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At some point, after he stocked the rivers with salmon and peopled the villages with descendants and in-laws, Coyote disappeared. Of course, he did not die—at least not permanently. Coyote, like the Coyote People, could not be put down forever. He would come back. Someday... probably? And we would too. At least that’s what the Coyote People believed back when we still called ourselves Coyote People.

The most common account held that Coyote would reappear in the End Times. When things came full circle, the trickster who molded the world into its Indigenous state would be there. Just to do whatever trickster shit needed to be done—make something, like a son; or break something, like the witches’ fishing weir; or steal something, like goose eggs or a wife; or invent essential ergonomic functions, like the elbow; or live a life full of damn good stories. Because how the world ends is just as important as how it begins.

Some said Coyote would reappear as a cooler version of Jesus. Cooler because if you listen to stories of his feats, Coyote resurrected way more than just once and did more to create our world than Jesus. Jesus died for our sins, and yet thereafter we were still sinners who could be damned to Hell. In the single act of liberating salmon—just one of many feats—Coyote provided over half of the Coyote People’s calories most years. While Christianity hands down eternal sentences for life mistakes, Coyote fills bellies, lives his own mistakes, and laughs about it all. According to a belief common among the Coyote People in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Coyote’s next coming would mark the renewal of the world and the return of an old and good Indian way of life.

Christians fingered Coyote as the Antichrist. Many believed the Indian way of life was the Devil’s work. That the Coyote People and our beliefs were wrongheaded, and that we would be punished for all time if we did not renounce Coyote and follow Jesus. And to make sure we did, they kidnapped our children and took them to schools where kids and even newborns were physically, psychologically, and sexually abused, assaulted, traumatized, neglected, diseased, starved, raped, and sometimes even killed.

I have come to see Coyote as creator and destroyer, messiah and Antichrist, forefather and deadbeat dad. He is the embodiment of forces greater than ourselves that drive and ride the metamorphoses of the world: of climate, geology, environment, technology, and culture. Coyote was change incarnate. And as his descendants, we carry that same power of transformation. Colonizers tried to remake us in their image or kill us—physically, legally, and culturally— countless times by countless means. But every time we came back, not as whitewashed primordial cultural goo, but as ourselves— as distinct peoples with prior and rightful claims to these lands carrying in our culture, memory, and blood the knowledge of how to live well upon them. To survive, we remade ourselves and the world around us in whatever way we could—often, and especially, by getting into trouble like Coyote, who broke that fishing weir, or my pé7e Zeke, who, amidst a genocidal apocalypse, almost single-handedly repopulated the Coyote People all up and down the Fraser River watershed; or my dad, who narrowly escaped the incinerator and many other brushes with death to bring the NoiseCat name and family back from the Land of the Dead.

In late May 1808, in this era of mass death, incipient invasion, and earth-shattering transformation, three birchbark canoes carrying a party of two dozen white men and two Indigenous translators came barreling down the Fraser River just after the spring floods, when the river was roaring in freshet. At their helm was a stubborn, barrel-chested, and heavy-browed 32-year-old Scotsman born in the colony of New York named Simon Fraser. He planned to follow the wild, unnavigable river that would eventually bear his name all the way to the Pacific. It was a preposterous mission. After he announced his intentions to the Coyote People, one of Fraser’s men fired off a swivel gun mounted on one of the canoes in an attempt to shock and awe the Natives. But the gun backfired, and the gunner was wounded. It was an appropriately slapstick entrance for this foolish voyage of discovery. Understandably, some of our ancestors went, “Coyote? Is that you?”

I have come to see Coyote as creator and destroyer, messiah and Antichrist, forefather and deadbeat dad. 

