Interplace

About Interplace

Interplace explores the interaction of people and place. It looks at how we move within and between the places we live and what led us here in the first place. interplace.io (https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Brad Weed

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

4 Mar 2021

Latest episode

2 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

170 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Aug 2026

   Regreening Ruses and Radiant Ruin

   Hello Interactors, I’ve long been a fan of “regreening” cities, imagining replacing bits of asphalt and concrete with trees, plants, mini-parks, and green roofs to cool them down. In many cases these are indeed good interventions. But even these celebrated nature-based solutions to the “urban heat island” effect require closer inspection. It turns out any land cover change alters energy, water, and momentum exchanges between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Which are the right ones and where? To understand why cookie cutter greening plans can fail and how planners and policy makers can build cities that can handle climate change, we need to understand how land and the air interact. Environments vary from place to place, and this puts limits on what we can do to land to create urban climates that are both beautiful and healthy. To get a handle on what the research says, I found a literature review from 2025 that synthesized findings from 84 peer-reviewed studies. In was published in the journal Climate Risk Management. Let’s see what they, and others, found. BEATING HEAT WITH BIOPHYSICAL FEATS What better place to start than science. Let’s just delve right into how urban green spaces affect temperature. It starts with determining the energy balance at the surface of the earth. This comes from a budget equation found in physical geography. When sunlight hits the Earth’s surface, it breaks down into three main fluxes, or ways heat moves around * Sensible heat flux: the heat that directly warms the surrounding air, which we measure as temperature. * Latent heat flux: the heat that’s used to turn water from a liquid to a gas, like when we sweat or plants release water vapor (transpiration). * Ground heat flux: the heat stored in building materials, asphalt, and soil. In conventional urban environments dominated by concrete and asphalt, latent heat flux is minimal because we’ve built cities in ways that rapidly drain water away as ‘waste’. As a result, incoming solar energy is funneled into sensible heat. This raises daytime air temperatures that gets stored as ground heat, which is slowly radiated back into the city at night. Urban greening can reshuffle this thermodynamic budget through three interconnected physical mechanisms: shading, evapotranspiration, and albedo modification. Mechanism 1. Shading: Intercepting Solar Radiation Shading — the most immediate and reliable cooling mechanism provided by vegetation — requires precise microclimatic quantification. Vegetative canopies act as physical shields, intercepting incoming shortwave solar radiation before it strikes impervious surfaces like concrete or asphalt. By preventing these dense materials from absorbing heat and emitting sensible heat flux back into the boundary layer, shading dramatically lowers surface temperatures and reduces the baseline thermal energy transferred to the surrounding air. (Bowler, D. E., et al. 2010) The cooling benefit of urban trees is non-linear, accelerating significantly once neighborhood canopy cover crosses a critical threshold of around 40%. Measuring daytime air temperatures across urban gradients, they found that canopy cover above this 40% mark can lower local air temperatures by up to 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius, effectively offsetting the thermal burden created by surrounding roads and impervious surfaces. (Ziter, C. D., et al. 2019) Mechanism 2. Evapotranspiration: Trading Sensible Heat for Latent Heat While shading blocks heat absorption, evapotranspiration actively removes heat from the air. Plants absorb soil moisture through their root systems and release it as water vapor through tiny microscopic pores in their leaves called stomata. This process requires thermal energy that turns phase-changing liquid water into gas. This energy transfer absorbs sensible heat and converts it into latent heat. Evapotranspiration from well-watered urban green spaces can lower local air temperatures by 2-4 degrees celsius. (Coutts, et al., 2013) However, physical geographers emphasize a crucial physical prerequisite that is easy to overlook: evapotranspiration is entirely dependent on available water. When the soil is dry or the air is super dry, plants close their stomata to save water. When stomata close, evapotranspiration shuts down. This leaves shading as the sole remaining cooling mechanism. Mechanism 3. Albedo Dynamics: The Surface Reflectivity Paradox Albedo measures the reflectivity of a surface on a scale from 0.0 (total absorption) to 1.0 (total reflection). Urban asphalt has a low albedo (0.05 to 0.10), absorbing up to 95% of incoming solar energy. Vegetation’s albedo can range from 0.11 to 0.25. In temperate climates, replacing low-albedo asphalt with greenery or reflective surfaces increases surface reflectivity, sending more solar radiation back into space before it can be absorbed as sensible heat. One study documented that increasing urban surface albedo typically lowers peak ambient air temperatures by 0.3 degres Celsius to 1.0 degree Celsius — alongside much larger drops in surface pavement temperatures. While a temperature change under one degree Celsius may sound modest at first glance, a baseline shift of this magnitude across a neighborhood is enough to redefine a local microclimate. (Santamouris, 2014) But swapping out light urban surfaces for dark vegetation can also have a negative effect. Paradoxically, when researchers in 2023 replaced dry, light-colored desert soil with darker vegetation in hot, arid regions it reduced overall surface reflectivity. The drop in albedo caused an increase in daytime surface warming. (Schlaerth, et al., 2023) Furthermore, dense tree canopies inside narrow urban street canyons can act as thermal blankets at night. While trees provide valuable shade during the day, their foliage reduces the sky view factor at street level, trapping outgoing longwave thermal radiation emitted by surrounding building facades and asphalt. When combined with reduced wind permeability, this canopy barrier restricts nocturnal radiative cooling and holds warm air near ground level (Lee et al., 2016). These are the physical realities that can demonstrate how urban greening is not a consistently inherent cooling practice. It is a complex thermodynamic intervention whose success relies entirely on local environmental conditions. PLACEMENT, PATCHES, AND PARK PATTERNS Because thermodynamic processes happen across physical spaces, cooling urban green space can be uneven. The literature review reveals that a green space’s cooling capacity depends on four spatial and biological variables: vegetation density, species selection, spatial configuration, and urban morphology. Let’s break