Under the Heat Dome: A Conversation about Thermal Inequality with Bharat Venkat

2023 marked the hottest year recorded in human history, with predictions indicating a worsening global trend. In early June 2024, southern California experienced an extreme heat dome, with temperatures rising into the triple digits. Currently, heat alerts affect over 16 million people across California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. This escalating situation is not confined to the United States nor limited to the present; it is a manifestation of the intensifying impacts of climate change. Regions previously unacquainted with extreme heat are struggling to adapt, while areas accustomed to high temperatures are becoming increasingly uninhabitable.

Heat is not merely a climate issue; it disproportionately affects individuals based on geographic location, race, and socioeconomic status, among other factors. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Bharat Venkat, Associate Professor at the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, to delve into the concept of thermal inequality. We explore how Dr. Venkat developed an interest in this subject and examine the origins of thermal inequality. Our discussion addresses the populations most impacted by heat inequality, focusing on the Los Angeles area. We also touch upon critical topics such as urban design, socioeconomic disparities, and their intersection with heat. Finally, we contemplate the future of thermal inequality and potential solutions to mitigate its effects.

Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with joint appointments in the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His research spans science, medicine, climate, race, and design. His notable works include his award-winning book At the Limits of Cure and his current project on thermal inequality, Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World.

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Narrator 0:08

Welcome to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

Rose Campbell 0:31

Welcome to Then and Now. I'm Roselyn Campbell, Assistant Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. As summer approaches and temperatures rise, countries around the world are struggling to adapt to new higher temperatures that last longer than ever before. Thanks to climate change, areas of the world unaccustomed to high temperatures are struggling to adapt, while regions that have always struggled with heat are seeing increased numbers of deaths due to extreme temperatures. The problem is not just the heat outside, but housing that doesn't cool down, lack of access to cool areas and cooling technology, and even lack of medical care when it becomes too hot for medical facilities to function. As we've seen in recent years, these issues can have life or death consequences for people around the world. These consequences, however, don't affect everyone equally. And those in developing countries or who are already facing various forms of social inequality are affected most severely by the rising temperatures. Joining us today to discuss this issue is Dr. Bharat Jairam Venkat. Dr. Venkat is an associate professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA with joint appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of History. His first book, At the Limits of Cure, explored the anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India. His current work, however, explores the intersection of heat, bodies, the built environment, and social inequality. In this capacity, Dr. Vencutt founded the UCLA Heat Lab, where he works with students to understand thermal inequality and justice. He has written multiple op-eds about topics related to thermal inequality, such as how the effects of redlining have led to extreme heat in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. I'm so pleased you're able to join us today, Varat.

Bharat Venkat 2:37

Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure.

Rose Campbell 2:40

So let's start by talking a little bit about your current research, which looks at the history of how people have experienced heat, and particularly the history of thermal inequality. Can you explain a little bit about what thermal inequality is and how you came to be interested in this topic?