Though not all. Fraser’s identity was hotly debated. Some among the Nlaka’pamux said Fraser must be Coyote returning at the End Times. Others, like St’at’imc, said Fraser and his party were more likely cannibals. They were hungry, dangerous, and consumed many dogs. Still others, like the Coast Salish, said Fraser and his party were transformers, like the ones who shaped the world in the beginning. These ideas are reflected in the words the Coyote People use for white people. “Semé7,” the most common, comes from the root “sem,” meaning “to tell stories.” The word for Frenchman, “Stspetékwllúy,” comes from the word for narratives about tricksters, transformers, and supernatural events: tspetékwll.

Although not all Coyote People believed Fraser was Coyote, there was a common understanding, reflected in our words, that the incursions of colonists were world-changing events marking a new epoch for our people and planet. Some European explorers and historians have trumpeted these historical, linguistic, and ethnographic facts as evidence that Natives believed Europeans were gods. But that’s an arrogant Eurocentric way of looking at things. Because in our accounts, supernatural beings—especially tricksters like Coyote—were often out for themselves and up to no good even while their actions were of incredible consequence. And in all these ways, Fraser fit the bill.

Simon Fraser’s father, a Roman Catholic Scottish Highlander, settled in Mapletown, New York, in 1774. A British loyalist, the elder Fraser fought for the Crown during the American Revolution and was taken prisoner in 1777. Held in an American jail for 13 months, he died a prisoner of war. His widow lost the family farm and fled to Canada, where Simon’s modest upbringing included just two years of formal education. As a teen, Fraser went to work at the North West Company in Montreal, a fur-trading outfit increasingly manned by Scots. Fraser, a capable frontiersman and trader, was named partner by 25.

But the North West Company’s business was far from thriving. The larger Hudson’s Bay Company controlled forts and shipping ports on Hudson’s Bay, pushing the North West Company out toward the Rockies. The North West Company set up operations in the Peace River Country in what is now northwestern Alberta, where the land was rich in furs. But the overland route between Athabasca and Montreal was long and costly. To better compete, the North West Company was actively looking for alternative trading corridors and especially a navigable river route to the Pacific.

Fraser was the second Nor’Wester and Scottish explorer to visit the relatively calm upper stretch of the river that would bear his name. The first was Sir Alexander Mackenzie. When Mackenzie came through searching for a pathway to the sea, the Natives told him he shouldn’t take the river. To the south, it was impassable. (Any child raised on “Coyote and His Son” knew how dangerous our rivers and waterways could be.) And if, somehow, the river didn’t kill him, the warlike downriver Natives would.

Mackenzie listened. He followed an overland grease trail used by the Dakelh or “Carrier” Indians west. A grease trail is an Indigenous trade route so named because it was used to trade valuable, nutrient-rich oil rendered from eulachon, a sardine-like fish that spawns in and returns to river systems on the Northwest Coast. The Dakelh are called “Carrier” in English because they were a trading nation that carried grease and other goods from the coast to the interior and vice versa. Following Indigenous guidance, Mackenzie made it to the coastal territories of the Nuxalk near present-day Bella Coola, British Columbia, becoming the first European to cross the continent north of Mexico. Though Mackenzie’s route was too difficult for the North West Company’s purposes, his journey came a full 12 years before Lewis and Clark’s easier southerly crossing. The Americans reached the Pacific near present-day Portland, Oregon—a metropolis. Bella Coola, by contrast, remains a remote community reachable only via a dangerous switchbacked dirt road, small plane, or infrequent ferry. On a rock overlooking Dean Channel in Nuxalk territory, Mackenzie used a mixture of red vermillion and grease to memorialize his victory in this colonial-era space race. “Alex Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.” (Take that, America.)

Unlike Mackenzie, Fraser did not listen. When he encountered the Secwépemc at Chimney Creek, the Coyote People told Fraser that if he wanted a river route to the ocean, he should leave the Fraser River and travel overland four or five days by horse to the river now known as the Thompson. From there, he could ride the gentler Thompson to an area near present-day Kamloops, British Columbia, then portage to Okanagan Lake, which feeds into the Columbia, the same river Lewis and Clark took to the Pacific. Against this advice, which he received at least twice according to his own journals, Fraser chose to travel the river that now bears his name. Though the Coyote People told him otherwise, Fraser believed the Fraser River was the Columbia. He survived the journey out of sheer luck and because, on many occasions, the Coyote People saved his ass.