them down individually. Cooling Factor 1. Vegetation Density and Species Traits Not all greenery cools equally. One way to measure this is through a Leaf Area Index (LAI). This is the total leaf area per unit of ground area and is a primary predictor of thermal performance. As you might imagine, dense foliage absorbs more from the sun and then produces higher cumulative transpiration (so long as there’s adequate water). Botanical traits also play a big role. Broadleaf deciduous species (like oaks or maples) feature large surface areas that maximize summer transpiration, but that goes away when they drop their leaves in winter. Evergreen coniferous trees, however, maintain continuous canopy coverage through every season. In temperate rainforest environments like Seattle or Vancouver, researchers found that conifers cooled urban surroundings up to 1.7 degrees celsius more effectively than broadleaf trees. Dense needle canopies continuously block incoming solar radiation due to higher LAI and the fact that clusters of spiny needles better trap a stable buffer of calm air which moderates heat exchange with the surrounding urban environment. (Eyster & Beckage, 2022, 2023) Cooling factor 2. Spatial Configuration: Landscape Ecology Principles Ecologists and geographers commonly evaluate green spaces through two main attributes: composition (how much green space exists) and configuration (how those green patches are arranged across the landscape). Over 58% of the mechanism-focused studies in the literature review analyzed spatial pattern metrics. The consensus is the spatial layout of green space is just as important as its total area! Other empirical studies consistently demonstrate that cooling effects decay the further you get from green spaces. Research done in 2016 and 2023 shows how urban parks can produce a primary “cooling footprint” that extends typically 100 to 300 meters from the park boundaries. If you’re lucky enough to live within this buffer, temperatures drop between 1.9 and 3.1 degrees celsius, but beyond 300 meters, the cooling influence quickly falls off. (Bao, et al. 2016, Shi et al. 2023) This spatial limit leads to a couple spatial layout choices. A few big parks or connected networks of smaller green spaces. Large, consolidated parks (>2 hectares) generate intense, stable “cool islands” at their core, but their benefits remain localized. For example, a study in Xalapa, Mexico, revealed that parks larger than 2.8 hectares with over 21% tree cover provided reliable local cooling of around 2 degrees celsius . (Lemoine-Rodriguez et al., 2022) Connected networks of smaller green spaces distributed across a city create a more equitable cooling effect. Three studies in 2019 and 2021 show that fragmented, isolated green patches — like big parks — perform poorly compared to continuous, linear green corridors. Linear “green belts” or street-tree networks (in the right environment) can act as ventilation channels, allowing cool air generated by vegetation to flow into adjacent built-up neighborhoods. (Masoudi et al., 2019, 2021; Pramanik, 2019) Cooling factor 3. Urban Morphology: The Built Environment Matrix Obviously, green spaces don’t exist in isolation. They’re embedded within a three-dimensional hodge podge of buildings, streets, and other bits of infrastructure. Urban morphologists can quantify this urban morphological cacophony using building height-to-street-width ratio and sky view factor - the extent to which surrounding structures and canopies obstruct a location's view of the open sky. High-density urban cores with tall buildings create deep “urban canyons” that generate their own shade. In these settings, building shade can combine with tree shade during peak daylight hours to significantly lower temperatures. However, studies show that if tree canopies in narrow street canyons are too dense — particularly in humid environments — they can trap anthropogenic heat emitted by vehicle exhaust and air conditioning condenser units. They can also significantly reduce localized wind speeds. As a result, maximizing green space cooling efficiency requires aligning vegetation density and canopy architecture with prevailing wind corridors to preserve urban ventilation channels (Cheung & Jim, 2019; Morakinyo et al., 2019). Nothing is every as easy as it seems. BRIDGING GAPS WITH BETTER MAPS While academic literature can offer detailed insights into microclimatic processes, there remains a big gap between academia and urban planning and governmental policy. That gap may be self-fulfilling. The literature review of 84 papers revealed 61% of the papers simply advocate for expanding green space area, whereas only 26% focus on optimizing existing green infrastructure. Recommending that dense, historical cities “add more large parks” ignores real-world urban constraints. In modern, rapidly expanding cities, urban land is expensive, highly contested, and structurally constrained. Space dedicated to a new park often competes directly with housing, transit infrastructure, or commercial development. To move beyond idealistic slogans, urban planning will have to recon with three major implementation challenges. Challenge 1. The Water-Energy-Heat Nexus in Arid Cities The most significant implementation challenge facing nature-based solutions occurs precisely where urban heat stress is most severe — in hot, arid regions. Cities like Phoenix, Cairo, Tehran, or Riyadh already suffer from intense summer heatwaves. You don’t have to live in or visit these places to know water there is extremely scarce. Maintaining green spaces in places like this requires pumping groundwater or desalinating seawater. Pumping and desalinating water requires massive amounts of electricity, which only increases greenhouse gas emissions if that power is coming from fossil fuels. Furthermore, if irrigation water runs out during a heatwave, non-adapted vegetation dries out, loses its cooling capacity, and can even become a wildfire risk. To solve this dilemma, physical geographers advocate evaluating urban greening through a standardized resource efficiency metric: evapotranspirative cooling per unit of water applied. In plain language, this ratio measures how many degrees of cooling you get for each liter (or gallon) of water that plants and soil release into the air through evaporation and transpiration. In dry climates — where municipal water is already tightly rationed and turfgrass is increasingly discouraged but rarely banned (I’m looking at you Arizona) — urban greening strategies are going to have pivot away from high-water lawns and non-native foliage. These cities have to move from simply prioritizing or incentivizing drought-tolerant species to requiring them. While drought-tolerant plants transpire less water than many other plants and trees — and still require water — when combined with drip-irrigation using treated municipal wastewater (greywater), they can provide a pretty reliable canopy shade and even modest evaporative cooling without draining water reserves. Challenge 2. Environmental Justice and Thermal Equity Urban heat exposure is rarely, if ever, distributed evenly across socio-economic groups. In many cities worldwide, low-income neighborhoods exhibit