I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life's ordinary rules are suspended. Summer is when we don't have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when nobody ever has to make eye contact. Summer is when nothing ever happened before this moment right now. Summer is when we trash the joint because whatever. Summer is when we fire guns into the air and the bullet never comes down.

All the very best countries celebrate their national holidays in summer. Summer is the season best adapted to modern commerce. When you think "Hollywood" you think "summer." Arson perpetuates summer; it makes it an action and not just a moment. In summer we think of rain as a calamity, and so does the weatherman. Summer craves fresh bodies. Summer has no consequences. Summer has children in every orphanage. Summer just walks into your house and goes straight to the refrigerator without saying hello. Summer has not spoken to the other seasons in decades. Summer cannot get served because it abjures shirts and shoes. There are open warrants out on summer.

But summer, however phlegmatic, dominates. There is no arguing or reasoning with summer. If you try to, summer just belches and everybody laughs. Summer doesn't need money because it has yours. Summer lies over the land like syrup on an ant hill. Summer wears your body like a shroud. Summer suddenly lashes out when everything is quiet. It pretends to retreat and then lashes out again. Summer knows your weaknesses, your blind spots, your unacknowledged biases, your unspoken shame. Summer pretends to love you but then burns you and runs. Your mind goes tilt whenever you try to think about summer. You try to tell people the truth about summer but no one believes you.

Summer wasn't always like this. It had a decent upbringing and a reasonable education. It lived in harmony with the other seasons, sometimes trading off bits of one another's weather. Just where it went wrong is uncertain, except that it happened in our lifetime. It was all those cars, all those drugs, all that red meat, all that money it sucked up and vaporized. Summer only remembers luxury and rage. Summer will not stop until it gets every inch of its way, and since that is impossible it will never stop. Summer will destroy everything we know and when called to account for itself summer will just belch. Summer is mindless. Summer is nothing but fun. Everybody loves summer. ♦

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist whose most recent book is 

. The following piece first appeared, in different form, in 

It’s Climate Week, and we’re sharing dispatches from a world on fire. Featuring Lucy Sante, Bill McKibben, Emily Raboteau, and Janna Levin, 

is considering heat as sensation, symbol, and scientific reality. We present 

—a gathering of artists, writers, and thinkers reflecting on life at the boiling point.

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

I’ve been lucky enough to live my life in the mountains, where even on the hottest days you can generally find a breeze, and where the temperature drops at night. Happily, I’ve never needed AC; I like my air unconditioned. But this also means that I have a profound appreciation for shade; on a hot day it’s a screened porch or under a sugar maple for me. I’m a shade connoisseur; I know from long experience how the shadows are going to move while I nap, and I’m perfectly willing to turn my baseball cap sideways when demanded. 

I also know that most people lack these luxuries. They’re not in the mountains, they’re in cities. And cities are, of course, hotter than they’ve ever been. That’s what comes from letting our planet go to—

—hell. Our first job, obviously, is to reverse that descent, and I’ve spent my life fighting for climate action. But in the meantime, as temperatures continue to rise, we have to do what we can to stay cool. Which means, among other things, shade, as a matter of survival and as a matter of justice.

How important is it? Let me tell you a story. In the 1930s, a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, graded all of America’s neighborhoods and deemed some of them “hazardous” for investment, essentially because they were home to large minority communities. This grading system (from A for “best” and B for “still desirable” to C for “declining” and D for “hazardous”) underlies what came to be known as redlining. The grading system led to chronic disinvestment in the lower-rated neighborhoods, resulting, over time, in less of everything from parks and green spaces to street trees and air-conditioning in homes. Almost a century later, the results of that racism can be measured with a thermometer: in Portland, Oregon, neighborhoods that were graded A in the 1930s now “average 8 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the city’s mean temperature, while D-graded neighborhoods average 4.8 Fahrenheit degrees warmer,” according to the 

. Actually, you don’t need a thermometer—that’s a 13-degree gap that anyone can feel just by walking across town.

 set out to quantify the difference in its home city a few years ago. At noon one hot August day, with the aid of an infrared thermometer, reporters found that on the “tree-canopied block of West 94th Street near Central Park in Manhattan, the sidewalk temperature was 84. Just across town, at a treeless lot for sanitation trucks on First Avenue in East Harlem, the blacktop registered at 115 degrees, a full 31 degrees hotter.” As the reporter, John Leland, noted: “Plants and trees cool a neighborhood by providing shade, but also by a process called transpiration: as water evaporates from the leaves, its transformation into vapor consumes heat from the atmosphere.” A tree is a cooling machine.

The warmth of the sun was a joy for most of human history; we’re programmed to smile when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and warms our shoulder blades. 

This is not an isolated phenomenon, of course. A recent 

, which looked at 530 locations in 51 countries, found that 30 percent more shade could reduce mortality in our new killer heatwaves by remarkable numbers—that would have cut mortality by more than a million human souls so far this century. How do people die from heat? So many ways. Just to give you an example that may not have occurred to you offhand: “Nephrolithiasis” is the technical term for the development of kidney stones, those small formations that, as they pass, can cause excruciating pain. (I’ve never had them, but I know more than one man who has said he came away from the experience with a newfound appreciation for what his wife had undergone during labor.) Doctors have long known that higher temperatures lead to more sweat, which reduces urine volumes and thus increases “the saturation of the insoluble salts that cause kidney stones.” During heat waves in the U.S., it takes just three days before emergency-room visits for kidney stones begin to spike.

If you think it's bad here, imagine what it’s like in truly hot places: a couple of years ago a 

 that a third of the people in the kidney transplant center in Kathmandu were young Nepali men who had worked overseas, mostly in the Gulf. It described, for instance, a young man named Suraj who journeyed to Kuwait in order to send money back to his impoverished family, and to build up enough of a nest egg to someday get married. He “found himself on construction sites where he installed massive, one-ton window frames on skyscrapers rising from the Kuwait desert. Because elevators were not operational, he recounted, he had to walk several stories to access water. But with work schedules so pressing, most workers gathered around the water tank only during their one-hour break. On many days, the water would be gone before the break ended. Often, Suraj didn’t drink anything all day.” When the temperature is well into the triple digits, that’s a bad idea; now he’s back home, living with his sister who wheels him a few times a week to the hospital. “To pay for his kidney transplant and the tests, they’ll sell Suraj’s half-built house with the propane stove. They’ll squeeze back into Panmaya’s mud-and-bamboo hut and cook on the ground with open fire. His dream of getting married was now ‘in ashes,’ Suraj admitted.”

In the ideal world, you’d figure out some ways to provide shade at the same time as you were doing something about the causes of all that heat in the first place. Which, as it turns out, is entirely possible. You’ve seen a solar panel; we’re used to looking at its top, and thinking about the way it faces the sun, turning photons into usable electricity, in the great miracle of our time. Its rapid spread—solar energy is now growing faster than any energy source at any point in human history—is the one scalable hope we have for actually reducing the flow of heat-trapping carbon into the air. 

Cities are, of course, hotter than they’ve ever been. That’s what comes from letting our planet go to—well, go in the direction of—hell. 

But solar panels have an underside, and that underside is, by definition, shady. If, say, you built solar panels over California’s irrigation canals, they would cut evaporation in those crucial arteries by 63 billion gallons of water a year.

And on land? A recent survey found that 72 percent of German farmers are considering deploying agrovoltaic arrays on their land, and the French energy giant Total recently set up a “Center for Expertise” in the art of growing food next to PV panels. And no wonder a 2024 study found that solar panels can increase yields for Chardonnay grapes by as much as 60 percent. There are a lot of studies like that, and they serve as a reminder that for many crops, some shade and extra humidity are a blessing, especially as temperatures rise. Near Phoenix, temperatures topped 110 degrees for 31 straight days in the summer of 2024, smashing old records. “The solar arrays help reduce our water use,” a USDA agronomist told a local reporter. “Plants don’t really need as much sun as they get in the West.” Even skipping irrigation every other day, soil moisture under the panels was 15 percent higher than nearby unshaded plots, and black-eyed peas were growing faster because they were less stressed.