The first and most helpful was the Secwépemc chief Cllecwúsem from Soda Creek, whose name means “to wear a mask” because the chief wore a face covering to protect himself from Fraser and his men. Whether this mask was a carved wooden face shield like the ones worn in ceremonial dances, a woven head covering like those donned by healers, or a precolonial KN95 has been lost to time. I suspect, however, the mask had something to do with Cllecwúsem’s spiritual power and political influence. The chief was well-loved. His brother gave Fraser a beautiful, well-dressed deer hide and beaver pelt, and asked the voyager to take care of his kin in return. While Fraser’s party canoed the Fraser Canyon rapids, losing a canoe on their first day south of Chimney Creek, Cllecwúsem rode ahead. The chief was known and respected up and down the river that fed and gave birth to the Coyote People. Through political and spiritual gravitas, Cllecwúsem negotiated safe passage for Fraser all the way through Secwépemc territory and into St’at’imc country.

The St’at’imc were far more suspicious of Fraser and his men than the Secwépemc. To this day, they still refer to Fraser’s party as “the Drifters.” One St’at’imc who met the Nor’Westers near present-day Lillooet said he had seen white men in “great canoes” on the coast before. He mimicked a naval officer, strutting with hands on hips. “This is the way they go,” Fraser quotes the St’at’imc in his journal. Others believed Fraser and his men weren’t white men at all. Since they seemed to prefer eating dogs over the plentiful Indigenous staple, salmon, they must be enemies or even cannibals in disguise. Fraser’s meeting with the St’at’imc turned heated, but the “Old Chief,” as Fraser called Cllecwúsem in his journal, held sway. This may have been because, according to oral history, Cllecwúsem’s pipe came from downriver. A pipe is a powerful spiritual and diplomatic tool. It connects the smoker’s breath to the Spirit World and was traditionally used to make agreements connecting people, villages, and nations to one another. I speculate that Cllecwúsem’s pipe signified his spiritual connection to and power within downriver St’at’imc country—commanding respect, granting him certain chiefly rights, and maybe even saving Fraser’s hide. Because despite palpable animosity, which nearly ended in violence according to Fraser’s journal, the Nor’Westers’ voyage continued.

Thus, the first treacherous leg of Fraser’s journey is actually a story of Cllecwúsem’s prowess—not Fraser’s. While it is unknown whether Cllecwúsem believed Fraser was Coyote or some other supernatural being, the chief had the forethought to talk to Fraser about building a fort at Alexandria in his territory, a long-term strategy to enrich and empower his people and himself. After Cllecwúsem departed upriver, Fraser and his men missed the “Old Chief.” “Here we are, in a strange country, surrounded with dangers, and difficulties, among numberless tribes of savages, who never saw the face of a white man,” Fraser wrote. “Our situation is critical and highly unpleasant; however we shall endeavor to make the best of it; what cannot be cured, must be endured.” Upon his return upriver, Fraser gave Cllecwúsem the finest gift he gave anyone on his voyage: a gun.

At ƛ’q’əmcín (Kumsheen), a town now known as Lytton at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, some 1,200 people gathered to greet Fraser, who some believed was Coyote, and his party, who they saw as his helpers: Sun, Moon, Morning Star, Diver, Arrow-Armed Person, and Kokwe’la (a supernatural transformer who takes the guise of a root vegetable). Lytton is the place where the Nlaka’pamux say Coyote’s son crashed to earth after returning from the Sky World. It’s just downriver from the place where the Secwépemc say the witches’ weir stood and where geologists say there was once a great ice dam at the end of the last ice age. Because of Lytton’s centrality at the junction of two great rivers, the Nlaka’pamux consider it to be the center of the world. (I also have a great-great-great-grandmother from there.)

