to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The FCC says all of Iowa has access to broadband internet. Speed tests tell a different story.
Like everyone else, rural Americans need broadband. They rely on their internet connections for many of the same reasons urban Americans do: to find doctors and look for jobs, pay bills and do homework, get the news and watch movies. But outside of cities, where great distances separate residents from social services, employers, and neighbors, reliable broadband not only keeps rural Americans apace with the modern world—it’s a critical economic lifeline.
The childhood obesity crisis started before Covid-19. The pandemic has made it much worse.
Experts fear that the profound disruptions of 2020—including changes to school lunch—may have a lasting, harmful legacy. Earlier this year, Anisha Patel, a Stanford University pediatrics professor, started to notice a troubling trend: Child patients at the Atherton California clinic where she works have gained a distressing amount of weight. Since the spring, she says, her patients’ growth curves, which track body mass index, have climbed their clinical charts steeply.
Facing aggressive pushback, Amazon workers to vote on forming the company’s first American union
The company has a long, documented history of anti-union efforts. If successful, this new campaign could galvanize workers across the country, as well as at Whole Foods. For years, Amazon employees have fought for unions and been quashed by their powerful employer. At last, they are poised to succeed.
California must abandon 535,000 acres of prized farmland to meet water conservation goals
A new report says saving the state’s aquifers will mean letting cropland go fallow—a worst-case scenario for growers in the San Joaquin Valley. A new report suggests that farmers in California’s San Joaquin Valley region, who account for half the state’s agricultural output, will need to severely limit their water use if the Golden State’s groundwater resources are to be conserved.
There is wood pulp in your “100 percent grated cheese.” Is that a problem?
More than 50 class-action lawsuits have been filed against Parmesan producers over the years, alleging consumer deception. Yet the harms are unclear. The grated Parmesan cheese in the green shaker tube, the kind next to dried pastas and canned tomato sauces on grocery shelves, may not be exactly what’s promised. And no one’s even claiming it comes from cow’s milk in Italy.
After the success of Prop 22 in California, UberEats, Grubhub, and Instacart score a federal victory
A controversial new rule that would maintain the status quo for independent contractors will likely be overturned by Biden. But it could live on as a model policy for states. Wednesday morning, the Trump administration published a controversial new rule that would it make easier for Uber, Instacart, and Grubhub to continue to classify their drivers, shoppers, and couriers as independent contractors, in a move that could save them and other companies over $3 billion annually.
70 percent of farm labor investigations end in violations
But it’s not the farm owners who are the biggest scofflaws, a new report finds. It’s the middlemen. Farm work is one of the toughest jobs in America. Crop pickers and field hands labor in potentially killer heat for low pay, usually without the benefit of health insurance. During the pandemic, the cramped conditions in dormitories and fields have made them especially susceptible to virus spread. And now, a new report shows, their bosses are more likely to stiff them on wages.
Peanut farmers advance in price-fixing lawsuit against Big Shell
A $57 million class action suit alleges that three shelling companies—who together dominate 80 percent of the peanut industry—conspired to depress prices. In recent years, the biggest companies in tuna, chicken, and beef have all been accused of colluding with their competitors, orchestrating alleged schemes to enrich themselves at the expense of producers and consumers. Now, meet the latest entrant in the price-fixing annals: Big Peanut.
Hunters are helping food banks by donating surplus meat. But while hunger has risen, giving has declined.
Every year, hunters donate extra deer meat to feed the hungry. But during the pandemic, they might be hoarding the venison for themselves. America is in a hunger crisis: eleven million adults are out of work, emergency unemployment benefits are soon expiring, and nearly 50 million people say they don’t have enough money to buy healthy food. Amidst all this, state officials have a message for hunters, now weeks into deer season: Give that meat to food banks.
New EPA finding: Glyphosate harms 93 percent of endangered species
Another task for Biden’s first 100 days—whether to rein in the controversial herbicide. Over 93 percent of endangered species and 96 percent of their habitats are likely to be harmed by glyphosate, the ubiquitous and controversial herbicide, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported in a draft evaluation released last week.
SNAP caseloads and benefits are breaking historical records-and it’s still not enough
Caseloads are continuing to rise sharply, as other emergency assistance programs are scheduled to sunset in December. Pictured above: People stand in line outside the Common Pantry as they wait for NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo to distribute Thanksgiving turkeys, in New York, NY. During the pandemic, as American hunger has risen to historic levels, the country’s nutritional safety net has been stretched to its limits, according to a new report from Hunger Free America, a prominent hunger advocacy group.
Sesame may finally get official recognition as one of our most common allergens
After years of pushing from consumer advocates, Congress and FDA both make moves to announce sesame—an increasingly prevalent allergen—on food labels.
Covid-19 made our food system more vulnerable. Turns out it also generated massive amounts of waste.
New populations of Americans have been made hungry by the pandemic. A recent report argues that food wasted by corporate monopolies could’ve fed them. Tyson and other meat companies advertise their mission is to feed “our nation and the world.” It’s a lofty goal that convinced President Trump they should stay open in the spring, even as workers were beset by the coronavirus.
Biden advisors push a new plan to slow global warming: A soil carbon bank for farmers
A policy memo by a Biden-linked group offers clues about how the new administration may address climate change through re-imagined farming practices—even without Congressional approval. On Wednesday, a group of Obama-era officials, climate scientists, and Joe Biden transition team advisors released a series of policy memos for how the incoming administration can fight climate change from the White House.
