In Phoenix, a Desert City Plants Shade Like It's a Public Utility

PHOENIX — On a Saturday morning that already threatened forty degrees, seventy volunteers moved down a Maryvale street with saplings and augured holes, and Beatriz Alvarado counted them in like a foreman. "Shade is the cheapest cooling this city has, and we grow it ourselves," she said. With the global mean anomaly holding at plus 2.8 degrees, Phoenix's low-income neighborhoods run measurably hotter than its leafy ones, and Alvarado's brigade has spent three autumns closing that gap tree by tree — some two thousand planted so far, she said, by a rotation of neighbors, students and retirees. The work is unglamorous and slow; a desert sapling needs years and jealously guarded water to throw real shade. But the volunteers speak of it as belonging as much as cooling. Elder resident Ray Tsosie, who has planted alongside them since the start, put it plainly. "You plant a tree in a place," he said, "and you have said you intend to stay."