At the center of the world, Fraser shook hands with all 1,200 of the Coyote People gathered around. The chief from Lytton gave a long speech. He pointed to the sun, the four directions, and back at Fraser, according to the Nor’Wester’s journal. Then he brought forward his father, a blind elder, so Fraser could touch the man. The Nlaka’pamux offered the travelers a feast of salmon, berries, and roots. Fraser requested dogs for his men. After dinner, the Coyote People danced through the night, as their neighbors along the Columbia River had when they met the North West Company explorer David Thompson in 1807.

In our accounts, supernatural beings—especially tricksters like Coyote—were often out for themselves and up to no good even while their actions were of incredible consequence. And in all these ways, Fraser fit the bill.

Fraser and his party departed the next day and ran into trouble a few miles downriver when a canoe capsized and broke apart. A North West Company employee named D’Alaire, who the Nlaka’pamux remember as Moon, was carried three miles by the current before dragging himself onto the banks and up a cliff. There, after searching for hours, Fraser, or Coyote as the Nlaka’pamux say, finally found him.

After Fraser passed through the remaining territories of the Coyote People in the Fraser River Canyon and entered the delta lands of the Coast Salish, his luck turned. By then, he’d wrecked about a half-dozen canoes and probably as many pairs of shoes. Running low on supplies and trade goods, he turned to piracy.

At a village not far from where Pé7e Zeke was sent to St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in present-day Mission, British Columbia, Fraser robbed a chief of his best canoe. And for good measure, he seems also to have taken the chief captive as a human shield and prisoner diplomat for the remainder of his dash to the sea. Though the Coast Salish were wealthy and lived in enormous Big Houses— some even 1,500 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 18 feet high, hewn from cedar trees as much as 30 feet in circumference, they lived under near-constant threat from northern raiding nations like the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingit, and Haida. Northern raiders routinely sent fearsome war parties down the coast in huge canoes to pillage and take slaves. Some Coast Salish believed Fraser and his men were transformers. Others saw the Scotsman and his party as yet more maritime invaders. Paddling a pilfered canoe, Fraser barely made it past the village of Musqueam in present-day Vancouver before the Coast Salish turned the Nor’Westers around and pursued them back upriver until they returned the stolen vessel to its rightful owner.

By then, Fraser had other problems. Speaking on behalf of the crew, two of his men petitioned to abandon the river in favor of an overland route back home, like the one the Coyote People originally advised. According to Fraser’s own account, some even suggested they stay with the Coyote People rather than go home. “This journey did not meet the needs of the Company and will never be of any advantage to them,” wrote Jules Quesnel, Fraser’s clerk, in a letter to a friend in Montreal.

Fraser reached the coast, though he never paddled into the Strait of Georgia or the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He glimpsed the tops of the mountains on Vancouver Island but could not see the open ocean. And he never made it past the spot where the silty Fraser River water meets the blue sea. In the eyes of the North West Company, the journey was an utter failure. The Fraser River was unnavigable, just as the Coyote People had said. A latitudinal measurement taken near Musqueam confirmed another fact the Coyote People told Fraser: this river was not the Columbia.

Fraser was no triumphal explorer. He was a foolish river pirate whose obstinance almost killed him and many others. The name “Fraser River” thus commemorates the epic misadventure of a lost wanderer not so different from Coyote. Because the trickster was not just a mythological being. He was also a worldview, philosophy, storytelling style, and tradition.

For the Coyote People, the reappearance of Coyote in the guise of Fraser was ominous and profound. It meant the world was ending—because for us, it was. But it also meant that our departed ancestors and everything they carried—their names, their ways, their lands, and their worlds—were coming back. And they are. ♦

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. 

, from which the excerpt below is drawn, is out this month from Alfred A. Knopf.  

ser-martin

The Cooler Jesus

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 

ser-kosugi-maru

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

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

October

Notice that daylight is now less than 12 hours—we've passed the equinox.