Bharat Venkat 2:58

Sure. Maybe I'll answer those questions in reverse order. I spent about a decade writing my first book, which is a history of tuberculosis treatment in India, stretching back to parts of the 18th but primarily 19th century, into the present. And, you know, I'm trained primarily as an anthropologist, as an ethnographer. So I was doing field work in Delhi during the summer, and I believe it was 2015. And it was an incredibly hot summer. And I remember going to the outskirts of the city to this old sanatorium, which was now one of the kind of largest tuberculosis hospitals in the country. And I get there and it's deserted. So I'm walking around, you know, must have been 10 or 11 o'clock, and I would have expected that there would be a large number of patients and their families milling around. And I just couldn't find anybody. I think I saw a couple of kind of dogs just kind of laying in some shade trying to kind of stay cool, but I couldn't find any humans. Eventually I stumbled upon a bunch of doctors and medical staff huddled in the on-call room at the hospital, which was the only room in the hospital that had air conditioning. So I had a room air conditioning unit. And uh what they told me was that, you know, it was just too hot, and they had sent all of the patients and their families home. And this was really striking for me. Um, you know, you I should have realized it was hot. I should have kind of considered this, but you know, as somebody who, you know, travels back and forth between the United States and India quite often for research, I I expect um I expect that it'll be hotter there. I expect that India, you know, is generally a hot place. Um it's not true everywhere all the time, but it's a certain expectation of the summer. And I didn't really understand what it meant for it to be too hot. I didn't understand what that threshold was. And clearly uh the people working at that hospital and the patients understood that threshold, and for them it was too hot. And for me, it was just uncomfortable, and that was kind of what I expected. But it kind of made me realize, on one hand, I don't have a great capacity to discern what is normal, uncomfortable, what is dangerous. Um, and it also kind of made me think about the fact that places that are already hot are getting dangerously hot in ways that are fundamentally unsettling basic social services like medicine, like healthcare systems. Uh and so, you know, at that moment I was still focused on tuberculosis, and and and there's a kind of interesting history there around tuberculosis and kind of tropical medicine disease and how climate was thought to be an ideological factor for conditions like tuberculosis. But in that moment, I really wasn't thinking about heat as a kind of object of analysis. Um, but it kind of stuck with me uh so that in 2019, when I began this research in earnest, um, I really kind of understood that this had been kind of shaping my work as a as a researcher for quite some time, right? And this is this is kind of the interesting thing about anthropology as a field, is that you have this figure of the intrepid field worker, the one who kind of goes in to study the thing often in a tr in a remote tropical setting and doesn't complain, right? So you're so focused on what you're trying to understand, whether it be social practice or or norms or rituals, that you're not worried about what's happening to your own body and how you're experiencing the world. And what that often means is that heat becomes epiphenomenal, it recedes to the background. It it is not it's not the thing you study, it's the thing you study through, right? It's the kind of thing in the background that you endure to get at the real thing that really matters to you. And I was victim to that same way of thinking, right? I I spent years doing research in India during multiple heat waves, and I ignored the heat waves, which is just ludicrous, right? So uh 2019-2020, I began taking the heat seriously. Um I began thinking about how I could write about this thing that's everywhere and yet nebulous and hard to pin down and hard to kind of bring from the background to the foreground. Um, and I can talk a little bit about how um, you know, the research developed, but I will say one of the kind of key concepts that's emerged for me and kind of that my lab and I have developed over the last uh several years has been that of thermal inequality. Um, as you mentioned. And I think about thermal inequality is having kind of three primary dimensions. The first is that it involves the unequal distribution of the negative effects of heat. So to be clear, it's about the distribution of the effects, not the heat itself, right? So it's not simply that some places are hotter than others, right? This would be the return to a kind of climatic determinism of the kind that you know Galen or Montesquieu subscribed to, right? Um instead, it's about looking at the ways in which those effects are unequally distributed, right? So if, for example, you have amazing air conditioning, it doesn't matter so much if you're in a hot place, right? If you're staying inside, if you have, if you're not doing certain kinds of work, uh high temperatures might not be as dangerous for you. However, if you're someplace where it gets a little hot, but you're not acclimatized to it, that could be deadly, right? So it's not simply just about where it's hotter and where it's not, but it's about how our bodies respond to it and how we're made vulnerable to that. Uh the second dimension of thermal inequality is that extreme heat tends to disproportionately affect those who have already been harmed by other forms of social harm, social inequality. So think here about racial discrimination, uh, lack of citizenship, class-based inequities, um ableism, sexism, ageism, the list goes on, right? Um so thermal inequality is really kind of like a magnifying class. It exacerbates those pre-existing forms of inequality of various forms that already structure our societies, right? So those who are already, I mean, to put it very bluntly, those who are already being screwed over get screwed over even more by climate change. Uh the third dimension is the thermal inequality tends to operate a bit like a zero-sum game. Um, what I mean by this is that some people labor under conditions of extreme heat. Um, we can think here about those who work in warehouses, right, to sort our boxes or those who deliver those boxes to us, right? Every time we call a delivery service for food or anything, we're asking people to go outside and do certain work so that we don't have to. When we go to a grocery store and buy strawberries, uh, it implies that somebody's growing and picking those strawberries. Somebody has to be outside, right? So it's never, it's usually never a kind of explicit ask, but there's a way in which we negotiate the world such that some people are asked to kind of endure and sacrifice their health, their bodies, their very lives, so that others don't have to. Uh so to my mind, those three dimensions of thermal inequality work together to structure uh the ways in which our societies are responsive to and certain people are made vulnerable to the effects of climate change and extreme heat uh specifically.

Rose Campbell 10:20

So you mentioned that you've done a lot of work in India, but you also mentioned that you've done some work in the modern United States, um, looking at sort of the workers and things like that. Why did you choose these two areas? India, both in the present and in its colonial history, as well as the modern United States, and what similarities or differences are there between these two time periods and areas?

