Once upon a time in a hot pool in Tempe

Once upon a time, there was a budding young scholar from the Northeast who moved to Tempe, Arizona. After settling into her new apartment, she decided to try the community pool and exclaimed, “It’s heated!”

Her companion looked on in dismay. “No. It’s August.”

My knowledge of heat has come a long way since that first weekend of grad school at ASU. But my approach has remained rooted in the everyday ways ordinary people experience it.

I’ve learned from climate scientists using satellite images; simulated environments; temperature sensors nailed to trees inside Dixie cups; and a robot named MaRTy. I’ve learned from people living and working in the Eastern Coachella Valley—not the fun Palm Springs vacation part, the farming-in-110°F-in-April part. And I’ve learned from local governments, from my own backyard in Southern California, where they’re trying to figure out how on earth to create more shade when it can cost $10,000 just to pour concrete at one bus stop, to Rome, where they’re trying to figure out how on earth to create more shade when the Vatican is, well, slow to change.

I even got to sit front row and center at a White House Summit on Extreme Heat, where I, in the grand tradition of Wellesley grads and Leslie Knopes everywhere, furiously took notes. Then I went home and made my team a PowerPoint about how the federal government could help communities across the country plan for heat.

Well, that’s on pause.

But I still get to advise my home state of California as it makes big efforts to help communities deal with extreme heat.

In my day job, I lead an amazing heat policy and planning research team at UCLA and teach some smart cookies in Urban Planning. I recently succumbed to side-hustle culture and started Hot Grrrl Agenda. And my evening job involves shade-hopping with my daughter while brushing off her assessment that my new side hustle is “cringe.”

Because I believe, unabashedly, that we all need some real talk about how to live well in hot weather.