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union startled the world by announcing that it had launched 

, the first artificial Earth satellite. It was just a little metal sphere, but it carried a radio transmitter which allowed the world to verify its existence and track its orbit. Alongside the U.S. lunar landing in 1969, this moment is remembered as humanity's first venture into space.

 was quickly followed by the much larger 

, which carried a dog, Laika, who actually managed to survive for a few orbits. Laika became an international folk hero; her story (or stories—there are many versions) is well told in the National Air and Space Museum and in 

magazine. She belongs with Balto and Hachiko in the pantheon of dog heroes.

Tonight’s evening sky features the third quarter Moon passing just north of Saturn.

On this day in 1882, Robert Goddard was born. At the age of 17, on a day which he always called his “Anniversary Day,” he climbed a cherry tree and dreamed of building a machine that would travel to Mars. As we all know, the successors to his rockets 

 travel to Mars—in particular, the Mariner spacecraft of the 1970s. But Goddard had to battle enormous skepticism about his plans. His first test rocket rose 114 feet and landed in a nearby cornfield; a newspaper greeted his success with the headline: “Moon Rocket Misses Target by 239,785 miles.”

 ran a famous article criticizing him for ignoring “the facts ladled out in every high school”—namely, the incorrect claim that you need something to push against for propulsion in the vacuum of space. In the aftermath of the July 1969 Apollo landing, the 

republished their critique, followed by the simple correction: “The 

 regrets the error.” (Notably without explaining 

 their earlier analysis of the physics was incorrect.)

However, Goddard had some powerful and early allies, who knew more physics than 

: Charles Lindbergh, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Guggenheim family. And late in World War II, after the Germans demonstrated the enormous potential of rockets (the 

), there was a mad scramble by Russian and U.S. troops to kidnap German scientists for their own military programs. The U.S. got the most and sent them to New Mexico to work with Goddard.

 as it's the full Moon nearest the autumn equinox. Because the Moon is opposite the Sun, it rises when the Sun sets and the bright moonlight allows you to extend your harvesting time by a few hours.

The Harvest Moon is my first remembered experience in astronomy. One day around evening twilight, I saw a big old orange ball hanging low in the East. I asked my mother what it was, and she replied, “It’s the Harvest Moon.” Somehow, this answer seemed satisfactory at the time. Maybe I thought the orange color meant it was ready for harvesting.

These were the days that never existed for most of Europe in 1582. The inaccuracies of the Julian calendar had caused an error of nine days to accumulate between the calendar and the dates of seasonal phenomena (solstices, equinoxes). This was worrisome to the Catholic Church because it meant that the timing of Easter was slipping away from its historic connection to Passover and springtime. Thus the Gregorian calendar was born, improving the leap year convention and restoring calendar agreement by legislating nine days out of existence. It caused a lot of social unrest too—landlords charging rent for the missing days, etc.

The Gregorian calendar isn’t perfect either. Its error accumulates to about one day per millennium—good enough for practically everyone, except some enterprising souls determined, in odd ways, to make the world a better place. Recent proposals have impressive names like Equitable Calendar, International Fixed Calendar, Edwards Perpetual Calendar, etc. Another possibility is that we’ll go to a completely metric system of time, with millidays, centidays, etc. This was attributed in the 1976 

to “an anonymous joker in Norfolk,” though one kiloday it may not be a joke.

Birthday of Niels Bohr in 1885. Bohr became famous for the “Bohr model” of the atom, which depicted each atom as a “miniature solar system,” with a massive central nucleus of positive charge (consisting of protons), surrounded by negatively charged electrons in very distant orbits. Although it was mostly superseded by the invention of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, the Bohr model remains the way that practically all astronomers think about atoms. For most of the century, Bohr's institute in Copenhagen became a mandatory stop for nearly all European physicists.

On this evening in 1992, a 28-pound meteorite crashed into a parked car in Peekskill, New York—the only known such event in history. The last few seconds of the meteor’s path were well photographed because a high school football game was going on next door. The car was a 1980 Chevy Malibu, recently purchased for $300 by a 17-year-old girl. It later sold at auction for $50,000.