significantly lower tree canopy cover, higher proportions of impervious asphalt, and higher building densities than the more affluent suburbs and ex-urbs. This imbalance leaves more vulnerable populations exposed to extreme heat hazards. When municipalities undertake uncoordinated “regreening” projects, they risk triggering green gentrification. Installing fancy attractive parks can then inflate surrounding property values, displacing residents while still not reducing their heat related vulnerability. To address this, requires targeted interventions like deploying small-scale, distributed interventions (think pocket parks, vegetated bus stops, and road corridors) directly in high-vulnerability, low-canopy/vegetation neighborhoods. You could focus on functional shading over high-maintenance aesthetics. This could better ensure that at least transit stops, pedestrian walkways, and playgrounds are prioritized for canopy cover. Lastly, combining situated green infrastructure with social policy could create and/or protect more affordable housing around old and new greened public corridors and spaces. Challenge 3. A Multi-Benefit, Context-Specific Design Framework No single cooling intervention works everywhere. Planners and policy makers need to adopt an integrated, multi-tiered approach that combines nature-based solutions with material interventions. In arid and semi-arid environments, planners should prioritize structural canopy shading and end an over-reliance on water-intensive lawn evapotranspiration. It’s time to demand drought-tolerant trees with greywater irrigation networks, shade sails, and high-albedo “cool pavements” that can better reflect solar radiation without draining water resources. In contrast, humid and more temperate climates would likely benefit most from maximizing green spatial connectivity. By linking existing parks through linear street-tree corridors — with select broadleaf and/or coniferous species — summer evapotranspiration can be enhanced while maintaining year-round microclimate regulation. Finally, within high-density, built-up cores where ground space for new parks is limited, cities should leverage vertical green walls and green roofs paired with reflective building materials. But they best also preserve prevailing wind corridors while preventing nighttime heat traps through street canyons. “Regreening” is a compelling slogan, but as physical geography demonstrates, simplistic blanket policies can yield unpredictable thermodynamic results. Simply planting trees without considering local climate, available water, species traits, spatial configuration, and urban geometry can lead to unintended consequences. The exhaustive synthesis of decade-long research provided by Hadi Soltanifard and Majid Amani-Beni (2025) offers a clear path forward. Nature-based solutions are not off-the-shelf products that can be copy-pasted across different global cities. They are dynamic, living interventions that alter energy fluxes across urban surfaces. By moving beyond blanket acreage targets and framing urban greening as the strategic reorganization of surface-energy relations, geographers, urban planners, and policymakers will need to work together. When we design green infrastructure that respects local environmental constraints, honors spatial equity, and optimizes microclimatic processes, urban greening moves from a vague policy promise toward tools of experimentation that can pragmatically evolve our cities and megaregions into truly climate-resilient urbanscapes. References Bowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010). Urban greening to cool towns and cities: A systematic review of the empirical evidence. Landscape and Urban Planning, 97(3), 147-155. Cheung, P.K., Jim, C.Y., 2019. Differential cooling effects of landscape parameters in humid-subtropical urban parks. Landscape and Urban Planning 192, 103651. Coutts, A.M., Tapper, N.J., Beringer, J., et al., 2013. Watering our cities: the capacity for Water Sensitive Urban Design to support urban cooling and improve human thermal comfort in the Australian context. Progress in Physical Geography 37(1), 2–28. Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2022). Conifers may ameliorate urban heat waves better than broadleaf trees: Evidence from Vancouver, Canada. Atmosphere, 13(5), 830. Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2023). Arboreal urban cooling is driven by leaf area index, leaf boundary layer resistance, and dry leaf mass per leaf area: Evidence from a system dynamics model. Atmosphere, 14(3), 552. Lee, H., Mayer, H., & Chen, L. (2016). Contribution of trees and grasslands to the mitigation of human heat stress in a residential district of Freiburg, Southwest Germany. Landscape and Urban Planning 148:37–50. Lemoine-Rodríguez, R., Inostroza, L., Falfán, I., & MacGregor-Fors, I. (2022). Too hot to handle? On the cooling capacity of urban green spaces in a Neotropical Mexican city. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 74, 127633. Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., 2019. Multi-year comparison of the effects of spatial pattern of urban green spaces on urban land surface temperature. Landscape and Urban Planning. 184, 44–58. Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., Fadaei, M., 2021. The effects of land use on spatial pattern of urban green spaces and their cooling ability. Urban. Clim 35, 100743. Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., Liew, S.C., 2019. Multi-city comparison of the relationships between spatial pattern and cooling effect of urban green spaces in four major Asian cities. Ecol. Indic 98, 200–213. Morakinyo, T.E., Ouyang, W., Lau, K.-K.-L., et al., 2020. Right tree, right place (urban canyon): Tree species selection approach for optimum urban heat mitigation-development and evaluation. Sci. Total. Environ 719, 137461. Pramanik, M. (2019). Impacts of urban expansion on land surface temperature and urban heat island in Kolkata Municipal Corporation, India. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 191(12), 738. Santamouris, M. (2014). Cooling the cities—a review of reflective and green roof mitigation technologies to fight heat island and improve comfort in urban environments. Solar Energy, 103, 682-703. Schlaerth, Hannah L., et al. "Albedo as a competing warming effect of urban greening." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 128.24 (2023): e2023JD038764. Soltanifard, H., & Amani-Beni, M. (2025). The cooling effect of urban green spaces as nature-based solutions for mitigating urban heat: Insights from a decade-long systematic review. Climate Risk Management, 49, 100731. Ziter, C. D., Pedersen, E. J., Kucharik, C. J., & Turner, M. G. (2019). Scale-dependent interactions between tree canopy cover and impervious surfaces reduce daytime urban heat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 116(15), 7575-7580. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io (https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   18 Jul 2026

   Burning Both Ends