Bharat Venkat 10:46

That's a great question. You know, I'd like to think that I had planned it out carefully and it was entirely um, you know, a thoughtful, systematic approach, but really it was uh coincidence, right? So, you know, my first project, as I mentioned on tuberculosis, um, I really was focusing on India. I was trained as a South Asianist, um, and that kind of pulled me, and I was also trained as a medical anthropologist, right? And so I was doing this research, and I spent years, you know, um studying various Indian languages, um, Indian history, so on and so forth. Um, and so this and I mean I guess the interesting thing is um, you know, as a as a South Asianist, uh what you know, there's this kind of idea that to be a South Asianist, to be an anthropologist who studies South Asia is to also study history, right? Um there's a really strong inclination towards history within South Asian studies, um, you know, partially because of post-colonial studies, partially because of subaltern studies and those legacies. And so that what that meant was that in graduate school, I was taking a lot of history courses. Um and I had you know the privilege of spending some time in New York. I so I did my PhD at Berkeley, but I spent some time in New York. I took classes with people like Partha Chatterjee, Nicholas Turks, um, John Ki Buckley, and so on. Uh, and then I started doing my field work. And um I was, I mentioned I was working in the sanatoria, and I, you know, I got to wonder why are these sanatoria here? How did they get here? Um, you know, I have in my mind a very romantic vision, or I had in my mind a romantic vision of, you know, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Um, and you know, it's it's it's hard to conceptualize the Magic Mountain set in um uh former colony, right? In the kind of tropical setting. And so I wanted to understand more about how things got to be the way they were and where the sanatoria came from and what were the kind of conditions of their foundation. Um but when I asked the doctors in these hospitals, their answers were, you know, we don't know, right? Uh we just work here. Uh we're state employees. And I tried to find kind of older patient records, hospital records, and they were largely lost. Although I discovered that uh many years later, after I finished the book, I found a lot of these records because they were hidden away in um abandoned buildings and they were being burnt by people who were functionally homeless and needed something to keep them warm at night. Um so it is interesting. But um basically trying to understand the history of these facilities and institutions pushed me into one, oral history and two, into the archives, right? So spending time in archives across India, uh in Chennai, in Calcutta, in Delhi, uh in London, uh, to understand the kind of histories of science and medicine and public health that led to the contemporary shape of tuberculosis treatment in India. Um so, in some ways, I think about all of this as kind of a series of things that happened, right? And I'm just simply responding to them. Um the next kind of critical thing that happened that led me to kind of shift my work to the United States, at least in part, was the pandemic, right? So um amidst the pandemic, I had just finished my first book. I was thrilled and ready to kind of start on this new project, and everything shuts down. Um and it goes on and on and on and on. And I have no idea when things will start up again. And so I had all these elaborate plans to spend great deals of time doing ethnographic work, archival research in India. Um, and those plans all crumble around me. And I don't know what to do. And you know, there are certain scholars who timed it perfectly, or they were incredibly fortunate, uh, and that they had finished all of the research for a project just before the pandemic hit, and maybe they didn't have caregiving responsibilities. So that was the time for them to write. Uh, for me, it was a time to eat ice cream because I didn't have my materials and I didn't know what to do, and I just felt kind of adrift. And I think that was maybe a common experience. Um so I started to pivot. I thought to myself, well, what can I do with what I have available? And I will say that one of the, if there are benefits from the pandemic, one of them was that archivists and librarians became incredibly generous in terms of uh copying and digitizing materials. And so I began to reach out to archivists, uh, you know, archives across the United States, especially, um, but also in the UK, uh parts of India to kind of ask, hey, are you still going into work uh sometimes? If you are, is there a way to access certain materials? And I was quite surprised that people said yes. Um, they really wanted to support scholars. And um I'm just so grateful. So what it meant is that I started receiving these like packets of documents, you know, using finding aids, trying to figure it out, it's hard because unless you see it in person, you don't really know what's in an archive. But I began receiving all these materials about uh not as much kind of histories of, you know, because I thought I initially thought I was going to be interested in kind of histories of uh ideas around how heat affects the body, specifically in colonial India, and how those ideas morphed into the present, how they continue to shape ideas around heat and heat policy in contemporary India, but that was only kind of the the kind of my my my scope expanded, right? So I became interested more generally in the kind of history of science of heat, right? So how were bodies understood to be objects that could be affected by heat? What was heat in the first place? Um what was the kind of biological response? How do you measure it or know it? Uh so I began receiving these packets of documents and photographs of you know all these amazing instruments and objects, including the thermal mannequin, which is basically a mannequin that represents human beings. It's a proxy for our biological capacities that is used to better gauge how human bodies respond to heat, because humans are notoriously unreliable. We can't describe our experiences with any kind of consistency. So the idea is put a robot in the place in their place, right? Um, because robots are better humans than humans, right? Um and that that kind of really reshaped the trajectory of this work. I began to think a lot more about um US-based histories, I began to think a lot more about uh histories of science, histories of medicine, histories of technology, um, alongside histories, like political and legal histories. Um so, you know, because I had started this lab, um, we could, you know, as pandemic rules started to kind of become a little bit looser as we started to get vaccinations and um you know people were able to kind of meet outside, we began to do ethnographic and oral historical work here in Los Angeles. So we went to Watts, uh primarily Black and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles, and we talked to people about histories of that area and about you know what they remembered and how they remembered something like heat, which is really hard to talk about, right? If you say to somebody, tell us about what you remember about heat, it's the most nebulous question you can ask, right? So we learned so much about how to ask about things like this, these things that are kind of backgrounded. Um and again, because you know, I had this team here that I couldn't fly with to India, and I wasn't flying to India anyway at that point, uh, we were able to kind of, you know, with vaccinations, with masking, to begin to do oral historical work here in Los Angeles. And so um it's a very long answer, but basically, I think in many ways, both the kind of the kind of geographic settings of this work, the geographic parameters were really established by what was possible at various moments.

