shade

By midmorning in the Central Valley, the light turns hard and white, bleaching the sky and flattening every shadow. The rows of melons stretch to the horizon, vines twisted low in cracked soil. Pickers move in the rhythm the crop demands — bend, twist, lift, drop — their long sleeves damp with sweat, caps pulled low, bandanas hiding heat-burned cheeks. Spanish drifts along the rows, a joke here, a warning there, carried in the heavy air.

These are the cruelest days of harvest, when the sun turns fields into slow ovens and the heat climbs before breakfast, holding on until the stars are out. By nightfall, the damage is done: another collapse in the dirt, another family handed a death certificate instead of a paycheck.

It’s an all-too-familiar old problem in California. Nearly 20 years ago, in the shadow of four farmworker funerals — Arvin, Fresno County, Kern, Imperial Valley — California enacted the nation’s first heat rules for basic worker safety: water, shade, rest. Mercies you’d think needed no law. My fellow lawmakers and I who wrote those rules, along with then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who signed them into law, believed they were enough. But two decades on, the grim reaper still walks the rows: 110 degrees, no tree, no tarp, a single water jug growing warm, its handle slick from dust and hands. Breaks denied, not from cruelty alone, but from the unrelenting clock of the harvest.

This is not a failure of the law itself, but of enforcement. Some treated the bill’s signing as the finish line instead of the starting gun. Inspectors are too few. Penalties too light. Investigations too slow. The state auditor’s latest report read like an obituary for Cal/OSHA’s credibility: outdated rules, missed chances, offices too empty to answer the phone.

Meanwhile the climate has turned meaner. Nights that once cooled now hold the day’s heat like a grudge. And the danger in the fields isn’t just the sun. Immigration raids now sweep through the Valley like dust storms — sudden, unannounced, merciless. For more than half of California’s 350,000 farmworkers, the greater threat isn’t heat stroke but a knock on the door before dawn or a traffic stop that ends with a vehicle full of workers detained and trucked to some distant site. The food that feeds the nation is pulled from the earth by people who work under triple-digit skies yet live in the shadows, where one complaint can cost them their job, their home, their freedom.

Twenty harvest seasons later, I’m calling for action — not another bill signing on the Capitol steps, but dollars, real and committed, and the regulations to match. With that will and funding, four simple fixes can turn promise into protection.

First, bring 21st century tools to the fields. In 2005, the “high-tech” solution was a plastic water jug in the shade and a flapping pop-up canopy. Today, for $50 — the price of two boxes of gloves — employers can deploy a wearable sensor clipped to a worker’s arm to track core temperature and heart rate, sending a warning before the body crosses the edge into heatstroke. That’s not Silicon Valley moonshot money. It’s pocket change for agribusiness, and for workers it could mean the difference between walking out of the rows or being carried out.

Second, enforce in real time. If a worker drops to one knee in the heat, the state shouldn’t hear about it days later in a report. Imagine a network linking growers, regulators and emergency crews to the same pulse of information — turning a slow, reactive system that documents tragedies into one that can act quickly and prevent many of them.

Third, train before the first row is picked. Ten minutes — no more — for workers to stand upright and learn, in their own language, the signs: dizziness, nausea, the creeping fog in the mind that means it’s time to stop. Not a photocopied handout in English tucked into an envelope behind a paycheck, not a rushed talk in Spanish at the field’s edge, but a verified safety course — certified by labor contractors and farmers alike. Knowledge here is as life-saving as water and shade.

Lastly, match the urgency we see in other arenas. While Cal/OSHA limps along, starved of staff and mired in red tape, Immigration and Customs Enforcement charges in the opposite direction — spurred by $170 billion in new funding, an immigration-enforcement and border-security blitz hiring thousands, dangling $50,000 signing bonuses, paying off student loans, waiving age limits, even pulling retirees back for double-dip salaries. That’s what happens when a government decides the wrong mission matters most. We pour urgency into chasing farmworkers from the fields, yet can’t muster the will to protect them in the heat. Until Cal/OSHA gets that same drive — inspectors recruited in every corner of the state, incentives to bring in a new generation, hurdles stripped away — the laws we wrote will remain a promise without a witness.