   Hello Interactors, As Canadian and Alaskan wildfire smoke drifts across North American borders, it’s easy to resort to feelings and language of crisis in the demand for urgent, immediate control. But fires are not new to these landscapes, and this “crisis” sits alongside others that are also on fire. Climate crises events bring into focus which histories we forget, whose knowledge we ignore, and which relationships we disrupt. Turns out it’s happening at a cellular level too. The real danger is a world and ecology changing so quickly, and understood so narrowly, that it erases the very temporal patterns, memories, and ecological relationships that make adaptation possible. FIRE’S FRACTURED FREQUENCY The climate crisis is often communicated through rising averages. We read of climbing global temperatures, sea levels, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and acres burned. These measurements are indispensable, but averages can make crisis feel distant and abstract. In a forest, climate change is also experienced as an altered interval — as too little time between one disturbance and the next. A forest is not a passive surface. It actively shapes its own microclimate, stores carbon, and retains moisture until fire temporarily disrupts these relationships…and in doing so creates new ones. To understand what shorter fire intervals are doing to Alaska’s boreal forests, ecologist Xanthe Walker and an interdisciplinary team of researchers examined carbon storage and forest recovery across 555 plots associated with thirty-one fires. They compared stands with different fire histories, including sites that had burned repeatedly before black spruce forests could fully recover. The absolute amount of carbon released by individual fires was broadly similar across fire-return intervals, but recently burned landscapes began with smaller remaining carbon pools and therefore lost a greater proportion of what remained. Repeated burning also consumed more legacy carbon — the carbon inherited from earlier vegetation and accumulated soils — and reduced the likelihood that some sites would regenerate as black spruce forest. Fire was doing more than releasing carbon in the present. By interrupting regeneration, it was weakening the landscape’s capacity to store carbon in the future (Walker et al., 2025). Black spruce forests are not merely tolerant of fire but have evolved with stand-replacing fire as a recurring part of their life cycle. Their cones evolved to be little seed bombs that stay in the trees and release their seeds when they burn. This helps new trees grow on the ground where they’re not protected by the canopy. That strategy works when fires recur at intervals long enough for stands to mature, rebuild their seed stocks, and accumulate biomass. Historically, boreal fire-return intervals commonly ranged from about seventy to 130 years. Black spruce may require roughly fifty years to produce enough seed for self-replacement. Yet intervals of less than thirty years are becoming more common in some areas, allowing another fire to arrive before recovery is complete (Walker et al., 2025). Under those conditions, fire can push regeneration away from black spruce toward deciduous vegetation or more open landscapes. Such places may remain biologically productive, but they are no longer the same forests. They store carbon, retain moisture, shelter organisms, but also carry subsequent fires differently. The landscape may not simply return to its former state after disturbance; it may cross into another ecological regime, organized by different species, intervals, and feedback loops. MEMORY, MEANING, AND MALLEABILITY It is tempting to call such transformations unprecedented. In some measurable respects, they are. We know Industrial greenhouse-gas emissions are rapidly altering atmospheric and ecological systems on a planetary scale, and the effects are not confined to normal oscillations around once-familiar conditions. The rate, direction, and geographic concentration of change effects forests adapted to fire and may be unable to adjust when fire’s frequency exceeds the time needed for reproduction and recovery. The fact that Earth has always changed does not make the present disruption ordinary. But neither does the climate crisis mark the first time people have faced the collapse of an expected environmental order. Many humans didn’t survive the Little Ice Age, but many did. For many Indigenous peoples, colonization produced generations of forced displacement, altered fire and water regimes, destroyed food systems, suppressed governance, and separated communities from ancestral lands. What dominant institutions now describe as an unprecedented disruption may appear within Indigenous histories as another transformation imposed by powers that have long treated land, water, plants, animals, and people as resources to be reorganized. The word crisis can therefore describe an observable material condition while concealing a historical one. The flames are real, but so are the questions of who altered the landscape, whose losses are treated as new, who is expected to adapt, and who gets to define recovery. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte challenges this framing, arguing that a dominant “epistemology of crisis” treats environmental disruptions as radically new, imminent threats (Whyte, 2021). This framing isolates the crisis from historical contexts of colonialism, allowing institutions to justify urgent, top-down actions that bypass local consent and justice under the guise of emergency. That framing carries two recurring assumptions. The first is unprecedentedness — the belief that the past contains few usable precedents or lessons for present conditions. The second is urgency — the belief that immediate action may justify setting aside ordinary concerns about consent, justice, and responsibility. Whyte’s intervention exposes how crisis language can obscure Indigenous histories of displacement and adaptation while allowing new forms of dispossession to proceed in the name of emergency responses (Whyte, 2021). Whyte is not arguing that climate change is unreal or that rapid action is unnecessary. He is asking what calls for urgency and emergency action leads people to overlook or forget. When the present is imagined as unprecedented, earlier crises become difficult to see. Climate-related relocation may be narrated as a novel problem even though Indigenous nations have extensive experience with forced removal, shrinking territories, flooding, and government-directed resettlement. Declaring the current moment historically unique can erase not only previous violence but also knowledge formed through surviving it. Whyte contrasts crisis epistemology with an “epistemology of coordination.” Coordination begins not with novelty but with constant change. It asks whether the relationships needed to respond remain intact. Those relationships take the form of kinship and mutual responsibilities, including care, consent, and reciprocity. They generate what Whyte calls the “responsible capacity to respond to constant change” (2021, p. 52). This is a big geophilosophical change in how we think about the world. Adaptation isn’t just about an organism or group of organisms changing to fit their environment, it’s also about how things are connected, like people, places, history, and processes (the primary focus of