Researchers have found much the same in Africa—test plots in Tanzania and Kenya, for instance, revealed that corn, Swiss chard, and beans were thriving under panels. “We created a microclimate that helped certain crops produce more, but they were also better able to survive heat waves and the shade helped conserve water, which is crucial in a region threatened by climate change,” the study’s lead author explained. In Phoenix, which is surrounded by desert, windstorms increasingly blow dust hundreds of feet into the air—that’s because the crust of the desert’s soil is so easily broken, even by a footstep. But this “biocrust” seems to be naturally re-growing under solar panels, which researchers at Arizona State described as “beach umbrellas.” Indeed, they’re now growing these crusts under solar arrays to replant in damaged desert areas; “crustivoltaics,” they’re calling it. In China, where great dust storms have swept off the Gobi into the cities of the country’s north for decades, they’re finding the same thing: the ground under solar arrays had higher plant and microbial diversity than the surrounding desert.

The warmth of the sun was a joy for most of human history; we’re programmed to smile when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and warms our shoulder blades. Thanks to human foolishness, this source of life has become the curse of our age: every tenth of a degree increase in the global temperature now moves another 100 million people out of comfortable climate zones. But now it’s going to have to be our salvation—harnessing the sun is our one way out. And that means luxuriating in the shadows that our planet-saving technology can cast. Some of that technology is coniferous, some of it is deciduous, and some of it is photovoltaic. All of it is delicious. ♦

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is also co-founder of Third Act, which mobilizes people over 60 for action on climate and justice.

Precious Shadows

Our existence is predicated on a delicate balance of hot bodies. The human body maintains, on average, 98.6℉. We are unable to survive a fluctuation in our core temperature of even a few degrees. The Sun is a hot body, whose surface atmospheric temperature is a sweltering 10,000℉, climbing to a molten 1,000,000℉ in the corona. Despite the impression that we bask in the warmth of the solar rays, at nearly a million miles from the Sun, the Earth would be a frozen, ice-covered planet were it not for the natural greenhouse effect which maintains our atmosphere at a temperate 60℉, warm enough to thaw oceans. While extremophiles might evolve on a frozen planet, we know from Neptune-like giants and icy moons in our own solar system that a frozen Earth would not experience the fecundity we celebrate at the comfortably habitable 60℉. We also may not survive thermal fluctuations on Earth. Climate scientists implore the industrialized world to contain escalations in the global average temperature to below +2℉. Which is all to repeat: our existence is predicated on a delicate balance of hot bodies.

You might imagine that the Sun and the biosphere and your physique operate according to vastly different and rather complex processes. The Sun is a thermonuclear furnace, the Earth is a big rock, and you are a living organism with curious networks such as a limbic system. The characterization of all three as hot bodies might seem more than a little bit reductive. And yet, in a demonstration of the almost unfathomable power of foundational physical principles, there is a universal description of all hot bodies: Planck’s law, an equation of such fundamental and revolutionary significance as to secure a place in the top five list of greatest equations of all time, alongside Newton’s laws and E=mc

Planck’s law, proposed in 1900 by the revered German physicist Max Planck, requires only a single input: temperature. Temperature itself is a subtle concept, emerging from the collective behavior of immense assemblages of particles. The temperature of air is the average energy of motion—the kinetic energy—of all the molecules comprising the air moving every which way, scattering about. The room feels hotter when air particles move faster, colder when they move slower. The same is true of the molecules in the Sun’s atmosphere. And, maybe surprisingly, the same is true of the molecules in your flesh. They may not be free to fly around the room, but they jiggle in their locales and that jiggling is also a form of motion with a corresponding kinetic energy. More energetic feels hotter, less energetic feels colder.

I cannot see you glowing in the dark because our eyes cannot effectively collect light that cold, but I can see you with the aid of thermal goggles. I can see your Planck spectrum.

Vibrating, scattering, dashing, jiggling molecules emit light. The Sun is the great giver of light, unrivaled in our planetary system. Our entire visual system—with the eye as detector, the nerves as wiring, and the brain as central computing—evolved just to detect light from the Sun. Our eyes’ peak sensitivity is attuned with the Sun’s peak emission, unsurprisingly, and is limited to a very narrow range of energies, detecting less than one octave of the Sun’s multi-octave spectrum. Our consciousness experiences light of different energies as color. High-energy, hot light is perceived as blue, whereas low-energy, cool light is red. It might surprise you that the Sun is green, or at least greenish. I spent most my life thinking the Sun was yellow and we do historically refer to the Sun as a yellow star, but this impression is largely due to our eyes’ simultaneous collection of light across a spectrum of colors. Our ocular organs really detect a spectrum of 

. How our brains convert a range of light into a hallucination of a spectrum of colors is a whole other story that keeps neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness awake at night.

All of this is rather familiar: a spectrum of light, a spectrum of colors. Planck’s law tells you, on the basis of that one input—the temperature of the body—exactly the intensity of the light that will be emitted at a given color. The equation is depicted in the simple figure here, and all you need to consider for our purposes is that glorious peak, the top of that hill, the rapid ascent from the left and the subsequent descent to the right. This is Planck’s spectrum. All ideal, hot bodies emit a spectrum of light precisely as depicted in this picture. The numbers on the axes might change, but the characteristic shape of that upsweep, the ascent from the left and the descent to the right is universal. 

Burning embers, hot stellar nebulae, and incandescent bulbs all exhibit this spectrum.

You tell Planck’s law how hot the body is, and the equation returns, with no other information required, the intensity of the light emitted across the spectrum. The notion of a spectrum is much broader than just the colors our eyes perceive and stretches across the entire known range, from the lowest-energy radio and microwave radiation, up through the infrared, into the visible, past the ultraviolet, through X-rays and gamma-rays.

You are a hot body at around 98.6℉. You emit a spectrum of light just as depicted in the picture above with that sweeping peak landing squarely in the infrared. I cannot see you glowing in the dark because our eyes cannot effectively collect light that cold, but I can see you with the aid of thermal goggles. I can see your Planck spectrum.

Not all bodies are ideal hot bodies, perfect absorbers and emitters. Historically, ideal hot bodies have been called blackbodies to indicate zero light reflection. Real things are imperfect. The Earth reflects 30 percent of sunlight and so is more of a gray body. Fire is another example of a messy blackbody as a result of the chemical reactions of tinder and air. Still Planck’s spectrum fares brilliantly at predicting the luminosity of virtually every warm thing, from stars to ovens.

Even the universe glows as a hot body at a mere −454.7°F. The primordial light left over from the big bang is extremely cold, the hottest event in history having chilled over the course of a cosmic lifetime to that minute temperature, barely above absolute zero. But −454.7°F is still a temperature. When the data measuring the spectrum of the primordial radiation was revealed in 1981 and every point from every measurement landed 

—I find myself at a loss for a more emphatic phrasing—on that simple Planck curve, a conference hall of cosmologists leapt up in applause. The experimenters won the Nobel Prize in physics.

You would radiate blindingly in X-rays, decimated. The universe itself would be hysterically unstable. 

For the law he discovered, Planck also won the Nobel Prize in physics. The citation read, “in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta.” Not only did Planck deduce a law of sweeping universal power, he initiated a paradigm shift of tectonic proportions.

Prior to Planck’s discovery, guiding principles suggested that the intensity of hot bodies grew without bound at higher and higher energies. There was no peak in the spectrum. No downturn. Instead there was a nonsensical prediction of a runaway emission dubbed an “ultraviolet catastrophe.” If there were truly no downturn, the Sun would instantly radiate infinite energy with nothing left for the eons. You would radiate blindingly in X-rays, decimated. The universe itself would be hysterically unstable.

To neutralize the theoretical catastrophe, Planck hypothesized that light came in discrete units, 

, of discrete energies. The ultraviolet catastrophe is averted because the emission of quanta of higher energies becomes increasingly harder, increasingly more expensive energetically. Imagine adding weight plates in discrete increments of 50 pounds to a barbell. You’d manage fewer and fewer reps with each additional weight plate until you could no longer bench press the barbell. Similarly, the intensity of emission mellows at higher energies where the hot body can’t muster enough muscle to emit such hot radiation. The peak energy of the radiant light is naturally commensurate with the energy—the temperature—of the hot body. Planck’s universal law is a stunning consequence of the quantum nature of reality, and his discovery is credited with provoking the quantum revolution.

Our current climate crisis is caused by an unstable interplay of hot bodies, each a vibrating quantum system radiating beautifully at a peak color, as though emanating an aura. We are warned of enduring, unbearable heat waves and inhospitable shifts in rising temperatures. Our immediate future will depend on rebalancing that delicate interplay. In the far future, the ultimate climate catastrophe will be cold. In a few billion years, the Sun will bloat and distend, vaporizing the inner planets, then cooling, red and giant. After trillions of trillions of years, the remaining debris will be so cold that there will not be enough energy to emit the merest quantum of light. Our solar system will go dark except for the diffuse, hopeful rays of other, distant stars. ♦

Janna Levin is the Founding Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works and the co-editor-in-chief of

. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her most recent book is Black Hole Survival Guide.