Some will say it’s too much, that the industry can’t bear the cost. But I’ve walked behind the hearses through Valley dust, stood in the gravel lots of farm town funeral homes, watched wives clutch work shirts as if they still held his warmth, seen children in Sunday clothes staring at the dirt. No budget line can measure that loss.

The Valley will keep feeding the nation. The question is whether we will keep feeding the graveyards too.

Once, by enacting heat safety rules, California declared that a life was worth more than a box of produce. If we let that promise wither in the heat, all we wrote back then was a press release. Government systems can fast-track billion-dollar projects, but until this much more affordable priority gets that kind of attention, the rules are just ink on paper, and the roll call of the dead just grows longer.

Dean Florez is a former California Senate majority leader, representing portions of the Central Valley.

This weekend, Descanso Gardens will unveil a meticulously curated art exhibition titled “Roots of Cool: A Celebration of Trees and Shade in a Warming World.” Co-curated by Edith de Guzman, cooperative extension climate researcher at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, and artist Jolly de Guzman — a husband-and-wife duo — the exhibition highlights all-women artists who provoke visitors to contemplate the pressing issue of shade equity, the unequal access to cooling shade across urban neighborhoods, and what a tree and shade filled future can look like for L.A.

The goals of the exhibition are clear from the start, beginning with its title, “Roots of Cool,” which creatively integrates the Fahrenheit symbol in the word “of,” a tree in the letter “t” and the word “cool” as a shadow cast from the word “roots.”

The exhibit begins in the garden’s pathways, strewn with artworks, which lead visitors to the gallery rooms housed in the park’s Sturt Haaga Gallery and historic Boddy House.

The first piece of art on the path, located at the gardens entrance, is Leslie K. Gray’s “Bus Stop of the Past,” an outdoor installation that shows the silhouette of a woman standing on an L.A. street, presumably waiting for a bus, with no shade structure nearby, meant to represent the climate-related challenges women bus riders faced while commuting in the past.

It’s the first of a three-part installation — the other two parts show up later in the exhibition — that invites visitors “to think temporally about where we’ve been and where we’re going,” Gray said. According to the artist, it is meant to highlight historical urban planning decisions that have left certain communities disproportionately vulnerable to heat, particularly women of color, who are prominent riders of L.A. public transportation, as indicated by statistics displayed on the bus signs accompanying the works.

Another standout of the outdoor part of the exhibition is Chantée Benefield’s “Cool Canopy,” which entails dozens of multicolored umbrellas suspended over visitors’ heads. The piece is particularly resonant given that it is actually a recreation that Benefield made after the original was lost, along with her family home, in the Eaton Fire.

“What if the trees in neighborhoods were like graffiti, just ubiquitous everywhere?” Benefield asked. Her installation is both a colorful homage to lost greenery and a powerful statement on urban shade disparities, prompting visitors to contemplate what they would do without the shade being cast by these “trees” as they walk through the sunny patch where the work is located.

The next stop on the pathway is the second piece in Gray’s three-part installation: “Bus Stop of the Present.” It’s a version of the first, but with the addition of a shade structure for the woman bus rider. However, it shows clearly that the added structure is still inadequate, reflecting many of the realities women bus commuters face today. The bus sign here contains scientific facts that make the case for the critical need for systemic urban planning changes. Gray emphasized that these facts were carefully selected from peer-reviewed research and “scientifically vetted.”

Entering the Sturt Haaga Gallery, things change. Each room is meant to elicit a specific experience around urban planning and vegetation, and so each has its own visual and auditory scheme.

It begins with a dreary, urban past: shown against gray walls, works by Kim Abeles and Diana Kohne address historical inequities. Abeles’ installation “Looking for Paradise” visualizes the uneven distribution of trees in Downtown Los Angeles, while Kohne’s painted urban landscapes vividly depict the shade inadequacies she witnessed firsthand through her bus commutes as an L.A. resident, emphasizing how Los Angeles and other cities were built for “efficiency” rather than human comfort. The works are paired with compelling research, including the history of redlining and crucial heat-shade statistics, which visitors can interact with and see how their own communities are affected by these factors.