Interplace). Fire isn’t just about heat progressively burning through plants. It depends on things like how old the trees are, how much moisture there is in the soil, how many seeds are available, if there have been any fires before, what the weather is like, and the rules and laws that people have made about how to handle fire. What the forest looks like after a fire depends on which relationships are still around. The same is true of human communities. Memory is not merely a record of what happened. It is part of the infrastructure of adaptation. It carries knowledge of earlier disturbances, durable practices, failed interventions, and obligations extending beyond the present generation. A society that repeatedly labels each disruption unprecedented may collect and reason over immense quantities of data while remaining unable — or unwilling — to learn from other histories. CELLS, CUES, AND CONTINGENCY The adaptive value of memory may reach far deeper into life than culture or nervous systems. Evolutionary biologists Maor Knafo, Elena Casacuberta, and Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo begin a recent study with the observation that “one of life’s most remarkable features is its persistent and adaptive resilience in the face of constant environmental fluctuations” (2026, p. 1). They investigated whether a single-celled organism could use an environmental cue to anticipate future stress rather than responding only after that stress arrived. Cells exposed to a predictable light and vibration cue before heat stress experienced a 12 percent mortality rate, compared to a 27 percent mortality rate for cells subjected to unpredictable, random cues. The cells didn’t just adapt to the heat; they learned to anticipate it, demonstrating that even single-celled life relies on temporal regularities to survive. The authors paired this experiment with a computational model. A nonlearning “blind” agent could adapt only through genetic mutation and selection across generations. A learning agent could also revise its phenotypic strategy within its lifetime, exploring alternatives when earlier responses performed poorly. In predictable environments, learning agents achieved higher fitness because they could use environmental cues to prepare for approaching conditions. The study does not demonstrate that cells reason as humans do. Nor does a cellular experiment prove a general philosophy of life. It does, however, offer evidence that even single cells can exploit temporal regularities in their surroundings. Adaptation is not always a passive process through which an external environment selects among fixed organisms. Organisms detect, respond to, and sometimes anticipate the worlds they inhabit. The model also showed that flexibility has its limits. As the simulated environment became more unpredictable, the benefits of learning started to fade. After a certain point, the cues that used to predict what would happen next didn’t work as well. Keeping things flexible came with a cost, because it didn’t give them any clear guidance. In the end, simpler, fixed strategies performed better. When the environment suddenly changed, the learning agents first took a big hit because their expectations had become useless. But their flexibility eventually helped them bounce back, but it also meant they made mistakes, got confused, and took time to adjust. (Knafo et al., 2026). Let’s not get carried away with the comparisons. A forest isn’t a Bayesian agent, and Indigenous knowledge can’t be boiled down to simple conditioning. They’re different forms of life, knowledge, and organization. What they do have in common is this shared principle: adaptation relies on meaningful patterns connecting past experiences to future situations. A black spruce forest can recover from a fire when trees have time to grow and produce seeds. A cell can prepare for heat when it anticipates it. A community can adapt when things change, remembering past actions, taking responsibility, and maintaining relationships. Resilience arises from a symbiotic relationship between living things and their environment. Life’s resilience isn’t innate. It’s more that it stems from memory, prediction, adaptation, and readiness…until the world’s race surpasses its ability to keep pace. RELATIONSHIPS, RECOVERY, AND RESPONSIBILITY Geographer Karen Bickerstaff warns against the dominance of a “catastrophic gaze” that portrays climate change as an imminent, universal threat (Bickerstaff, 2026). While planetary measurements are indispensable, this abstract framing can paralyze political agency, reducing people to passive spectators awaiting either inevitable collapse or a far-off technological rescue (Bickerstaff, 2026). Although our atmosphere is shared, climate exposure, responsibility, and adaptive capacity remain radically uneven. The crisis is planetary in cause, but it is lived and experienced through particular bodies, infrastructures, and local ecosystems. This planetary abstraction often fosters a form of “cruel optimism” — a reliance on grand technological promises like geoengineering or carbon-removal systems that allow us to avoid changing our politics or holding powerful actors accountable (Bickerstaff, 2026). The dangers of these universal, top-down approaches are highly visible in fire governance. Simple, blanket policies — such as total fire suppression or restrictive carbon-offset projects — frequently ignore the diverse ecological histories of fire and displace Indigenous burning practices, which ultimately increases the flammability of the landscape. In contrast to these universalizing fixes, true responsibility must preserve and restore the unique capacities of particular systems to respond to change. This is where Kyle Whyte’s epistemology of coordination can turn to practice. His push is for climate action to strengthen the relationships — such as consent, reciprocity, and intergenerational obligations. This is what is his ancestors practiced surviving constant change (Whyte, 2021). Instead of top-down emergency responses that make justice disposable in the name of speed, we need “situated action” (Bickerstaff, 2026). While individuals cannot act on a planetary scale, they can act meaningfully within their own watersheds, neighborhoods, and local political coalitions. Climate action becomes durable not when it chases abstract global targets, but when it visibly improves local health, restores specific ecosystems, and corrects immediate injustices (Bickerstaff, 2026). This is not an argument for delay. Emissions do need to fall (leading to innumerable benefits), but urgency cannot excuse us from asking what kind of world our interventions produce. The task is to connect scales without allowing the global to erase the particular. A mature black spruce indeed stores carbon, but it also stores decades of growth, fungal relationships, and a history of fire and recovery. When fire returns too soon, the forest loses not just biomass, but time. Climate responsibility begins here. Not in the fantasy of holding a restless Earth still, but in preserving the intervals, relationships, and possibilities through which living systems can continue to adapt. REFERENCES Bickerstaff, K. (2026). The perils of climate catastrophism: A call to situate crisis and change. WIREs Climate Change. Knafo, M., Casacuberta, E., & Ruiz-Trillo, I. (2026). Beyond diffusion: Bayesian learning strategies in single-cell life. Walker, X. J., Mack, M. C., Black, B., Dean, J., Kemper, L. F., Potter, S., Rogers, B. M., & Truettner, C. M. (2025). Increasing wildfire frequency decreases carbon storage and leads to regeneration failure in Alaskan boreal forests. Fire Ecology. Whyte, K. (2021). Against crisis epistemology. In B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L. Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, & S. Larkin (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical Indigenous studies (pp. 52–64). Routledge. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io (https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   3 Jul 2026