Shut out of government relief, New York City street vendors ask for support
Over 10,000 New Yorkers make a living selling street food. More than half of them could be excluded from stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, and other forms of assistance. New York City street vendors who spend five figures on black-market permits have run out of patience, eight months into the pandemic, while a bill that would help them languishes in City Council.
Alaskan salmon fishers to Trump: Leave Tongass alone, Joe will fix it
Sam Bloch, Staff Writer at The Counter – lives New York City Metropolitan Area. By Sam Bloch / The Counter / October 29, 2020 The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) yesterday announced a final decision in exempting Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the so-called Roadless Rule, clearing the way for logging and road construction in the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.
Trump spent four years gutting food and farm protections. Here's what can be reversed on day one of Biden’s term.
by H. Claire Brown + Jessica Fu + Sam Bloch 11.12.2020, 1:09pm iStock / tupungato, USDA, Graphic by Tricia Vuong The Counter’s guide to Trump’s signature rollbacks—and our predictions on their survival in 2021. Here’s a post-election reality check for these abbreviated, early-winter days: Congress will still be narrowly divided when President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.
Young black farmers to Mark Bittman: We don't need your land reform
by Sam Bloch + Hillary Bonhomme 12.07.2017, 7:14pm Conflict at a New York conference, where attendees tell the food movement figurehead he doesn't speak for them.
To survive the pandemic, restaurants are offering subscriptions for bottomless coffee and beer. Will the model last?
Restaurateurs say they offer quick hits of cash, a stable stream of revenue—and an opportunity for customers to spend more money than they expect to. In the early days of the pandemic, Darlyn Summers, a YMCA summer camp and after-school coordinator in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, signed up for a free trial of unlimited coffee at Panera Bread.
Collin Peterson, Democratic voice for farm bill compromises, defeated after three decades
Under his lead, provisions were introduced for supporting local foods, organic agriculture, and permanent funding for beginning farmers and ranchers. Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s election, but Rep. Collin Peterson, a powerful Democratic legislator and two-time chair of the House Agriculture Committee, was defeated in his reelection bid for Minnesota’s 7th Congressional district.
Florida becomes eighth state in the nation to enact a $15 minimum wage
The Sunshine State is the first in the South to vote in favor of an increase—a feat in a region that has long been hostile to labor unions and slow to raise the minimum wage. When Florida voted to re-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday, it also achieved a long-sought victory for labor unions, low-wage workers, and even some small-business owners: Voters in the Sunshine State passed an amendment to raise the its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
FCC announces “biggest and boldest step yet” to expand rural broadband
As the pandemic deepens the digital divide, a $20 billion rural broadband auction offers more of the same, critics say. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday launched the first phase of its new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction, which will provide internet companies with $20 billion in subsidies over the next 10 years to build out broadband networks in underserved parts of the country.
leave the Tongass National Forest alone
USDA just opened up America’s largest temperate rainforest, “the lungs of North America,” to logging. Resistance is coming from unlikely places. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) yesterday announced a final decision in exempting Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the so-called Roadless Rule, clearing the way for logging and road construction in the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.
Could Covid-19 be a foodborne illness? Virginia Tech researchers just got $1 million to find out.
For months, scientists have said there’s no evidence that people can catch the virus through food or packaging. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Around the world, virtually all leading health agencies say the same thing: There is currently no evidence that people can catch Covid-19 from food. And experts beseech us: Stop wiping down your groceries. But just because there’s no evidence of transmission doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
Does the American diet make us more vulnerable to Covid-19?
When the CEO of Whole Foods attempted to connect our vulnerability to the virus with our food choices and diet-related disease, the internet fired back. We asked experts if he was onto something. In September, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey sparked an internetbacklash when he said the American diet was partly to blame for U.S. deaths from Covid-19. And he wasn’t talking about flouting mask rules.
Servers and bartenders bet their futures on getting out the vote
Record unemployment in the hospitality industry has left nearly 4 million workers with time on their hands. So they’re text-banking, holding rallies, and fundraising for the candidates they believe can send them back to work. For the first time since he graduated from high school, Jeremy Richardson isn’t working in a restaurant. The career server and bartender hasn’t set foot in Gigglewaters, the Safety Harbor, Florida bar and movie theater where he used to work, since July.
People with disabilities fear that permanent outdoor dining will make inaccessible cities even worse
Crowded sidewalks and streets make it harder for people in wheelchairs and mobility devices to get around, though some see a silver lining. Edith Prentiss, a 68-year-old resident of New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood, has relied on a wheelchair for 28 years because of a badly injured right leg. She struggles to navigate many of the city’s sidewalks, some of which are too narrow for her 23-inch motorized device or lack the corner slopes she needs to cross the road safely.
USDA allows school meals to be free through the 2020-2021 school year
The extension comes weeks after the agency, under pressure, extended crucial waivers through December. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today that schools can continue offering free meals to students for the duration of the 2020-2021 academic year, whether they are learning at home or still in the classroom.
EPA issues largest-ever water pollution fine to a CAFO-and it's a horse track in New Orleans
When you think CAFO, you probably don’t think horse racing. And surely you don’t think food. But never fear: we’ll connect those dots for you.
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