Rose Campbell 18:37

Well, that actually leads really well into my next question, because a lot of your work talks about uh how historical and ethnographic accounts describe heat as a nuisance kind of nebulously that affects people differently based on things like race or sex or other factors. So could you talk a little bit about how heat was and has been viewed, even if it's in these nebulous terms, and how different groups of people have reacted and adapted to heat in these areas you've studied?

Bharat Venkat 19:09

Absolutely. And, you know, I think in the 18th and 19th century, heat was actually in some ways less nebulous, or it was it was more of an object of concern and perhaps more nebulous in terms of how we understand mechanistic causality in the present moment, right? But it was um to kind of give you an example, right? So uh for many European powers who were trying to establish permanent settlements in tropical places, there was this persistent concern about whether you know European bodies, white bodies, could survive in the tropics. Um and the tropics were understood kind of very broadly to include everything from parts of South America to India to Africa. Um it was a very kind of broad geopolitical term, geoclimatological term, right? To to encompass a really broad swath of really very different climatic regions. And even in a place like India, you have places that are very cold, right? But nevertheless, it's part of this kind of tropical imagination. Um and scholars like David Arnold, many others have kind of tried to pinpoint what tropicality is really about, right? It's about lushness, but it's also about disease. It's about heat, but it's also about wealth and resplendency, right? Uh but for many kind of European colonial powers, it was also just about death, right? It was this fear that if you have permanent settlers, um they will eventually die or they will degenerate, right? The the race itself will degenerate over generations, um, either through intermarriage with local populations or through bodies themselves somehow degenerating, um, which might lead to everything from enfeeblement to quote feminization to melting brains, uh to sexual impotence impotency, uh, homosexuality, insanity. These are the kinds of concerns of a kind of colonial power, colonial administration. And uh so really heat was a dangerous thing. Um and this in a way established the parameters for much of how colonial empire was structured. So if we look to a place like India, you see that there's never more than a small number of British soldiers and ministrators on the ground at any given time. So, how do they control this kind of vast territory? They really rely on local peoples who get conscripted into the army, who get conscripted into the administration, right? Um, and this reliance persists even after you know what's sometimes described as the sepoy mutiny, this idea, this moment when Indians are. Bell and there's this kind of fear that local populations uh are going to try to overthrow rule, right? And this is what kind of establishes crown rule uh from a previous moment of of rule by the um uh um by like a by a charter company, right? So so in this in this moment of crown rule, you would think, okay, well, there's there's fear about Indians trying to overthrow us, uh, we should rely more on our own people. We should bring more soldiers from Britain, right? But but they don't. They continue to rely on local soldiers, uh, precisely because of the fact that they're more afraid of the heat than they are of insurgency, right? Um so I think this is just really telling is that on one hand, heat is a kind of potent force in the colonial imagination that really shapes how things are done. Um at the same time, it also offers a kind of alibi around labor, right? So it means that certain kinds of work are appropriate for white bodies, and those are the kinds of work that are intellectual and involve sitting in shaded, you know, shaded areas or inside of homes with someone uh fanning you or some sort of kind of early cooling technology. Um there's a fascinating one called a thermantidote, which involves multiple humans fanning uh basically cool-down cloths to produce a kind of cooling effect inside of a home. Um but yeah, so what this means again, there are people who are doing the inside intellectual work and people who are doing the outside um kind of menial, exhaustive in-the-sun labor, right? And and those are very kind of racialized uh differences, right? It's brown bodies outside, white bodies inside. Um, the same thing is happening around the world, right? So if we think about everything from slavery to indenture to other forms of forced labor, um you're seeing this across the board. Um, for example, in the Americas, um, you see enslaved black people who are who are working in plantations uh and under the grueling sun, and you see um doctors, you see scientists, you see administrators of the time saying this is their natural condition, right? Biologically, um Africans and those of African descent are better suited for this kind of labor in the sun uh because of, you know, and and they draw at various points on evolutionary theory, on scripture, right? Um there's multiple kind of forms of exegesis to explain exactly why this is the case, but um, the the end result is that white bodies are meant to be overseeing and doing that kind of intellectual labor, and black bodies and later on Chinese bodies and Filipino bodies, Japanese bodies, uh Mexican bodies, so on and so forth, can withstand heat and are meant to kind of do this kind of labor under extreme heat conditions. Um you see this from the plantation system to the um the automotive factories in Detroit, where black people were put into the kind of hottest parts of the factory into, you know, the working in the furnaces. Um you see this uh with Chinese working on the railroads. Um, again and again and again, you kind of see this recurring trope of white fragility. Um, and I don't mean this in the kind of a contemporary sense of white fragility, um, that's primarily psychological. I mean this in a in a deeply kind of biologistic sense, right? There's a sense that white bodies are fragile and therefore superior, right? Paradoxically. Um, and all these other kinds of bodies are are more durable, they're more resilient, and therefore uh inferior, and therefore uh properly suited by nature and by God to this kind of work.