Picture This: Hot Bodies

I took my kid to Rome in June. It was hot as the mouth of a lion. We were there to celebrate the end of middle school, surely the worst years of anyone’s life. The trip marked his coming of age—sort of like a bar mitzvah, minus the Torah portion. Round-trip from New York City, our footprint was over six metric tons of heat-trapping CO₂. I felt guilty about that, but I also wanted to make up for the sucky pandemic years when we were trapped in our apartment without escape. Back then, aged eight, aged nine, the kid would spin his globe, studying the shapes and names of other nations while dreaming of travel, or longingly flip through his book on the wonders of the world. Now, aged 14, he’d finally made it across the ocean to the boot of Italy, a full head taller than I, his mama, who hadn’t planned for the extreme heat.

Unlike other heat waves that have scorched Europe in recent years, such as Charon and Cerebus (named for the ferryman and fearsome three-headed dog in Dante’s 

) and Lucifer before them, this one had no name. Some climate experts argue that christening heat waves and categorizing them according to levels of severity, as government agencies do with tropical storms and hurricanes, might help raise public awareness of the dangers of heat through branding and PR. 

The World Meteorological Association disagrees

. Too sensational. Yet heat is a silent, invisible killer, claiming more lives than any other climate hazard. You can’t see it the way you can see a wildfire or a flood, which are secondary effects of planetary warming. Heat is the first order effect. You can’t photograph it directly. The problem is how it dries up the soil and turns trees into tinder, how it melts the ice sheets, how it creeps up on the body. Especially if you are old. Or sick. Or young. Or poor. The slow violence of it.

Picture this. The open bowl of the Colosseum at high noon, 104°F, with nothing so much as a cloud to protect us from the broiling sun. Above us the jet stream was splitting apart, leading to high pressure zones. An anticyclone had compressed and shoved down the air, which sizzled as it reached the ground, trapping us and much of Europe in a heat dome. To be sure it grew hotter this summer in cities across the globe—ranging from Isesaki (107°F), Rio de Janeiro (111°F), Phoenix (118°F) and Kvormuj (127°F)—but to me the Roman Colosseum felt like the hottest spot on Earth. How many gallons of sweat did we, the tourists walking through the ruins of empire, perspire that day? We hired a tour guide who gamely recited the marvels of engineering, but I felt so dehydrated, exposed, and concerned about how such warming would warp my kid’s future that I only absorbed two facts about the Colosseum. Number one: it was built by the hard manual labor of some 100,000 slaves. Number two: in its heyday, the world’s largest amphitheater had a retractable roof made of canvas sails that bathed its spectators in enviable shade.

One wonders, what is the breaking point? For food production? For human, let alone nonhuman, life? My friend Roy has remarked that every ruin is a testament to grandeur, "

," and a warning. Somewhere between the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, we saw someone in a nearby tour group pass out from heatstroke. With fear on his face, the guide cut our tour short. For quite some time, guides have been agitating for extended hours at major attractions in Rome to allow for tours at cooler, less punishing, parts of the day. Two months after our visit, a guide showing another group around the Colosseum in the baking heat collapsed and died of a suspected heart attack on the job.

As for my son—who may at my age recall this summer as one of the coolest of his life rather than one of the warmest in recorded history—he retained almost everything we learned about the Colosseum. I could remark about shifting baselines and how my son is adapting to the new normal. But climate change is only part of his unfolding story. More remarkable to me than record-breaking temperatures, the death toll of this June’s particular heat dome (2,300) and the number of European heat deaths two summers prior (over 47,000) was that my baby’s voice had changed. How was it possible that he already needed to shave? On our crawl back to the pensione, my teenager stopped by a Madonnelle installed on a street corner overlooking one fountain or another to call his grandmother. 

She would appreciate the hundreds of shrines to the Madonna and child, he figured, since she was Catholic. It saddened him that she’d never been to Rome when he was enjoying it so much. The new pope was originally from Chicago, just like her. This was a jubilee year, when Catholics are invited every quarter century to renew their faith. The theme for 2025: “Pilgrims of Hope.” Was she planning to get here before she died? he asked. No, my mother answered from the other side of the warming ocean—he would have to be her eyes. He told her with delight about what went down at the sites we’d seen: the vestal virgins buried alive if found unchaste, the battles between gladiators, the crimes of the house of Borgia, the cruel methods of papal executioners, the technique of chiaroscuro mastered by Caravaggio, the artfully arranged bones in the crypt of the Capuchin monks including the tiny skulls of children. He told her dutifully about the Madonnelles, candlelit symbols of Marian devotion. How back before gas and electricity provided streetlight, the votives lit up the dark. He latched on to the sacred and the profane, I realized, alongside the concept of memento mori. 

What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be.

My friend Roy has remarked that every ruin is a testament to grandeur, a monument to human pride, and a warning.

Here are some mortifying heat index stats shared by 

Jeff Goodell in The Heat Will Kill You First

 Almost twice as many people now die per year from extreme heat than from firearms. Owing to climate-driven heat and drought over the last 20 years, global agricultural production has dropped 21 percent. Land animals are migrating to cooler, higher latitudes at an average speed of one mile per year; malaria-carrying mosquitoes at 2.5 miles per year. 75 percent of urban trees are forecast to die from a combination of heat and drought by 2050. Today, 30 million people live in extreme heat. By 2070, the number of people likely to live in extreme heat is two billion. By 2100, half of the world’s human population will be exposed to life-threatening combinations of humidity and heat.

We flew back to the Bronx. New York City, with its average 500-plus heat deaths a summer, was—I kid you not—even hotter than Rome. Much has been reported about the urban heat island effect, with our buildings, concrete, pavement, dark asphalt and roofs absorbing the sun’s heat and re-radiating it at night, worst of all in poor neighborhoods where there’s not enough green. We can be five degrees hotter than the leafy suburbs around us; 20 degrees hotter at night. “Heat like this can kill,” NYC Emergency Management warned on social media upon our return. Bad as it is now, by the 2050s, when my kid may have kids of his own, New York can expect our number of 90-degree days to double. Heatwaves could triple or quadruple.

With the heat index factoring for humidity, the weather forecast for my son’s graduation day was an ungodly high of 109℉. I wrestled with whether to invite my mother to the ceremony. What if her car broke down on the highway? Unlikely, but still. In the time it takes to hard boil an egg, the temperature inside a car can increase by 20 degrees or more. In 30 minutes, on a hot summer day, the inside of a car can reach up to 140℉, which is the temperature at which tap water can give you a third-degree burn. In the end, I left the decision up to her. She adjusted for the weather by rising before the sun to make the drive.

The problem is how it dries up the soil and turns trees into tinder, how it melts the ice sheets, how it creeps up on the body. Especially if you are old. Or sick. Or young. Or poor. The slow violence of it.

I felt grateful that my mother got to watch her grandson graduate. I felt alarmed when one of his classmates fainted in the heat before crossing the auditorium stage. The incident went unremarked by the school principal whose speech about the bright future of MS141’s class of 2025 sounded frankly like fiddling while Rome burns; disconnected from the actual level of risk we were all experiencing just by being there. You can’t see the heat in the family picture we took after the ceremony under an awning rigged with blue and yellow balloons. Not directly. Yet our graduate is down to his shirtsleeves, having removed the tie and jacket we bought for the occasion in Italy because it was too damn hot to maintain the fashion.

With working papers in hand, the kid wanted a summer job. I had hoped he might spend July and August working with friends in the garden of the neighborhood community center, growing vegetables as part of a program that runs a farm stand and helps to feed local seniors my mother’s age. But it feels too dangerous now to work safely outdoors in the summer. The upper end of human adaptability to humid heat is a wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees. Higher than that, hyperthermia can set in. An estimated 2.4 billion people worldwide are exposed to heat stress at work. My son is privileged not to have to participate in the sweat economy. He wound up working instead through a hybrid youth employment program for city kids that met indoors twice a week, and remotely, online. 