   Burning Through 250 Years

   Hello Interactors, Welcome to summer where Interplace turns its attention to physical geography and the environment. It’s already a crazy El Niño — thanks in large part to global warming — and the United States is having a big birthday. How might these be related and what to do about it? What follows is not a celebration or a condemnation, but more of a reckoning. I look at what was built, what was deliberately forgotten, and what is now continually arriving, season by season, in forms of weather the founders could not have imagined. Although Alexander Humboldt — one of the world’s most famous scientists at the time — did warn Jefferson of the effects of human-induced climate change in 1804. He based his prediction on changes he observed in forests and water systems as a result of mono-crops and industrial “steam and gas”. Jefferson ignored him. BUILDING, BURNING, BILLOWING BACK On this momentous 250th Fourth of July, when the world is experiencing record level extreme weather events, let’s reflect on how over the last 250 years the United States helped build, extract, and then burn the material and political conditions that made climate change possible. From the beginning, it tied itself to land, extraction, mobility, and expansion. Over time those commitments became an energy system built on coal, oil, gas, highways, suburbs, industrial agriculture, and a development model that treated nature as an inexhaustible storehouse. That legacy is now legible in the atmosphere itself. Let’s light a Roman Candle in celebration! Even before the 4th of July fireworks celebrations create another nationwide 42% average increase in fine particulate matter (Seidel, et al., 2015), the United States bears the single largest share of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions of any nation . We represent roughly 20 percent of the global total since 1850 contributing approximately 0.2°C of warming to date (Carbon Brief, 2021; UNEP, 2023). To represent four percent of the world’s current population and be responsible for nearly a fifth of its cumulative warming is not a coincidence of geography or fake news. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about how a republic would be organized, energized, and expanded across two and a half centuries. The United States has long imagined freedom in spatial terms: movement, property, settlement, mastery, frontier, and circulation. Those abstract ideals were made real through land theft and remade landscapes, as well as through infrastructure built in significant part by African and African American enslaved labor. Each step along the way depended on ever-greater throughput of energy, labor, and material. In that sense, the country’s history is also a history of how thought became organized around extraction and exploitation, until those thoughts and actions themselves became a kind of common sense. But by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries increased industrialization meant emissions grew. They surged during the postwar era and peaked in the early 2000s — a trajectory that maps almost exactly onto the spatial project of suburban expansion, highway construction, and fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture (Climate Change Tracker, 2024). Two-thirds of the country’s cumulative warming impact derives from fossil CO₂ alone. The built environment of American freedom is as inseparable from the chemical footprint it left behind as a firecracker’s scattered debris and carbon residue. This leaves us with a climate crisis that is not just the result of a few bad policy choices in the late twentieth century. We exist in a cumulative outcome of a long national project that normalized combustion as prosperity and treated atmospheric consequence as some distant abstraction. Kind of like turning up the radio to drowned out the sound of your car making a funny noise. The federal state government played a central role in this process. Not only through direct policy and subsidies, but through the development of roads, ports, power systems, agricultural regimes, and military logistics that expanded the scale of fossil dependence at every scale of national life. The fossil fuel industry understood this trajectory earlier than the public was permitted to know. A systematic analysis published in Science found that ExxonMobil’s own scientists accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning from as early as 1977. These projections are consistent with subsequent observations. And yet, for decades, the company publicly pushed doubt and denial (Supran, Rahmstorf, & Oreskes, 2023). Consequently, what America projects as “economic growth”, fueled enormously by the fossil fuel industry, is embedded not only in a collective national memory but in the scientific record. The irony is that America’s confidence in its own permanence rested on a false sense of geography. The landscape seemed stable because the costs were displaced in the form of upstream mining, downstream pollution, hidden emissions, imported and exported harm, and deferred climate effects. The effects on the atmosphere made that displacement impossible to sustain. The ‘progress’ that had been scattered across space and time returns as heat, drought, fire, flood, and increasingly volatile weather. We built a world in which the rewards of extraction were immediate while the penalties were delayed. Call it what you will — the climate crisis is just the debt of delay, dressed as disaster. KNOWING, NEGLECTING, NEUTERING KNOWLEDGE The USA did not simply keep burning and expanding on autopilot. By the late twentieth century, it had also begun to lose the institutional capacity to understand what its own trajectory meant. The problem was no longer that the 1970’s scientific picture Exxon had already portrayed was absent. The evidence was clear. By the early 1990s the United States had ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and formally accepted the goal of returning greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade. The barrier to progress was not ignorance, but a degraded relationship between knowledge and power. This was engineered in part by more fossil fuel industry campaigns to sow doubt about science it privately accepted. Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented how a loose-knit network of industry-connected scientists ran effective campaigns to mislead the public on issues from tobacco to climate change. They exploited the media’s tendency toward false balance and keeping controversy alive long after scientific consensus had been reached (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). The strategy was to make certainty seem uncertain, and it worked. For decades, political inaction persisted through every window of action that may have helped. By the mid-1990s, climate change had become legible enough for federal institutions to name, study, and plan around, but the machinery of governance was being bent in the opposite direction. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans who rose with him may not have invented anti-government politics, but they weaponized it. Curiously, through pro-governmental politics. While their rhetoric promised efficiency and modernization, in practice it often meant cutting staffs, weakening committees, abolishing subcommittees, and treating the legislature less as a site of deliberation than as a theater of permanent combat. After all, their own staffers affectionately referred to Gingrich and his wrecking crew as ‘jihadists’ — even as those same politicians promulgated and attached that term as a slur toward Muslims. One of the most consequential acts of this period was the 1995 defunding of the Office of Technology Assessment. This was a bipartisan, independent body that had produced over 750 reports on complex scientific and technical questions since 1974, including major studies on energy policy, environmental risk, and the long-range consequences of atmospheric change. Gingrich had vowed to kill the OTA during his 1994 election campaign. He kept his promise, and with it eliminated one of Congress’s primary mechanisms for converting scientific knowledge into durable legislative capacity (Wikipedia, Office of Technology Assessment; AAAS Science, 2019). A legislature cannot respond intelligently to a long-range atmospheric crisis if it has stripped away the very mechanisms designed to synthesize evidence, test assumptions, and tackle complex questions over time. What replaced deliberations mediated by experts was a vacuum quickly filled by industry lobbyists — the same industry that, amongst themselves, knew exactly what Gingrich was doing. Research on institutional dynamics in climate governance consistently finds that fragmented policy, weak intergovernmental coordination, and the erosion of technical capacity are among the most significant barriers to effective long-range climate action (Jaisridhar et al., 2025; Birchall, Bonnett, & Kehler, 2023). The thinning of Congress’s own cognitive infrastructure in 1995 was a bureaucratic adjustment that disabled the country’s capacity to govern on topics beyond the timescales and dimensions of a single administration. The political system was becoming less capable of converting recognition into sustained action precisely as the need for that conversion became most urgent. The United States not only helped create the conditions for warming but undermined its own capacity to govern the effects warming created. The atmosphere was warming and so was the willful weakening of the world's most powerful potential partner in planetary protection. CASCADES, CRISES, AND COMING TO TERMS What follows is not simply a warmer world, but a less legible and actionable one. Once a political system weakens its own capacity to think long-term, it becomes ill-equipped to face a future that arrives not as a single rupture but as a cascade of self-reinforcing disruptions. We’ve all experienced or read about hotter summers, fire, more erratic rainfall, stressed coasts, shifting storm tracks, and weather that no longer behaves as the old seasonal calendar once did. Anthropogenic warming is already increasing variability in frequency and severity of weather systems. This in turn can alter local precipitation variability, storm behavior, and the climatic conditions on which seasonal expectations have long depended (Robinson, 2021; Wang et al., 2017; Scher & Messori, 2019). In several regions, climate change is expected not only to shift average conditions but to change seasonal predictability itself — especially for rainfall — making the future harder to read through the calendars and risk assumptions modeled and built from the past (Le et al., 2023; Delsole et al., 2014). Even now, the atmosphere offers a live demonstration of this instability. On June 11, 2026, NOAA officially declared that El Niño has arrived — with a 63 percent probability of reaching “very strong” intensity, defined as sea surface temperature anomalies of at least +2°C in the equatorial Pacific. This would rank it among the largest events in the historical record (NOAA, 2026). What makes 2026 categorically different from prior super events is not just its projected intensity but its baseline. This El Niño begins from the warmest ocean temperatures in human history, layered onto anthropogenic warming that has already pushed the planet to 1.55°C above preindustrial levels. As one paper argued in April, the El Niño is the accelerant; the fuel was already stacked (Hansen et al., 2026). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has placed an 86 percent probability on at least one year between 2026 and 2030 surpassing 2024 as the warmest on record, with 2027 — when El Niño’s thermal lag typically produces its most extreme global signals — as the most likely candidate (WMO, 2026). When that variability is layered onto long-term warming, the result is not just discomfort but a deeper erosion of climatic predictability. ENSO — the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system that drives El Niño’s periodic warming and its counterpart La Niña’s cooling across the tropical Pacific — is not a new phenomenon, but its behavior is changing. Model evidence indicates that ENSO-related rainfall variability is likely to intensify and shift eastward under greenhouse warming, creating more severe and sometimes novel climate conditions across the terrestrial tropics (Cai et al., 2021; Rifai, Li, & Malhi, 2019). The question is no longer whether the climate will change, but how many of the social and political structures built on climatic regularity can survive that change. Climate change is often presented as a technical or environmental problem to be solved. Especially amidst a culture of pervasive techno-optimism. But climate change is way more fundamental than this. It’s a reordering of the relationship between how we need to think and the geography in which we exist. This includes political geography and a reordering of political imagination as it relates to physical geography. The old originally envisioned republic of the USA assumed that land could be mastered, seasons could be predicted, and institutions could absorb shock without losing coherence. Those assumptions no longer hold. The old assumption that infrastructure could be planned around stationary baselines is increasingly at odds with the evidence. We can already see how energy systems show measurable vulnerability to climatic uncertainty and extremes. Modeled systems evidence declines in reliability and large performance gaps