Rose Campbell 25:53

So that kind of leads us into the modern period really well. And we, you know, climate scientists have been discussing for more than a decade how climate change differentially affects those who are already suffering from other types of inequality or lack of resources, also something you've talked about, of course. And in an op-ed for the LA Times in 2022, you discussed the intersection of housing policies and race in the 1930s and how those policies actually led to increased thermal inequality in the black and Latinx neighborhoods of Los Angeles today. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about these policies and kind of speculate on how something like housing laws could lead to thermal inequality.

Bharat Venkat 26:41

It's a great question. Uh so let me begin by saying that work that we did in Watts was in collaboration with two of my colleagues here at UCLA. Uh it's Dr. Mark Festel, who I believe has been a guest on your on your show, uh, and Dr. Kelly Turner. And, you know, we wanted to understand um what was kind of taken to be um, you know, so so there's this idea amongst, let's call it the heat community or the kind of community of scholars who are interested in studying heat exposure, uh, that redlining was a kind of really important moment in establishing vulnerability to heat across the United States. Um so for folks who don't know redlining, um, so in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, um, as people were at risk of losing their homes due to foreclosures, um, the federal government stepped in with uh the homeowners loan corporation, which basically offered the capacity to renegotiate the terms of those loans, and um basically provided access to certain kinds of financial instruments for people, right? And uh but those that access was mediated by ideas about who was a good investment and who wasn't, right? So the homeowners loan corporation developed these maps uh of cities across the United States where they would map which parts of the city were good investments, which were bad investments, and the areas that were bad investments were often quite literally in red, and those were often areas that had um high numbers of immigrants, um, high numbers of um black folks, um, other people of color. Uh so there was a very kind of clear racialized and kind of classed way in which um redlining occurred. Uh, and what it meant was that those areas that were that were redlined, um, including Watts, uh really lost access to a whole series of financial instruments, not simply home loans, right? So making which makes it incredibly difficult to buy a home if it wasn't already hard enough, uh, but also other kinds of financial instruments, um, including small business loans, um, other lines of credit, uh, so on and so forth. Um, this generally kind of propagates disinvestment in communities, right? So you're not able to establish stores, you're not able to own your homes, you have less kind of investment in a sense of like place because you don't know how long you'd be able to stay in that home, you don't have um these kinds of third places like corner stores, et cetera, because again, um, you're not able to buy those places. Um and all of this has an effect into the present, right? So we were kind of interested in understanding, you know, if if redlining had the strong effect, um, what were the mechanisms of that effect, right? So what precisely led to redlining leading to um higher temperatures today? Because we know, for example, Watts is what's referred to as a as an urban heat island, right? Because it is hotter than surrounding whiter areas. Um and it's not simply because of location, it's also because of things like lack of canopy cover, right? Many fewer trees. Uh, it's also about lack of air conditioning in homes. Uh people don't have ways to cool down. And you know, so most of most people live in Watts are low-income renters, right? Again, going back to this uh issue with being able to get you know loans. Um and so they're not able to cool down inside, they're not able to cool down outside. Um, it's just a dangerous place to be, right? And this is a common story across the United States. Um, kind of understand, you know, like what are the mechanisms that lead that kind of lead from the redlining to this uh increased exposure to heat in the present. You know, and part of that story has to do with something as simple as tree planting, right? So um in LA as in many places, um, what often happens is that if you if the city plants a tree in front of your home, um, you know, in that little kind of green patch up in front of a house or a building, uh, you're responsible. I mean, you being the homeowner are responsible for maintaining that tree. And those first couple years, trees need an incredible amount of water and care to survive. Uh, however, if you don't have homeowners living in homes, if you have renters, then it's not clear who's responsible. You can't get concordance from those homeowners to plant the tree and kind of a guarantee that they'll take care of it. Um so that's kind of one clear way in which you kind of see this investment um having effects in terms of uh you know access to shade, for example. Um we also see it just in terms of like bus stops, right? So um many bus stations in in Los Angeles, um, the shade, the the kind of the shaping of the the bus stand is partially related to who is sponsoring it or funding it. So if you see kind of um the advertisement, right, um that ties into the the kind of shape of the bus stand. There are other issues too, having to do with ADA compliance, so the Americans with Disabilities Act. So you have to make sure that um you know someone can get around a bus stand so can't take up too much, can't have too large of a footprint. Um so it depends on how large of a sidewalk you might have, uh so on and so forth. Um so what you see in a place like Watts is that a lot of the bus stands, a lot of people who use these buses, they don't have access to shade there either, right? So they're standing outside just baking, right? Um as opposed to some something like here in Westwood, you know, in UCLA campus, where I think most of the bus stands do in fact have shelter. And um I talked to a couple of UCLA students who told us that, you know, they they they notice this viscerally when when they're leaving their home in Watts and then they're coming to UCLA campus, and they see how much greener it gets as they travel. They see the shade, the shade structures in one part of town and not the other, right? So this is kind of something you can read off the landscape. Um I will say that the the other interesting thing to note here is that increasingly, uh, especially through the work of my colleague Mark Vestel, um, we're starting to kind of recognize that perhaps redlining was not the most important event in producing these effects. Um it might in some ways have been more of an index of pre-existing processes, right? So it was these exist the you know, um racism, classism, so on and so forth, disinvestments, these things might have already been happening prior to redlining, and redlining was simply a way to index and formalize that existing configuration, right? Um so we have research showing at a broad scale that redlined neighborhoods tend to be hotter than non-redline neighborhoods. Um, but we're kind of seeing through our work is that perhaps actually those processes that set that into motion predated redlining and predated the Great Depression, predated Hulk and these redlining maps. Um that's kind of interesting, and it kind of points us in other directions to kind of understand those mechanisms having a deeper history, maybe stretching back into the late 19th century. But that's still very much kind of a work in progress.