I take note of similar pivots to summer plans among friends with kids to avoid the heat or the smoke from wildfires, factoring for canceled camps and staying indoors with the AC running instead of taking trips to the lake, beach, or pool. We are able to recalibrate unlike more vulnerable folks delivering packages, picking crops, laying asphalt, patching potholes, fixing roofs, or doing any of the other low-wage outdoor jobs nobody else wants to do, made as dangerous by ICE raids targeting immigrant workers as by sweltering heat. We live in an air-conditioned bubble on an urban heat island. Yet I can’t help mourning the little losses adding up in the shadows of the bigger ones: the crop failures, foreclosed farms, disrupted food webs, concentrated casualties, metabolic stress, mass die-offs of marine life, the spread of invasive species, water scarcity, melting permafrost, rampant wildfires, global displacement, increased gun violence, ecological damage, and economic burn.

There’s only so much heat a body can take. The planet is approximately 1.8 to 2.3 degrees hotter now than it was in 1990 when I graduated from eighth grade. How much warmer it will be by the time my son reaches my age depends on how quickly industrialized nations act on their commitments to curb fossil fuel emissions. Scientists have long warned that 3.6 degrees of warming from the preindustrial era is the threshold for limiting the most severe impacts of climate change. It’s likely we’ve sailed past that target and are on track for six degrees of warming, or more, by century’s end. Given the thresholds we’ve already crossed, I ask myself daily: What acts do we owe these children graduating into a warming world?

Here is one answer, with its own extreme logic. On April 14, 2018, a 60-year-old civil rights lawyer turned environmental activist named David Buckel burned himself to death in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in what has been described as the first self-immolation to protest climate change. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote in an email to news media before dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself on fire. Prior to his final act, he worked towards marriage equality for same-sex couples, then ran a community compost site. He told nobody about his plan—not his husband, nor the lesbian couple with whom they parented a college-aged daughter, nor the volunteers he worked with. He chose a remote area, out of sight. Unlike the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire on a busy street in Saigon to protest oppression in 1963, there is no photograph of Buckel’s death to evoke an emotional response. And although his act is not one that I would ever choose, I name it to amplify the final line of his suicide note. “Here is hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded action.”

Here are some facts about the saving grace of trees, another answer with a similar hope. They are terrific combatants of climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide as they grow, filtering air pollution, exhaling oxygen, reducing water loss, managing erosion, and preserving biodiversity by supplying nectar, nuts, fruit and shelter to nonhuman life. In cities like ours, trees take the edge off heatwaves. They cool the air by sucking up water from the soil and sweating it out through their leaves via evapotranspiration, lessening our need for air conditioning and its greedy demand for energy. They offer us shade and solace, improving our mental and physical health.

For example, I need only lay my hand on the trunk of the enormous London plane tree growing streetside out our front door to calm my overwhelm. Maybe that’s why, among the many climate actions being made in cities around the world to adapt to rising heat—including putting up plexiglass awnings in open air markets to protect shoppers, renovating ancient aqueducts to irrigate parks with reclaimed water, painting streets white to make them more reflective, retrofitting old buildings with insulation and shutters to cool them down, agitating for a legal limit to indoor temperatures to reduce heat deaths, advocating for energy assistance programs to help the poor afford air conditioning, banning traffic to improve air quality, greening roofs to absorb heat and grow food, designating public cooling centers to help people cool off, extending the hours of public pools to offer reprieve, pushing for laws that would mandate rest and water breaks and heat protection standards for workers at outdoor sites, developing community centers with back-up power where residents can find refuge during blackouts or other disasters—the act I latch onto is expanding the tree canopy of the inner city.

You can’t see the heat in the family picture we took after the ceremony. Yet our graduate is down to his shirtsleeves, having removed the tie and jacket we bought for the occasion in Italy because it was too damn hot to maintain the fashion.

New York is a city of roughly eight million people and seven million trees. There are more trees, of course, where the moneyed live. In poorer neighborhoods like ours with legacies of racially restrictive redlining, the canopy can’t compare. Trees in low-income communities of color are less likely to be maintained and replaced when they die. Even when cared for, urban trees have a tough life. They are crowded and pissed on by dogs, beset by drought, heat, and compacted soil. Through the urban forestry arm of the Department of Parks and Rec, the city aims to increase its tree canopy from 22 to 30 percent, equitably, by filling out some of the bald spots, selecting for climate resilient species and training folks to nurture them when they’re young so they can take root. The deadline proposed for reaching that goal is 2035, by which time, God willing, my kid will have graduated college and the saplings going in the ground now will have matured along with him. So far, workers and volunteers in the city have planted over a million trees. In our part of the Bronx, there are plans for sweet gum and swamp white oak to be planted on a narrow path alongside 

a brook in the process of being unburied to alleviate flooding

Just as every 25 years the Catholic Church invites the faithful to come back into right relationship with God, with one another, and with all of creation, every 10 years the NYC Parks Department invites New Yorkers to count trees. 

 will be the fourth such census to measure the location, species, and health of the city’s trees. Thousands of volunteers, myself among them, will contribute to a data-driven effort to manage and grow our urban forest. It’s not enough, but it’s something. 

Another record-breaking summer is almost done. It’s September again. When I look back at the picture someone took of me and my son inside the Colosseum with a panoramic view of the ancient arena floor, I can’t see the heat. All I see is my kid at the threshold. The sweetness of him. His curiosity and potential. Despite its fame, the Colosseum was not his favorite part of our Italian holiday. He liked best of all the day trip we took to Naples by high-speed rail where we ate pizza and toured the underground tunnels of the ancient Roman aqueduct, repurposed as a bomb shelter during air raids in World War II. The underground was my favorite part, too, not only because that network of tunnels was cooler by several degrees than the city overhead, but because of the little tricycle someone had left down there during the war, now covered in dust. A mother had thought of that, I figured, so even in a hellscape, her kid had room to play. How else could she endure that scene, but to make it good for him?

At sunrise on his first day of high school, my kid rode the 1 train without me, down to Times Square, and walked three avenues west to his new school in Hell’s Kitchen. I was somewhat worried for his safety but trusted he'd survive. Meanwhile, I rode a Citi Bike to Starlight Park to count trees with other New Yorkers in the South Bronx. We learned to identify leaves by their shapes: football, spade, teardrop, hand. A young man had been fatally shot in the park the night before and the sun bore down with a vengeance. Adjacent to the crime scene, we faithfully measured and recorded the circumference of the trunks of some thirsty-looking trees on a bank of the Bronx River. The data set included a black locust, a pin oak, and an American elm. We determined their condition was fair. We added them to the inventory. This was a collective action with its own prayerful logic, like lighting candles in the dark. So many trees are still alive, and so many new ones on the way. ♦

Emily Raboteau is a Black Studies professor at the City College of New York and the author of

Among The Ruins

Once, on my first ever trip to Greece, my husband and I took what we thought was going to be a short walk around the island of Hydra, only to end up on a 13-mile hike through a seared, shadeless expanse of scrubby hills, completely lost. It was 96 degrees, and the final two thirds of the hike—after it had become plain that the “towns” we’d seen on the map were just sun-bleached ruins, and it was too late to turn back—offered not a single scrap of shade. We had just two tiny bottles of water between us.

This wasn’t how the day was supposed to go. We’d arrived in Greece in the middle of a merciless heat wave, and, after a few days, had opted to defect to Hydra from Athens because we couldn’t bear the city’s swelter and clog. Sleep had been hard to come by on account of the jetlag and our feverishly hot rented apartment; opening windows brought little relief, and along with it mosquitos and the neighborhood’s clamor of all-night partying four stories below. We’d been in search of the fabled ease of Hydra—a place where people hauled goods and water with donkeys instead of cars, replete with a horseshoe harbor, lovely cafes, and so many beaches in which to bob in the sea.

The trip was an important one for me, because I had always dreamed of visiting Greece. It was constantly pitched to me, a third-generation Greek-American, as a personal homeland. Here, finally, I was. I’d come to research the migration crisis—the real crisis that resulted in a humanitarian strangulation of refugees, not the manufactured one of their arrival and how it threatened the nativist vision of both Greece and Europe at large. But I was also researching my family’s Greek origins from the Ellis Island generation some 100 years prior, and grappling with the asymmetry with which we humans—within families, neighborhoods, nation-states, newspapers, and within our own souls—narrate stories of our migration.

Heat, once a matter of inconvenience, something to build one’s life around, is now a matter of life and death. 