The next room is the present, with bright yellow walls representing the increasing urban heat of a changing climate. The artworks attempt to do the same. For example, Lisa Tomczeszyn’s installation, “Every Bench Deserves a Tree,” consists of two benches beside each other, one with no shade and only a street sign reading “Asphalt Blvd” while the other is shaded by a large tree — with leaves that are actually cutout photos of trees throughout the Deaconso gardens.

Finally, the third gallery room attempts to project a cooler, more verdant future with walls colored a serene green hue. It features works that imagine a future where technology and city planning better respond to environmental stressors, including Pascaline Doucin-Dahlke’s “Suspended Garden.” Like Tomczeszyn’s work in the previous room, this piece is also comprised primarily of benches set underneath umbrellas. In this case however, those umbrella canopies are made of repurposed plant materials.

One key goal of the exhibit is to help visitors connect to the importance of heat, shade and urban trees. For example, at the very end of the exhibit in the Boddy House, visitors can contribute to a real-world data collection study about how shade shapes their neighborhoods and what shade-heat related fact they find most striking, and are also invited to draw their imagined shade structures for women waiting at bus stops.

“[We] just don’t want to do science and just don’t want to do art. [We] want to create a good intersection that actually engages people,” said Jolly de Guzman.

“We want to get them through the heartstrings, visually, aesthetically and actively,” added Edith de Guzman. Reflecting on the broader potential for change, she said, “There’s a lot of reasons to despair right now, but if we change our radio frequency a little bit, we can connect to a whole different feeling. We can actually create the city we want, in the neighborhoods that we deserve.”

The exhibition will run from July 12 to Oct. 12, 2025, with a free opening reception on Friday, July 11, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Visiting Moorten Botanical Garden in Palm Springs is a step back in time, and worth the visit not just for the plants but the commentary from its gregarious, white-haired proprietor, Clark Moorten, who usually greets visitors at the entrance.

This quirky, endearing garden is one of the last remnants of old Palm Springs, when there was time to watch little birds flit fearlessly among the thorns, marvel at a palm that grows sideways about 8 feet before it grows up and listen spellbound to Moorten’s wonderful and seemingly endless stories.

The garden itself is small — roughly an acre of mature, artfully arranged cactuses and desert plants along shady dirt paths with hand-lettered signs, decaying desert artifacts and the famous “cactarium,” a word invented by Moorten’s mother, Patricia, who with his father, Chester “Slim” Moorten, began expanding the garden, established in 1938, after they bought the property in 1955.

The cactarium, by the way, is a small weathered Quonset hut stuffed with weird and rare cactuses — some of which wind along the ground like snakes or grow upside down from their pot like a prickly stalactite.

There’s a nursery here too, for people who want to take some plants home. This is a garden visitors can easily traverse in a few minutes, but honestly you’ll want to give yourself time to sit on a bench, browse in the nursery, and, if he’s around, listen to at least a few of Moorten’s stories about old Palm Springs and his remarkable parents. His father, for instance, was a logger as a teenager, who hitchhiked to Hollywood in the 1920s to become a Keystone Kop, then moved to the desert to fight off tuberculosis where he discovered that raising cactus paid better than gold mining — especially when Walt Disney asked him to suggest plants for “a little amusement park” he was creating in Anaheim, and he ended up supplying the plants for Frontier Land.

Moorten, 82, was an only child, and he still talks about his parents as though they’ll walk around the corner at any moment. “I was born with stickers in my butt,” he says on the website, and enough memories and stories to make this endearing garden glow.

Hours: Depends on the season. Between Oct. 1 and May 31, the garden is open every day but Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. In the summer, June 1-Sept. 30, when the heat is at its fiercest, the garden is open Fridays through Sundays only, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Admission: $7 adults and seniors; $5 veterans, $3 children 5-12. Children under 5 enter free.

Food: No food is sold at the garden, but there is a drinking fountain and they sell bottled water at the entrance. There are tables where visitors can bring prepared food into the garden to eat.

Other: There are restrooms at the back of the garden. The garden trails are compact dirt and wide enough to accommodate wheel chairs, but the cactarium’s narrow aisles and steps are not wheelchair-accessible.