Rose Campbell 33:43

So you we've mentioned the UCLA Heat Lab, which we established a few years ago, and a lot of the projects that you and your students have taken on at the UCLA Heat Lab have been local to Los Angeles in part because of the pandemic, of course. Uh, but one of your recent projects looks at workers in food trucks. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about some of these projects and what you've learned about the various policies that create thermal and social inequality in areas we might not think to look at, right? Like we've talked about housing, but also people working in food trucks or factories or really hot places like that.

Bharat Venkat 34:22

Yeah, sure, I'd love to. Um so uh the UCLA Heat Lab is a group that I founded in back in 2020, January. And it's a group of students, uh primarily undergraduates, a few graduate students, um, and we have faculty and postdocs who are visitors at various points. And we're really trying to study thermal inequality in its various incarnations from a really multidisciplinary perspective. Our approach is to begin with a question or a concern and then work backwards to methods. So we don't begin with a methodological uh insistence that we must use X, Y, or Z approach, but we say, what is the question we want to tackle? What is the thing we're trying to understand? And um, so going back to you know the issue of coincidence, right? And and the pandemic specifically, during the pandemic uh here at UCLA, there was a concern about students congregating in dining halls, right? Um, that there wasn't adequate ventilation or there was too much density and students would get sick. And so uh food trucks were invented on campus, and you have several food trucks that were vetted and allowed to kind of serve students food outside, which is a great way to eat with others in a with you know safe distancing and so on and so forth. Um and one of my students came to me and said, you know, I wonder what it's like on the other side of that serving window. I wonder what it's like for people who work inside of these food trucks. And I had no idea, right? I mean, uh LA loves to talk about its food trucks and its food truck scene and how great the food is, and it absolutely is. But I don't think we know a lot about the lives and specifically the kind of work lives of people who who run these trucks. So we decided to talk to them. Uh so we began conducting oral histories, um, primarily my students, with with these uh folks who work in food trucks um here at UCLA and in Westwood. And um, we also purchased these little sensors called eye buttons, and we placed them in three different places within the food truck. So we placed them near the cooking area, near the serving window, and I think near the back door. Um and we found a couple of really interesting things, both through the temperature measurements, but also through the oral histories. Uh first, we learned that these food trucks get to be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, even on a relatively cool evening, uh, because they're, you know, they're a small space, because there's a very small window for serving, because the back door usually has to be closed, and that's a that's a state, uh, it's a state regulation, it's a food safety regulation, because in theory, if that that door is open, things can fly in, right? And they can land on your food and you don't want that. Uh a lot of them don't have air conditioning, or if they do, it's not very effective. Um, and so you have people who are exposed to incredibly high temperatures, again, even on a cool night. So you can imagine what that's like on a hot day. Um, and they're also working incredibly long hours. A lot of these food trucks are run by families, right? So it might be somebody and their kid or their brother or their or their wife or what have you. It's a family-run situation. There aren't a lot of employees, um, and it's really hard to take a break. So you're working long shifts. You barely have time to run out and use the bathroom. You definitely don't have time to just step outside and take a take a long break, right? Especially if you have a lot of people lined up. And so you're working under in really hot conditions uh for long hours, and there's really kind of no way to fix it, right? Um, and when we talked to food truck owners and workers, we talked about, you know, how do you handle this? And they said, well, you know, some of us are just better at this than others. Um, you know, maybe it's because my family's from Indonesia, my family's from Mexico. Uh, we learned how to do hard work, or we're just better able to do this kind of work. Um, but you know, and then we would hear stories about uh, you know, I once hired uh a white worker and they fainted on day one, right? And so we again heard these stories about uh racialized difference, um, racialized vulnerability and racialized resilience. Um and we were hearing it from workers of color too, right? And immigrant workers. So it wasn't simply a story imposed by others, but it had become so kind of ingrained in how people understood themselves, right? That that they were somehow perhaps biologically more resilient to the effects of heat, so they could endure these things in a way that a white worker couldn't, right? And there isn't really a biological basis for this, right? There's no um there's no kind of inherent, I mean, our bodies can change over time, and that's referred to as acclimatization. So if you have sustained exposure to certain temperatures while doing kind of low levels of work, you can build up your acclimatization. And some people maybe can be acclimatized more than others. But the idea that there's a kind of inherent biological capacity uh to deal with the heat is is just not true, right? And yet that idea continues to shape labor regimes um, you know, across the country and across the world. Uh so it was interesting to kind of hear that that kind of story that we can trace back through the history of slavery and indenture and colonialism playing out in food trucks, right? Uh and it's also kind of interesting to understand the kind of thermodynamics of a food, you know, this metal box that just absorbs heat from the outside and produces even more through the bodies packed in, you