And now, I was grappling with the unholy heat. On that hike, the path kept appearing and disappearing, leading us astray. Though we could see the port town of Hydra down below, miles away, and the boats and bathers on beaches nearby, we could never figure out how to reach them. How was it possible to slip so quickly from paradise into a sweltering hellscape of no exit? As we searched for the path I became so dehydrated that my legs wobbled, and I involuntarily peed my pants. I hallucinated patches of shade and sat in them, unaware I was fully bared beneath the sun. Each time I stopped, horseflies bit up my brush-scraped legs and feasted on the patches of blood. Knuckle-sized spiders began to appear on webbing spun across the pathway, crawling up my face and arms. Or was this, too, hallucination? I had begun to see an elaborate pantheon of gods and beasts.

Greece is a place plump with mythology—or rather, because of the nature of the cannon, Greece’s landscape is plump with a mythology known and legible to many of us who venture there, whether we trace roots there or not. Myths teach us something about the business of living, of staying alive. What was this mythic landscape revealing to me?

The future, I think. Many of us travel to Greece to study the past. But when it comes to our climate reality, Greece—which is heating up faster than most other places in the global north—is an oracle, helping us see, in terms both stark and enigmatic, what the future holds.

Eventually, we made it back to the harbor. No big thing. But this experience has continued to trouble me. It wasn’t just a foolish misadventure with a happy ending. My hike story reveals something about life in our era of climate emergency. We need only scratch the surface of a place (Google Hydra, behold its stunning beaches, and you’ll see what I mean), deviate only slightly off the well-trodden sections of the map, to reveal a precariousness, a peril—in the place itself, and in us humans trying to live upon it. How quickly a state of careless ease becomes one of mortal peril. Enter the future.

“Oh, everyone here knows never to go hiking after April,” a journalist acquaintance told me over coffee when I was back on Hydra a few summers later. It’s just a fact: too hot. The summers are for swimming, for sticking closer to town, for Freddo coffees, for afternoons of shade.

My great grandparents probably knew this, too, on their own island in the Cyclades, where walking paths loop from house to house, town to town, monastery to hillside to spring to mountaintop. But then again, Greece is some four degrees hotter now than it was in the pre-industrial era when my great grandparents were born. The country has always experienced summer heatwaves, but now such spikes are not anomalous, but the norm. In the past 20 years alone, the average temperature has risen two degrees, and 2023, 2024, and 2025 have been the hottest years on record.

Right now, as with every summer, part of Greece continues to be paradisal, while other parts have become seething conflagrations of wildfire and parch. In 2021, 125,000 hectares of land burned, cloaking parts of the country in a mask of black smoke. This past June was the third hottest June on record.

Anyone who has been to Greece in the summer knows the quality of the heat I’m talking about here—inescapable and unrelenting, an entity unto itself, so thick it feels as if you could grab a hunk of it and hold it in your hand. How soothing it is to slip into the water, beneath a patch of shade—to disappear the air. Greeks know how to manage the heat (build houses made of whitewashed stone, irrigate the olives during waves of heat, wear linen, hide out during the unholy hot of midday, don’t take moronic hikes during a heat wave in late June) but the heat is mutating in degree and in kind. Tourists—we’re hopeless. We trudge uphill to the Acropolis (that “monument to doomed expectations,” as Delillo once called it) and to the oracle at Delphi, panting, seeking the ancient ruins’ shadows. We take those ill-advised hikes. That day up on the shadeless hilltops of Hydra, I had been mortally afraid of how hot I had gotten, how disoriented. It wasn’t a total overreaction. In 2024, half a dozen tourists died of heat-related deaths.

“Who needs the scorching Med? Readers’ Tips for Cooler European Coastal Holidays” ran a recent 

 headline. But the heat isn’t, in fact, dissuading people—not yet; the number of tourists visiting Greece in 2024 was higher than ever before, and this year that record is likely to be broken yet again. But the tourism industry, which constitutes some 13% of Greece’s economy, is also under stress as the water table of the Mediterranean basin rapidly depletes. Greece’s government is forced to make difficult decisions about who gets the water as it becomes more and more scarce. The hotels need water for their pools and spas and cooling mid-day showers. The water-stricken islands like Hydra need it shipped in as they work to build more desalination plants. The farmers need it for their olives and tomato and sunflower crops. And the people need water to drink—to live.

After 20 years of reporting on migration I’ve come to learn that practically every migration story is also, in one way or another, and somewhere along the way, also a story of climate change.

The heating up of Greece is, of course, a global trend, but Greece—and southern Europe more broadly––is being hit particularly hard. The temperature of the Mediterranean basin is rising at a rate 20% faster than the rest of Europe, and in Greece, the cost of climate chaos per capita—basically, how much the average person ends up spending to offset, prevent, or recover from climate emergency—is some 10 times higher than any other Mediterranean country. Meanwhile, Greece’s rate of heat-related deaths is 393 per million—the worst of any country in Europe. Heat, once a matter of inconvenience, something to build one’s life around, is now a matter of life and death. And Greece is a disturbing harbinger for what is to come worldwide.

Heat death takes many forms: death by fire, death by asphyxiation, death by hyperthermia, death by drought, death by economic strangulation, even spiritual death from the grief of a landscape dying. As a reporter, my focus on Greece is always on some aspect of migration—the history of migration to and from Greece, the high numbers of people arriving to Europe by way of Greece today, the inhumane treatment they receive once they arrive, the government’s attempt to keep them out or remove them, the way Europe saddled Greece with the unequal responsibility for the migrants’ care. But climate change—the inhuman heat, and its effects—is always a topic impossible to avoid.

Refugees on the island of Lesvos complained mightily of the heat in summertime, when they practically cooked beneath their makeshift tents (the lucky ones managed to save up for fans they plugged into the camp’s dubious and makeshift network of wires). In September of 2020, that island’s camp burst into flames and, most likely as a result of high winds, historically dry temperatures and the cramped, shantytown nature of the camp quarters, spread so fast that within two days practically the entire place was turned to char. Many of the refugees living there had come from places stricken by their own climatic chaos: people leaving Gambia due to the encroaching Sahel, or the unreliable rains of Ethiopia, or the famine in Sudan. After 20 years of reporting on migration I’ve come to learn that practically every migration story is also, in one way or another, and somewhere along the way, also a story of climate change. To migrate, particularly from south to north, is to move through a multitude of ecosystems that are also migrating and mutating as a matter of survival.

It's an old truth about migration: we leave one kind of trouble only to find another. Last January, I was in Greece researching the future of the country’s olive harvest. The short of it: not good. Olives have been cultivated in this region for millennia because they thrive in arid climates—able to sustain themselves within great domes of heat, through long stretches of no rain. But wildfires have devoured hundreds of thousands of Greek olive trees in the past few years, some of them hundreds and even thousands of years old. Climate chaos has strangled the predictability of the harvest. Two years ago, farmers told me there are so few olives on trees that it wasn’t even worth harvesting them for oil. Part of the problem is the summer heat, but it’s the rising winter temperatures that do the most damage. Winter signals a tree into dormancy, which is what allows it to regenerate enough to burst buds in spring. Seasons, now, are just designations of time—not of weather.

“In these Classical lands,” wrote Théophile Guatier over 100 years ago, “the past is so alive that it leaves hardly any room for the present to survive.” Greece, the history books often tell us, is where all of “Western Civilization”—that fictitious creature—began. Greece projects an outward story of its own centrality, in part as a bid for continued inclusion and relevance in the European project, one that consistently sidelines and maligns Greece (strapping it with interminable debt after the 2008 financial crash, for instance, and marooning refugees in Greece’s care, rather than the more resourced countries of the North, as they navigate the asylum process.) The invitation as one climbs the Acropolis Hill is to believe in the origin story—to look backward in order to better understand democracy, civilization, the nation-state, oneself. But up on that hillside in Hydra, I came to understand that while Greece is known for its past, the place offers the most insight into what will become of the sea, as the fish rise to the surface in suffocation; at what will become of the trees, the branches bared of olives; the forests, charred black with fire. What will become of us?

Many of us all over the world will, as we always have, be forced to move. And in this dimension, too, Greece speaks more to an increasingly barricaded future than to the more porous, borderless past.

Once, I was reporting from the Evros region of Greece, the borderland with Turkey. It’s a beautiful and brutal mountainous region with lonely little towns, and an abundance of police and immigration trucks scouring the landscape. I studied the map and drove south, toward a green swath on the map where the river border emptied into the Thracian Sea—what turned out to be the Evros Delta National Park. Though few of the signs were in English, I gathered that the place was a sanctuary for birds—geese, pelicans, storks, flamingos. It was flat, and the wetlands stretched for what felt like miles. I was still close to the border (the border is everywhere, as the refrain goes) but felt liberated from its logic. Here, the river ran into the sea. The birds did their skyward work. And—best of all, on this blistering day—there was wind.