Join the AAA (Amateur Astronomers Association) for a night of observing (99th Street and Central Park East). Weather (clear sky) permitting. See 

 (not the car organization) for details concerning this and all AAA events.

Solar observing at Pioneer Works from 1–4 pm. 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn—weather permitting.

The last quarter Moon rises around midnight. It’s practically on top of the Gemini twins (Castor and Pollux) tonight.

On this date in 2019, observers in Hawaii reported the discovery of what might be the strangest astronomical object in history. It was possibly cigar-shaped, moving through the solar system faster than anything else ever found, and seemingly violating Newton's Laws. In a famous or maybe infamous paper, a Harvard astronomy professor suggested it might be an alien spacecraft. It received the name "ʻOumuamua"—Hawaiian for "scout from afar." More recently, two similar objects were found, and they're now called "interstellar comets." But you've gotta love the swashbuckling name of the first!

Early this morning (on the 22nd), the Earth “collides” with the orbit of Halley's Comet. The comet itself is long gone (totally invisible, somewhere in the rough vicinity of Neptune), but its dust debris, shed by solar heating during thousands of previous visits to the inner solar system, continues to orbit the Sun. There's a continuous trail of dust along all the places the comet has recently been. Twice a year, in October and May, the Earth’s orbit carries us through that trail, and a meteor shower occurs as the dust particles burn up in our atmosphere. Away from city lights tonight, a naked-eye observer might see around 20 meteors per hour.

They're called “Orionid” meteors because they'll appear in the rough (VERY rough) vicinity of Orion. More correctly, they'll appear to 

 from Orion—but appear all over the sky. Despite a mediocre ranking among the annual showers, the Orionids are my favorite for observing. Why? Because Orion, grandest of the constellations, hasn't been properly seen since March, and the October mornings still permit viewing without frozen fingers. It's also a chance to welcome back all those winter constellations. This year, there’s no moonlight to hamper the view.

In tonight’s evening sky, if you have a clear western horizon, look for a bright starlike object just west of the (very thin) crescent Moon. It’s Mercury! Very few people have ever seen it, because it’s always so close to the Sun. Even Copernicus never did.

First quarter Moon, setting around 1 am. Any night within a few days is a good time for telescopic lunar viewing because the angle of the Sun (near 90 degrees) will cast long shadows on the lunar surface.

November

 
End of daylight saving time. At 2 am EDT, wake up and set your clocks back to 1 am—except in Hawaii and Arizona, which have plenty of daylight and have opted not to participate. This gets you back in reasonable harmony with the Earth-Sun clockwork.

Full Moon. The Moon is at perigee, so watch out for very high tides today and tonight.

 
Birthday of Marie Curie (née Sklodowska) in Warsaw in 1867. The only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in different fields: Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911.

Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in his lab in Germany in 1895. On this day of discovery, he found that these rays were a new form of light of much higher energy—and that they were extremely penetrating, revealing the bones in animal tissue. Within a few months, X-rays were used to find bullets in wounded soldiers. In the 1960s, it was also found that many stars were copious natural emitters of X-rays—including the famous Cygnus X-1, the first black hole ever identified. 

 
The Moon is just north of Jupiter tonight, and just south of the Gemini twins (Castor and Pollux).

 
Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight. On these two nights, the Moon passes near Mars. The red planet is rapidly brightening as it approaches its dramatic December 8 opposition (closest approach to Earth). Look at it up there, slightly above the constellation Orion.

Stargazing tonight for the public, 8–11 pm at Lincoln Center Plaza, weather permitting.

 
Birthday of Frederick Banting in 1886. I just had to mention it. No astronomical significance whatsoever. But there are very few movies about scientific discovery. Two great ones, in my opinion, are 

, a CBC production of Bertolt Brecht’s play, and 

 (about Banting’s discovery of insulin). Another is 

 (about the Scopes “Monkey” Trial). Lots of opportunities for new flicks. A really good cartoon movie, by Frank Capra, is 

 (part of the old Bell Telephone series of shorts on science).