know, who are producing metabolic heat, but also the food they're cooking. Um all of that you know contributes to a really kind of dangerous uh work environment, right? But the thing is, in this situation, there's really no one to complain to because the workers are often the owners, right? There isn't a kind of um a big boss you can say that guy is evil, that guy's doing the wrong thing here. Um so it's a really trick tricky situation, and we really thought about this a lot. Like, how do we, what are kind of forms of amelioration that are possible in this context? Um, one of them was to push for um a change to the rule about closing back doors. So you so you've probably seen that food trucks have these doors that people enter in and out of, right? Um, those doors are required by food safety regulation in California to be closed at all times during service. And this to us was a clear way in which food safety and labor safety were not being uh thought of together. They were being pitted against each other, right? So there was a the concern for food safety overrode the concern for worker safety. Um and we were talking uh so we ended up publishing a zine about this, and we wrote um, you know, we wrote an op-ed, uh, we talked to various kind of elected officials to try to kind of push for a change in this, in this rule specifically to allow, for example, for the door to be open, but perhaps using a wire mesh, which some people do kind of informally, right? So that you still get some airflow, not the full amount, but you prevent things from flying in, right? Um another possible solution would be to install better air conditioners, um, although that's tricky for many reasons, including location power. You don't want stuff blowing onto your food, you don't want your food cooling down. Um there's also other kinds of design-based solutions because the um the windows in food trucks in America tend to be smaller, and that's again regulated, uh, than, for example, in places in Europe where you might have like a larger window. Um, there's also issues of safety, there's concerns about people kind of reaching in. So there's kind of possible solutions across multiple axes of kind of design policy, um, even people understanding that their bodies are vulnerable. But ultimately what makes it difficult is that food truck workers and owners are not super wealthy. They do this work, you know, partially because they love it, but also because they they need to. They need to do this to make ends meet. Um, I spoke to one guy who told me that you know, on particularly hot days, he said he doesn't he tells all of his employees not to come in and he pays them anyway. But he goes out and does it himself because he's like, I'm gonna sacrifice myself, but not any of my workers, right? Um, so this to me is a kind of really classic way in which thermal inequality is often rendered invisible, and in this case, quite literally, because it's behind this window inside of this metal box and we don't see it. Um I'll mention one other quick quick example is um carceral facilities. Uh people who are incarcerated are at the kind of front line of climate change. They experience the um the impacts of extreme heat uh in tremendous ways, you know, for multiplicity of reasons having to do with where prisons are located, how they're built, um, who is incarcerated and who's not, uh, pre-existing medical conditions, um, the ways in which psychotropic drugs actually make your bodies uh makes certain bodies unable to thermoregulate as effectively. Um and we know that uh prisons in the United States are the kind of biggest psychiatric institution in the country, right? There's more psychiatric drugs going through those than anywhere else. Um and yet, so recently California is trying to uh pass what's called an indoor heat standard to protect workers who who work in hot places, like warehouses and kitchens and so on. Um and there was a kind of last-minute decision by Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, not to sign, precisely because he was told at the last minute that the cost to air-conditioned carstrail facilities would be in the billions. So what they decided to do was to actually exclude carstal facilities, to kind of say, well, this applies to indoor spaces except for prisons and jails. Um this is a kind of really, really important exemption, right? This is basically saying those who are most vulnerable will not get the protection. Um there is some vague. promises that there'll be a separate separate rule passed down the line to protect people in prisons and jails but there's no reason to believe that'll happen right because those who are kind of most vulnerable are not going to kind of get the symphony sympathy and support of politicians and and um uh these kinds of bodies uh that that that develop these rules and regulations um so it's not going to it's not gonna have the kind of force required to pass a separate rule on its own um and so we're really trying to kind of insist that we need to understand that uh protecting labor means also protecting incarcerated labor and incarcerated people more generally um and this is again a place where those effects of heat that kind of inequality is rendered invisibilized because it's again it's behind closed doors it is within these kind of largely concrete facilities that just trap heat and make people endure what is often lethal degrees of heat, right? The number of heat deaths in prisons is is abominable right and and that is something that is is um kept from us in many ways you know those deaths are often not recorded as heat related um there's often and this is kind of true in general of uh the deaths of incarcerated people is that they're often reported in ways that are not accurate to what's going on. And so um I really think think you know once you think about thermal inequality in my experience and in the experience of my students you start to see it everywhere. You start to kind of see how it exists in places that you would, you know, places you walk by on a regular basis, the very fundamental structures of society, you see that it kind of shapes nearly everything we do in terms of where we work, how we live, how we relax, who we're able to associate with, and who is kind of hidden away or taken away from society.