Seasons, now, are just designations of time—not of weather. 

I walked through the wetlands on a rickety boardwalk, the occasional plank wobbling underfoot, and out toward an observation tower in the distance. No one else was around—not a soul. I managed to glean from a sign that in a few months, the flamingos would make a waystation here on their journey south to Africa.

I’d spent the past 20 years studying human rights abuses and borders, parsing questions of belonging and exclusion. I’d been in Greece for just two weeks this time, reporting on the fire that had burned down the refugee camp on Lesvos and the six young refugees who, with zero evidence, were arrested for arson. It was July, and it was hot, and the country was studded with fires, more erupting each day. I was weary from it all and, though I would never give up my ceaseless inquiry into borders—not today, not ever—I did need a rest, a waystation, just like the birds. The future…it worried me—what we were doing to the planet, to one another. What might thwart this instinct to barricade and to bunker? What better temporary waystation from that future than this protected place, no people, crowded with birds, so much water. It was a place where you could almost imagine the world intact again, a future full of life. ♦

Lauren Markham is a writer based in northern California. Her latest book

Edge of Paradise

When Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne first met at Pioneer Works in 2015, they spent an entire weekend replacing every single mention of “climate change” in a dense 1,150-page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with “capitalism.” The simple gambit of 

 (2015) turned an otherwise mind-numbingly boring text into a tongue-in-cheek broadside against the real threat to our collective future: an economic system that mostly addresses the climate crisis with slick lip service and market-based solutions. The calculation of so-called carbon offsets, for example—whereby you compensate for pollution you cause by, say, planting trees—uses formulas so opaque that they beg countless questions, not least: who came up with them and why, and do they even work? Brain and Lavigne, in their respective solo work and collaboratively since that weekend in 2015, take precise aim at such systems—and more broadly at how corporations monetize our online selves—by building technological tools that are at once ad-hoc parodies of the “real thing” and real ways to make a difference.

 (2021), for which the duo designed an app that increases the duration of your sleep incrementally every night until, in three years’ time, you’ve reached “perfect sleep,” which is never waking—the perfect way to both avoid working and reduce your own carbon footprint. Another productivity-killer is 

 (2023), which prompts viewers to phone oil industry executives to waste as much of their time as possible. Both works are featured in Brain and Lavigne’s new Pioneer Works survey “

,” alongside a new carbon offset marketplace they created called 

 (2024-present). Here, efforts to compensate for your carbon footprint don’t involve planting trees but directly funding activists who’ve been jailed for, say, blocking an oil pipeline’s construction or camping in forests set to be felled. If you buy a certificate, an activist gets paid. Such transparency flies in the face of the pretzel-like ways markets bend to avoid the kinds of straightforward solutions—like buying and selling less stuff—that the climate crisis demands.

Fresh off their exhibition’s opening—and exhausted from installing its pieces across two floors at Pioneer Works—Brain and Lavigne sat down with their friend Shannon Mattern to discuss their respective backgrounds; how our online, personal data is surveilled, used, and disseminated; and how such information is given form in their work, both spatially and aesthetically.

Shannon Mattern

One of the first things we ever did together was an exhibition across the three public library systems in the city, called “Privacy in Public.” Sam, you found all of Mill Basin Library’s books on Amazon, and from their user reviews compiled lists of other products that readers of each book had bought. You printed these out on cards, then put them in the library’s books. Tega, you did a project called 

Tega Brain

I invited middle school kids to develop targeted ad campaigns to try to influence specific individuals or communities. The work was responding to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook users’ data was used for political advertising. So me and a bunch of eight and nine year olds developed campaigns. One kid tried to convince his parents to get a dog. (laughs)

I think these works foreshadow or embody some of the vibes and methods that are persistent throughout all of your work: fun, play, subterfuge, scrape-ism. But just for people who don't know you, could you maybe talk about your own individual backgrounds, which are very complementary in the work you do together.

My background is in environmental engineering, which has informed a lot of the work I've done around climate and the environment, and thinking about the ways technologies play into how we can act and engineer it. We’re seeing that in the context of AI and how it’s gonna help us address climate change. This techno-solutionism is so central to our thinking. So my work often looks at those issues, and also the way that environmental data and computing really play into that as well. I'm Australian originally, but when I came to the US it was in this post-Snowden leak moment. Everyone was thinking about what it means to live in this world of surveillance, and how all this data of our day-to-day, mundane activities were getting collected.

Sam Lavigne

It’s funny, I teach about both art and technology, but I'm neither a trained computer scientist nor a trained artist. I did comparative literature in undergrad, critical theory stuff. After school I basically taught myself how to program, to try to make a living and build websites for people. I was really, really bad at programming for a really, really long time. Eventually I decided to go back to school in this arts and technology program. Like Tega was saying, this was around when Snowden happened, and Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks, and I started becoming very interested in combining my ability to make websites with my interest in large collections of material. I started doing a lot of work around web scraping. We leave all these traces on the web, and through collecting those traces, we can understand how power is operating via the internet. The first project Tega and I ever did together was a web scraping project—it was actually done here at Pioneer Works in two days, for an event called Art Hack Day. It was like a sprint.

This was 2015, and there was, like, a hackathon every week. (laughs)

Tega and I made this really fun project together called the

 (IPC), where we downloaded every single thing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had ever produced—their PDF reports, their website, their videos—and did a find-and-replace of the phrase climate change with the word capitalism.

We were delighted to find that the grammar remained perfectly intact, and we just thought it really improved the focus of the IPCC, because we didn't feel like they were talking enough about the broader economic landscape we’re in, and how central that is to the climate challenge. We then published it all online, and someone from the IPCC reached out to NYU with a complaint they made to the State Department, about us using their logos. They were not happy. We had what started out to be a very tense email exchange, and then at some point he stopped replying to us because we asked if we could do a residency with the IPCC, to see if the IPC was something we could realize. I think then they understood that we didn't really have any power. (laughs)

There are some critical, aesthetic traditions in which you're working—The Yes Men, the Situationists—and which your work brings together. But I also love this show at Pioneer Works; it’s symbolically significant because you did one of your first projects together at Pioneer Works, and now you're exhibiting your individual and joint work together here. It shows how your individual sensibilities entwine over the course of your collaboration: you can see the influence of comparative literature, your understanding of the poetics of technology and its embodiment of power. Your partnership is such a beautiful example of how having a capacious mindset and multiple skills can be brought to bear on these larger global issues like climate change, or capitalism. It’s really important. Can you describe the show and how you gave it form?

“How to Get To Zero” begins on the second floor, and you start with the premier of our most recent work, called 

. It critically looks at climate markets—how they demand the quantification of the environment and the atmosphere—and takes the form of a carbon registry. We took methods from the offset industry and applied it to direct actions that’ve happened over the last few years that sabotage carbon infrastructures, like Blockade Australia shutting down the largest coal port in the world in Newcastle or the protesters of Standing Rock delaying the North Dakota pipeline construction. What else have we got in there?

Atlanta Forest Defense reducing the size of Cop City. That’s a new one we added for this show. There are a variety of other cases that have happened across the world. But to backtrack: the piece started a few years ago, when Tega got a grant from NYU to do a project around climate change. It was like a fairly sizable amount of money, I think $10,000. We were both frustrated about how climate art mostly just grieved. We should definitely grieve things, don't get me wrong…

But it just seemed so passive. We wanted to think instead about what we could do that was more action oriented. We wanted to locate where we have agency and not just give in to sorrow. That's what led us to really focus on examples of activism and trying to work with activists.

The very first thing we did was find folks who had been incarcerated for their climate activism, and we were like, "Let's just give it to them." We were looking for people who were currently in jail, but it was impossible to connect with them, so we found people who had 

 been in jail, someone involved in the Earth Liberation Front, for example. There was also someone from Sudan who had started an Extinction Rebellion chapter. We did short interviews with them and then gave them a fee, divvying up the money.

(2022), the center work in the second floor gallery. That's what got us thinking about whether we could systematize ways to pay activists or people doing real frontline work around the fossil fuel industry and its infrastructure. That's what led us to 

Could you describe the setup? You talked about these interview transcriptions being on banners in the room’s center. What else is there?