 
Last quarter Moon. Stargazing at Pioneer Works, 7–10 pm, weather permitting. It's also the anniversary of the 1974 “Arecibo Message,” the first attempt to send a message to extraterrestrial listeners about who we earthlings are. It was aimed at the globular cluster M13, which has about 100,000 stars. Who knows, maybe someone will receive it. It’s brief and primitive, but ingenious. But don’t expect a reply: M13 is 100,000 light-years distant.

Tonight is the peak night of the Leonid meteor shower, occurring when the Earth collides with dust debris strewn around the orbit of Comet Tempel-Tuttle. The comet itself is nothing special and is now out there beyond Jupiter. It's an ordinary comet, but at least once spewed a huge hunk of dirt and ice, which continues to orbit the Sun with the parent comet’s 33-year period. Astronomers keep an eye out each November 16–17, when we collide with "the orbit.” That apparently happened on November 13, 1833, when Boston observers reported meteors falling “like snowflakes in an average snowstorm.” Other great displays were seen in 1868 and 1966. Nothing special is expected this year, but comets and their debris are famously fickle. Roz Chast once likened comets to NYC landlords: they live very far away, with a heart made of ice and stone.

 
The Sun enters the astrological sign Sagittarius.

 
The Sun enters the constellation Scorpius. Didn't stay long in Sagittarius, did it? And shouldn't it be traversing these constellations in the opposite order? Truth be told, astronomers—mostly the Brits—paid only rough attention to astrological boundaries when they divided up the sky in the nineteenth century. They had a difficult task: make the star pattern roughly resemble a scorpion, maintain the rough boundaries of old star maps, and assign each zodiacal constellation one-twelfth of the Sun’s path. On top of all this, they were well aware that the Earth's 26,000-year axial precession would make their assignments gradually obsolete. So, in the 2,000 years since traditional zodiacal boundaries were set, things have moved almost an entire constellation.

But it could have been worse: those Brits could have put Queen Victoria in the sky!

 
Thanksgiving. No astronomical significance whatsoever. But if you adopt the (highly recommended) practice of giving thanks at dinner, here's one for you: give thanks that the Moon and the Sun have the same angular diameter (0.5 degrees). And if you're pretty savvy, tell your dinner companions why it's worth celebrating. (They'll think it's weird, but tell them anyway.) Plus, if you're shrewd about such matters, tell them why it will not always be so. We live at a special time in history.

Note for those gutsy enough to take up my suggestion: it’s because the Moon is slowly spiraling away from the Earth, as it steals angular momentum from our rapidly spinning planet. In another billion years—no more total solar eclipses!

First quarter Moon. The medium-bright object near the Moon on these evenings, shining with a steady yellowish light, is Saturn. Usually great for telescopic viewing, of course—but not this year, because the very thin rings are close to edge-on. 

Each year on November 30, the Sun travels through Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer), a sign missing from the standard zodiac list.

On this day in 1934, an Alabama woman (Ann Hodges) was napping on her couch when a 10-pound space rock ripped through her ceiling and struck her on the hip—the only known case of a human hit by a meteorite. She hoped to make some $$ by selling it, but so did the homeowner, and it eventually wound up in the Alabama Museum of Science.

December

 
On this date in 1942, the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was achieved by the “Manhattan Project” scientists in an underground squash court at the University of Chicago. Working under the direction of Enrico Fermi, the team found that by bombarding uranium with neutrons, the uranium would fission into lighter elements, which would in turn trigger further fission in other uranium nuclei—each time with energy release (because mass is lost, and

). This was the basis of the atomic bomb. They had anticipated this outcome but needed to find a way to control the reaction—otherwise, building a bomb would risk blowing themselves up (along with much of Chicago). After the tense but successful experiment, the team cabled to the super-secret agency, “The Italian navigator has discovered the New World.” The cryptic reply came: “How were the natives?” eliciting the answer, “Very friendly.”