when future weather variation is not adequately incorporated into planning (Perera et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2023). As a result, the challenge ahead is not adaptation to these changes in the narrow sense, but reconstruction of our relationship to them in the broad sense. This may seem impossible in today’s American political system, but truly Democratic societies will need stronger scientific institutions, more durable legislative capacity, and trustworthy public agencies able to interpret risk before disaster becomes routine. They will need not only infrastructure, but intelligence. Embodied intelligence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition) — embodied engagement with physical and social environments rather than as a purely singular-brain augmented by LLM computation. This includes a renewed ability to gather, preserve, and act on knowledge over long horizons. The literature on adaptation governance is clear that resilience depends on organizational learning, intergovernmental collaboration, inclusive planning, and long-term institutional capacity. Short-term, reactive, market or donor-driven interventions that respond to emergencies without building the durable frameworks that prevent them won’t work (Birchall et al., 2026; Rahman & Islam, 2024). What this means practically is the reconstitution of the kind of congressional expertise that was dismantled in 1995. We need not merely revive the OTA but to imagine a broader democratic intelligence infrastructure capable of thinking on the timescales that climate change demands — decades, generations, and centuries. Without that, climate change will continue to be experienced as a succession of emergency, political, or market conditions rather than as a governable transformation. We can do this. After all, a country that once imagined itself through movement, expansion, and mastery made a certain kind of freedom seem natural. A new kind of freedom can be made to seem natural too. But right now our current system returns prosperity for many — but heat, flood, instability, and constraint for all. What was built now must be lived within — good and bad — while what was extracted must now live in the atmosphere — all bad. What gets burned today, will burn more later. The political order that was built through extraction, combustion, and territorial expansion must confront the atmospheric and hydrological consequences of those choices. That confrontation will only intensify. Past century’s cumulative emissions have already committed the planet to changes that will outlast any government, living generation, or institution that exists. Including you and me. The next 250 years will belong less to societies that imagine escape than to those that can build the institutional intelligence, infrastructural redundancy, and long-term public capacity required to inhabit a less legible and hospitable climate (Ouyang et al., 2023; Jaisridhar et al., 2025). So, as you watch the rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air — sending even more smoke, chemicals and debris everywhere — know the flag will still be there. But to endure, it must repair an institution to be once again knowledgeable and fair. References Birchall, S. J., Villeneuve, K., Rose, D., Baran, N. N., & Adams, S. (2026). Exploring the modifying effects of adaptive capacity on resilience to climate change across 4 coastal cities in British Columbia, Canada. Cities. Birchall, S. J., Bonnett, N. L., & Kehler, S. (2023). The influence of governance structure on local resilience: Enabling and constraining factors for climate change adaptation in practice. Urban Climate. Cai, W., McPhaden, M., Grimm, A., Rodrigues, R., Taschetto, A., Garreaud, R., … Vera, C. (2020). Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on South America. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. Cai, W., Santoso, A., Collins, M., Dewitte, B., Karamperidou, C., Kug, J., … Zhong, W. (2021). Changing El Niño–Southern Oscillation in a warming climate. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. Carbon Brief. (2021). Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change? Climate Change Tracker. (2024). United States of America: Historic contribution to global warming since 1850. Delsole, T., Yan, X., Dirmeyer, P., Fennessy, M., & Altshuler, E. (2014). Changes in seasonal predictability due to global warming. Journal of Climate. Holgate, C., Evans, J., Taschetto, A., Gupta, S. A., & Santoso, A. (2022). The impact of interacting climate modes on east Australian precipitation moisture sources. Journal of Climate. Jaisridhar, P., Nirosha, R., Jasimudeen, S., Senthilkumar, M., Ponsneka, I., & Raja, P. (2025). Institutional dynamics in climate change adaptation: A bibliometric analysis. Frontiers in Environmental Science. Le, P., Randerson, J., Willett, R., Wright, S., Smyth, P., Guilloteau, C., Mamalakis, A., & Foufoula-Georgiou, E. (2023). Climate-driven changes in the predictability of seasonal precipitation. Nature Communications. Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press. Ouyang, H., Tang, X., Zhang, R., Baklanov, A., Brasseur, G., Kumar, R., Han, Q., & Luo, Y. (2023). Resilience building and collaborative governance for climate change adaptation in response to a new state of more frequent and intense extreme weather events. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science. Perera, A., Nik, V., Chen, D., Scartezzini, J., & Hong, T. (2020). Quantifying the impacts of climate change and extreme climate events on energy systems. Rahman, M. M., & Islam, M. S. (2024). Institutional dynamics and climate adaptation: Unveiling the challenges and opportunities in coastal Bangladesh. Rifai, S., Li, S., & Malhi, Y. (2019). Coupling of El Niño events and long-term warming leads to pervasive climate extremes in the terrestrial tropics. Robinson, W. (2021). Climate change and extreme weather: A review focusing on the continental United States. Scher, S., & Messori, G. (2019). How global warming changes the difficulty of synoptic weather forecasting. Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. UNEP. (2023). Current and historic contributions to global warming and emissions in the United States from 1850 to 2021. Statista. Wang, X., Jiang, D., & Lang, X. (2017). Future extreme climate changes linked to global warming intensity. Science Bulletin. Hansen, J., Kharecha, P., Morgan, D., & Vest, J. (2026, April 15). Super-Duper El Niño. Columbia University Earth Institute. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2026, June 11). El Niño forms, expected to strengthen, say NOAA forecasters [Press release]. NOAA Climate Prediction Center. (2026, June 11). ENSO diagnostic discussion. National Weather Service. Seidel, D. J., & Birnbaum, A. N. (2015). Effects of Independence Day fireworks on atmospheric concentrations of fine particulate matter in the United States. Atmospheric Environment. World Meteorological Organization. (2026). Global annual-to-decadal climate update 2026–2035. WMO. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io (https://interplace.io?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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