There’s a related work that takes the form of a call center, called 

 (2023). You’re basically invited to sit down and engage in a method of worker sabotage called time theft, where you waste time on the job by sleeping, napping, or being on social media. Whatever it is, it’s about being unproductive. In the call center you're invited to phone CEOs and executives in the fossil fuel industry and waste as much of

time as you can. We’ve developed a kind of methodology to quantify how much time wasted would result in what amount of carbon savings. The work really thinks about sabotage and non-productivity as a tool we have in the climate challenge.

I love that the room makes use of three very different architectures or spatial conditions. You have an area that looks almost like an expo installation with a parodic corporate demo video, plus interfaces that we can use to explore the product you're proposing; fences upon which are transcribed interviews; and then the call center off to the back. So there are multiple points of entry and multiple methods of climate intervention in one space. Then we move up to the third floor, and that's where you have sections for your individual projects.

Yeah, that's right. It's a bit of a journey. You're going back in time as you go through the show. The first two works on the third floor are both collaborative and engage with this idea of expanded geo-engineering.

So rather than the status quo idea of geo-engineering—which is to make an intervention in the carbon cycle through ecosystem restoration, or carbon removal by chemical processes—we wanted to think about geoengineering in terms of social or cultural interventions. One work engages with this idea through sleep, and it's a sleep app that adds one minute to your alarm clock every day to try and get you to sleep and rest more. A lot of the climate literature shows that if we were working three or four-day weeks, our emissions would be way down, so let's do that. (laughs)

We made an alarm clock app, where you put in your current sleep schedule—when you go to sleep, when you wake up. It sets an alarm for you, but then over the course of three years or so, it adds a minute to your sleep time until you achieve what we call perfect sleep, which is sleeping 24 hours a day. And then we made 

 (2021), which is a botnet that looks for news articles talking about climate change, and clicks on all their ads—which signals to news outlets that these articles are popular, but it also gives them money.

And in your individual practices, which are also displayed on the third floor, you show that media is more than an app—more than what we see on a screen. It's also the infrastructures that facilitate distribution of content or energy to be harvested, for instance. I'm wondering if you could just say more about how your solo practices and your individual topical interests in ecology, environment, policing, and surveillance are now entangled with 

I've got two pieces, one of which is a set of WiFi routers that are tied to different natural phenomena, like the moon cycle. Then there’s 

 (2023), where we’ve created a solar-powered cloud of servers around the world that serves web content from wherever there is the most sunshine at the time.

I have this nightmare video room, in which three separate pieces alternate. One is made from my attempt to download the face of every cop in New York City—which I did not do, but I got about a third of them. There’s a related website called Coppelganger that allows you to do facial recognition on cops, like at a protest when maybe their badge is covered. It also allows you to see what cops you look the most like. The second piece is made from leaked police helicopter surveillance footage, mostly in Dallas. I wrote a program that extracted just the zooming shots from 600 hours of tape. And then the final one is a systematic overview of every single video that ICE has published. All of them allude to the real relationship between climate and policing which is a relationship that’s frequently obscured. So these works speak to this underbelly of repressive forces and the institutions and mechanisms that are propping up the current state of affairs.

You both work across different geographic and material scales—and different temporal scales, too. You work with hardware, you work with software, you build infrastructures. You're proposing new markets, new kinds of geotechnical and even cosmo-technical systems. How does working across those different scales allow you to think about the different strategies or points of intervention?

I think we try to remake everyday systems for our own agenda, or, to shift their goals or politics. So many corporations, countries, cities, individuals, are making claims around net zero. And what sits behind that are these carbon markets which are unregulated, and extremely boring. (laughs) They’re not getting a lot of public scrutiny, despite the fact that every time you open up the newspaper, there's a story about some offset scam that's not really removing carbon. So the whole thing did feel like this big spectacle that isn't actually doing the material work that we need it to. Climate finance is a spectacle as well. Is it actually doing what it claims? With 

we’re trying to hold ourselves to the same standards as the industry does while supporting direct action and industrial sabotage rather than what you might expect to see on some of these registries. So with all of our projects, we’re attempting to take a pretty mundane or ubiquitous technology, like a sleep app, and put a twist in it to think about how it could be reconceived.

When you're thinking about how something gets designed and constructed, you have to think more broadly about infrastructures and supply chains, and that usually takes you on a journey, right?

In a lot of our projects we’re really reverse engineering a system and then repurposing it. And in doing so we come to understand how a system works.

We also think it's really important for us not to just reproduce the slickness of so much digital technology. Again, it’s so boring. (laughs) So making bad Photoshops or letting bits of our bodies go into a work is important to us. We want it to be scrappy, because it helps you realize that these systems are made by people, and it's all just a bunch of decisions that could’ve been made differently.

Yeah, that's certainly a concern I’ve seen throughout your work. We see 

’s carbon certificates, I couldn’t help but pay attention to their warped borders, not the classical, credibility-signaling ribbons or heralds. You’re attuned to these graphic languages of authenticity or verification, but then there’s something punked about all of it. Even listening to the corporate voiceover, there’s a distancing, a disaffection, that makes us aware of how normalized and naturalized some of that “authoritative” language and visual culture has become.

Yeah, but it's also very important to us that when we're trying to reproduce a system, it works. It's not just speculative.

There’s a tone of hope to the work. It's the promise of collective action, the promise of mutual aid, the promise of building your own infrastructures that embody a different set of values. How do you situate that hope in the context of the political climate we find ourselves in today? You were talking earlier about going through the IPCC reports and replacing all these words. Our federal government is literally doing that right now.

Maybe the best conceptual artists of our time are in the Oval Office. (laughs) But yeah, there’s always an interesting tension in our practice, because Sam's work is often a lot more dystopian, focusing on the scary, ugly side of the internet, whereas my work has a utopian side. I like to repurpose infrastructures in ways that are about equity or participation or sustainability, as opposed to extraction. We made 

 10 years ago, and it was very amusing for us. We try to make work to amuse ourselves and cope with life at this point in human history. We're in a very bad place, but I also think that climate doomerism doesn't work, and it's not producing the change we need to see. That’s what the arts and humanities are so good at envisaging: "What else can we do?" Of course there are limitations to that; I'm not saying that artists are gonna save the day with climate change. (laugh) That would be completely unfair. But I do think we need to keep imagining how we can get out of this, as opposed to just focusing on what a bad place we're in. What can an artwork be? What can art be a space for, what can it do that is hard to do elsewhere? ♦

Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council and 2025 Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress.

Climate Hacks

If a metal poker has been left standing for a long time with one end in the fire, never grab the other end. Obvious, right? Heat flows from hot to cold: that’s the second law of thermodynamics (a word that literally means “movement of heat”), to which there are no known exceptions. But what is it, exactly, that flows from the heated end of the metal bar to make the rest of it searing to the touch? What is it that we feel emanating from the stove, beating down from the noonday sun, or that warms our hands around a mug of chocolate on a winter’s night?

The question is at least as old as civilization. Yet less than two centuries have passed since we finally understood the true nature of heat. Not until we began to truly comprehend the nature of matter itself could we have ever hoped to resolve this—forgive me—burning question.

 is a relic of the longstanding view that it must be some kind of fluid substance—that the heat at the red-hot end of a poker must seep along the metal bar like moisture spreading through the fibres of a wet cloth. To the ancient Greeks, heat and cold were identified with the four fundamental elements classified by Empedocles and endorsed by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. But this was a subtle matter. Each of the four classical elements—fire, air, earth and water—possessed two out of four fundamental qualities: fire was hot and dry, air hot and moist. Fire was thus a substance that could confer hotness.

 produced by the body: generated by the heart, it was connected to the soul itself. He thought that heat was responsible for the digestion of food. His mentor Plato had proposed his own theory for this phenomenon, arguing that the four elements were composed of atom-like particles with geometric shapes. The pointy, sharp-edged tetrahedra of fire could cut up food matter to release its nourishment. It was because of the sharp, prickly edges of fire particles that a burn is so painful.

Of course, we now know they were wrong. What remains impressive, however, is how Plato and Aristotle sought to rationalize our experience of the world in terms of general principles, even if these operated beyond our perception (no one could hope to 

 these fire particles). But the long road from Plato’s tetrahedral atoms and Aristotle’s vitalism to our modern view of heat as motion, not matter, is more than a linear correction of old ideas. In getting to the heart of heat, we’ve found ourselves facing questions of cosmic significance—about the fate of the universe, the origin of time, and the riddle of life itself.