Rose Campbell 45:52

Thank you. This has been such a fascinating discussion and as we wrap up I just would like to get your thoughts on what you see ahead with regards to thermal inequality. What can we do as individuals, as groups, as world citizens to mitigate the effects of thermal inequality and ensure that more people have access to the resources they need as temperatures rise, especially with climate change?

Bharat Venkat 46:18

That's a great question So I'm committed to what's described as climate justice, right? So it's not simply about mitigation it's not simply about we need to reduce carbon emissions. I mean absolutely we do but to think about how the degree of climate change that's already kind of baked into our kind of terrestrial system is going to impact us and impact us in really unequal ways. So how do we address that fundamental fact of inequality? How do we address those who are most vulnerable? How do we respond and protect those people? And I think that many of the solutions that exist are either counterintuitive or involve certain compromises or they don't seem like climate related solutions at all. So to give you an example um in our work in Watts one of the things that I advocated for um in that LA Times op ed was using money from the federal government to install air conditioning in rental units, right? To make sure that renters had air conditioning to make sure that their energy bills could be paid for. Air conditioning is frequently a controversial topic whenever I talk journalists they always say how can you advocate for air conditioning because air conditioning requires energy it it contributes to climate change. It's a huge accelerant of climate change it also produces waste heat that makes outside areas hotter right uh but to my mind there are a lot of other places we can cut air conditioning we can cut air conditioning from huge stores from these servers that are mining for Bitcoin from uh these mega palatial mansions that are often you know they're ridiculous right so if we want to cut air conditioning if we're worried about that we can think about where we're cutting from we don't have to cut from those who most need it just to survive right because again heat is deadly heat is I mean you know 2024 sorry 2023 was the hottest year in recorded human history um we don't know what this year is going to look like yet uh but we do know that you know there are more heat related deaths than any other natural disaster or weather event combined. So that means this is kind of a necessity to save lives. And so you know one compromise would be to say let's get more air conditioning but put them in places where it can save lives not just kind of add more air conditioning for those who already have it and use it for primarily comfort-based purposes right um another thing is to consider that climate solutions and climate adaptation adaptation solutions often don't look like climate solutions they can look like other kinds of things right so um if we understand that climate justice is also about racial justice it's also about civil rights also about public health then we can begin to see for example how something like uh to use my earlier example uh decarceration or abolition could be a a tool towards kind of addressing climate change right so if you have fewer prisons in California um they're producing less carbon um you're also having fewer people who are in these facilities that magnify the effects of heat um and so decarceration or abolition might seem like it's something over there it's an entirely different strategy for a different kind of problem but to my mind it's actually a pivotal strategy for climate adaptation and so I think more generally if we think about our solutions to these older fundamental issues around inequality and justice whether it's about race or gender or disability and so on and so forth we begin to see the kind of lineaments of a strategy for climate change, right? It's not simply about uh can we make the seawalls higher? You know, those are the kinds of things we imagine when we think about climate adaptation but it's also about things like can we install air conditioners in homes? Can we help renters become owners? Can we uh get rid of car show facilities? Can we think about um labor laws? Can we think about uh dignified wages right these are all to my mind climate solutions.

Rose Campbell 50:18

Well Bharat I'd like to thank you again for this fantastic discussion and for all your really important insights about a topic that probably a lot of us hadn't really thought about before so thank you again for joining us.

Bharat Venkat 50:31

Thanks again for having me.

Narrator 50:40

Thank you for listening to Then and Now a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website luskincenter.history dot ucla.edu Our show is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support and thanks to you for listening