The nearly Full Moon is just north of the

famous star cluster “The Pleiades” tonight.

Prof. Joe Patterson is a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, an observational astronomer, and a baseball enthusiast. (He was also our editor-in-chief’s first astronomy professor.)

sci-ameliapro

Big Apple Sky Calendar: October, November, December 2025

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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

Motion, Not Matter

Picture This: Hot Bodies

when someone asks if I've been writing new poems

it’s the coldest summer of the rest of my life.
third trimester ablaze, that July
the air conditioning gave out on my birthday
and I sat sweating in a bikini before two fans,
downing glasses of lemon water while the fetus protested,
all the blinds closed against a hundred-degree heat dome.
that summer the tomato plants succumbed
their green fruits to thirsty squirrels
who sucked them dry and then sprawled on fence posts
like exhausted mothers. who could blame them?
we all had a job to do, which was life.

while the organs were forming
I couldn’t think of metaphor, only of nephrons
layering like honeycomb in tiny kidneys.
each week I imagined alveoli proliferating,
tissue paper bubbles filling a tiny chest.
I couldn’t compose while possessed so,
but later I wrote all about it.
water was scarce that summer, words scarcer,
but I put fat on the bones, pumped iron into
the baby’s blood before its long journey.
I imagined ancestors at the beginning of every
apocalypse before, reviewing the way to water.

how has becoming a mother affected your writing?


the act of creation went back inside.
heavy with energy, I wasted no words.
I found the liquid buried in stones.
I refused burning. instead, I transformed
from the inside.
a mother is a creature who revises. ♦

Every Apocalypse Before

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

Where were you when New York City’s climate was reclassified from humid continental to humid subtropical? I was in a borrowed apartment on 101st Street, overlooking the west side of Central Park. The apartment belonged to a widower, a man who kept a gun in a filing cabinet that he warned us not to open. His hallways were lined to the ceiling with boxes overflowing with photos and paper scraps, a memorial of sorts to his deceased wife, and to the grief he would not let go of. There was no table in this apartment, so we stacked some of these boxes by the window overlooking the park, a view worth more money than I’d ever care to have. Living in that apartment felt like one of those rare summer days in this century—not too hot, almost indecently pleasant, but already unraveling at the edges. The type of day where sublimity is found in a makeshift table of a single plank of wood laid upon a lifetime’s worth of loss.

I was sitting at that makeshift table when I saw the July 2020 

’ headline, tucked into the Climate section, a headline worthy of the opening lines to a romance novel: “Sultry Nights and Magnolia Trees: New York City Is Now Subtropical.” As I sent the article to friends, I realized its insinuations of pleasant, exotic things like palm trees and mild winters did not aid my insistence to anyone who would listen that this mattered. That August was ranked the third hottest on record globally—a title that was superseded just last month. Despite the heat, or perhaps amplified by it, demonstrations for racial justice were shaking the streets of nearly every major city across the U.S. A close friend of mine, who was encamped outside New York’s City Hall, called me after sleepless nights of being terrorized by the police, insisting that the revolution was nigh. I believed her. The city's energy that summer felt unstoppable, ready to build a new world from the detritus we’d leave behind. And amidst the cacophony of protests, joyous and furious alike, a different barrier was crossed. Though that threshold break barely registered as news, our city on the North Atlantic is now, climatologically speaking, a part of the tropics.

The Earth’s climate resists Cartesian logic, yet humans persist in their classifications. The Köppen system, the most renowned climate classification system, was created by Wladimir Köppen in 1884, a botanist so hubristic that he believed all life forms could be named and classified. He used the same logic to fit all the earth’s continents and regions into five discrete climate zones.

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Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

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Precious Shadows

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Every Apocalypse Before

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Edge of Paradise

Becoming Subtropical

Tentacle Memory

Tentacle Memory

Heat Maps in Time

Heat Maps in Time

Climate Hacks