The Aristotelian scheme of elements remained predominant in the Christian and Islamic worlds until the waning of the Middle Ages, by which time natural philosophers had begun to suspect that things were more complicated. One popular alternative way to think about the constitution of matter was proposed by the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who said in the early sixteenth century that all substances were made of three “principles”: sulfur, mercury, and salt. These weren’t quite as arbitrary as they might sound, for the eighth-century Islamic alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan had asserted that sulfur and mercury were the ingredients of all metals. By adding salt, Paracelsus claimed to include all other materials too, including our own bodies. Besides, in inflammable sulfur we can recognize a kind of substitute for Aristotelian fire; fluid mercury was analogous to water and salt akin to earth.

In getting to the grips of heat, we’ve found ourselves facing questions of cosmic significance—about the fate of the universe, the origin of time, and the riddle of life itself.

The German chemist Johann Becher, an advocate of Paracelsus’s ideas, replaced this trio of principles with three kinds of “earth”: 

 (oily or fatty earth). Fire and hotness still feature in these elemental schemes: the last of these ‘earths’ was thought to be abundant in things that burn. In the early eighteenth century another German chemist, Georg Ernst Stahl, renamed 

 “phlogiston” from the Greek word “to burn”.

Was heat, then, the same as this “fire-element” flowing from hot objects, or was it simply a property of phlogiston? Natural philosophers at that time were hazy about such distinctions. The fact was: where there was heat, there was phlogiston.

Phlogiston has a bad reputation for misleading chemists for the better part of a century. But while it doesn't feature in today's roster of chemical elements, its theory offered a valuable framework for thinking with. It helped to make sense of various observations about burning: why, say, many substances like wood lose mass as they burn (their phlogiston escapes to the air), and why a candle burning inside a sealed glass jar will eventually go out (the air has become saturated with phlogiston and will absorb no more). But in the end there were just too many problems with the idea. If, for instance, phlogiston is lost from a material when it burns, why do “burned” metals—those heated in air—

In 1783, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier wrote a paper which offered an alternative idea: when things burn, they don’t release phlogiston but instead combine with a gaseous element in the air, which Lavoisier called 

. Covered candles stop burning when they have used up all available 

Lavoisier was right about oxygen, of course, and French chemists quickly adopted his new system of chemistry. (Those in other countries dragged their heels.) In the void of phlogiston, Lavoisier offered a new theory: there was a “subtle fluid, the accumulation of which is the cause of heat and the absence of which is the cause of coldness.” Like Aristotelian fire, this fluid could flow through the gaps between the “corpuscles of matter”, and it moved from hot bodies to cold ones. Lavoisier called this stuff “igneous fluid, the matter of heat and fire.”

Four years later, Lavoisier and his colleague Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau introduced a different and rather more original name for this fluid: 

, meaning heat or warmth. In his influential 1789 textbook 

, Lavoisier listed no fewer than 33 substances he considered to be elements, including oxygen and caloric. He also showed how one could measure the flow of caloric using a device he called a calorimeter.

Was cold then just a paucity of caloric? In 1790 the French experimental scientist Marc-Auguste Pictet claimed that he could collect and focus cold using mirrors, just as one could focus light. In this way, a cold object could be used to cool another one nearby. Pictet’s experiments suggested, at least to the American scientist Benjamin Thomson—who was later ennobled as an officer in the Bavarian army, and became known as Count Rumford—that cold was produced by a kind of wave-like radiation. Rumford called this radiation frigorific rays. He also embraced the idea, common among his contemporaries, that all of space was filled with an imperceptible fluid called the ether, which he believed could carry coldness just as water carries ocean waves.

Kelvin christened that gloomy future the Heat Death of the universe. Devout Christians were dismayed: what kind of eternal life was that? 

But wait a minute! If cold was a wave—a vibration of the ether—then maybe heat was too? Rumford started to promote the idea that heat is indeed merely a vibration, which could be carried not only by ether but by the “corpuscles”—the atoms, we’d now say—of matter. That idea faced stiff opposition from the caloric theory of the mighty Lavoisier. But in a paper presented in 1798 to the Royal Society in London, Rumford described strong evidence in his favor—which he’d happened upon while superintending the boring of cannons for the Bavarian army.

When the hollow central channel was bored into brass cannons, Rumford noticed, the metal became intensely hot through friction. Military engineers had likely observed something similar for several centuries—but if the heat were caused by a flow of caloric from the metal of the cylinder, then repeated boring ought gradually to exhaust its supply, with the amount of heat produced decreasing over time. Yet it didn’t. No matter how many times the same cylinder was bored, a seemingly boundless amount of heat was generated. So much, in fact, that when iron was bored inside a box filled with water, the water could be raised to a boil. “It would be difficult to describe the surprise and astonishment expressed in the countenances of the by-standers,” Rumford wrote in his paper, “on seeing so large a quantity of cold water heated, and actually made to boil, without any fire.”

Thus did Rumford conclude that heat “cannot possibly be a 

. But motion of what? “I shall not presume to trouble the Society with mere conjectures”, Rumford airily wrote.

More than 40 years later, an English engineer named James Joule had an idea about the matter. Joule was a student of the chemist John Dalton, who in 1808 had proposed that all substances are composed of atoms. What if heat, Joule proposed, was the motion of these atoms?

Joule was little known at that time, and his idea was dismissed at first by some of the giants of British science, such as Michael Faraday and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin, after whom the scientific temperature scale is named). But in the late 1840s, Joule conducted experiments that changed many minds.

He made a cylindrical copper container, filled with water, that held a kind of paddle wheel, which could be turned by strings attached to an axle. Joule attached weights to the string, which passed over pulleys, and by cranking the axle he could lift the weight and set the paddle wheel spinning inside the chamber. As the wheel turned, the agitated water warmed up little by little. From the raising of the weight, Joule could calculate how much work was done in turning the crank-handle—and after taking account of all the sources of heat loss, he showed that the amount of work done in lifting was equal to the amount of heat generated in the chamber. “Wherever mechanical force is expended”, Joule wrote in 1850, “an exact equivalent of heat is always obtained.”

The German physicist Rudolf Clausius expressed this principle in a different way. “By the expenditure of an equal quantity of work an equal quantity of heat is produced”, he wrote. In terms of Joule’s experiment, this meant the amount of energy expended to turn the paddlewheel was equal to the amount of heat energy added to the water (plus the heat that leaks away into the surroundings). No energy simply vanishes: all can be accounted for. Or in the formulation intoned by school pupils today: energy can be neither created nor destroyed. And 

 is the first law of thermodynamics, the science of heat flow that Clausius (who also articulated the second law that we saw earlier) helped to launch.

Joule’s work killed off caloric theory. Or almost did. Today scientists measure energy (such as heat energy) in units of joules, but the older units of calories still persist.

So there it was, as Kelvin and others soon accepted: heat is motion. Specifically, it is the motion of atoms. As bodies rub against one another, their atoms are set jiggling, and the bodies get warmer. The sun’s rays falling on a surface are absorbed by the material’s lattice of atoms, which are made to vibrate more vigorously. Chemical energy released by metabolic reactions in our bodies jangle our molecules and keep our bodies warmer than their surroundings typically are.

It's no coincidence that the science of thermodynamics arose at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. For it was then that efficiency became the watchword: how could the steam engines, the mills and blast furnaces, be operated most efficiently, which is to say, so that the maximum amount of work could be obtained from a given amount of fuel? This was all about reducing the losses of energy as useless heat, like that which radiated away into the surroundings by the hot chamber of a steam engine. The second law revealed that it was impossible to operate any machine with 100 percent efficiency: some energy was always squandered as heat. That was a sad fact of life for the factory manager—but for the physicist it meant something remarkable, even alarming. Eventually, 

 pockets of energy in the universe would be dissipated as heat, leaking into the environment and equilibrating until everything reached the same temperature. At that point, it would be impossible to extract any more work, because there wouldn’t be an impetus for heat to flow from hot to cold. Then there could be no further change: the entire universe would be a barren, uniform buzz of vibrating atoms. Kelvin christened that gloomy future the Heat Death of the universe. Devout Christians were dismayed: what kind of eternal life was that? Did thermodynamics undermine their faith? There was a lot more at stake in understanding heat than merely keeping a factory’s fuel bills down.

Since the beginning of all time and space, all change has followed a preferred direction: the one dictated by the second law, whereby heat flows from hot to cold and thereby gets inexorably more equal everywhere. 