Focus on Arts and Ecology

By Olivia Rosane, June 14, 2022, Edited by Chris McDermott

More than half of the world’s agricultural soils are already degraded, and both scientists and UN agencies agree that the remaining soil will only take us another 40 to 50 years. 

Yet despite the threat this poses to biodiversity, the climate and global food security, soil health receives less attention than other looming environmental crises. That’s why yogi, mystic and visionary Sadhguru has set off on a 100-day, 30,000 kilometer (approximately 18,641 mile) motorcycle journey to save soil.

“Everybody knows the problem. Everybody generally knows what is the solution, but they’ve all been waiting for one idiot to come and bell the cat,” the 64-year-old said during a talk in Tbilisi, Georgia, on day 37 of his journey. “So here I am.”

A 24-Year Journey 

Sadhguru revved up for his motorcycle odyssey from Trafalgar Square, London, on March 20, but his journey to save soil really began 24 years ago in Tamil Nadu, India, as Jyoti Jankowski, who has been volunteering with Sadhguru’s Isha Foundation since 2004 and the Conscious Planet/Save Soil movement since August 2021, told EcoWatch. In 1998, visiting UN officials warned that almost 60 percent of Tamil Nadu could become a desert by 2025, according to an Isha Foundation website.

“He was kind of shocked by this number,” Jankowski said. “And he went around and looked and he said, ‘No, it’s going to be sooner than that.’ So he started thinking about what it is that we can be doing for this and that’s, I think, where this whole thing started.” 

The movement first focused on increasing vegetation to shelter the earth from the sun. It started off with local efforts to reforest Tamil Nadu’s Velliangiri Hills that rose behind the Isha Yoga Center. It then expanded to the state-wide Project GreenHands, which mobilized volunteers and farmers towards the goal of covering 33 percent of Tamil Nadu in vegetation. Finally, Sadhguru went national with 2017’s Rally for Rivers, which won the support of 162 million people in India. This attention on rivers evolved into the Cauvery Calling movement to aid the struggling southern Indian river by empowering 5.2 million farmers to plant 2.42 billion trees in its basin in a 12-years period.

Rivers and soil are connected, Jankowski explained, because the water that replenishes these rivers is filtered through the soil. Soil health is also connected to the health of the planet because soil stores three times the carbon dioxide of living plants and therefore helps combat the climate crisis, according to the Save Soil website. 

The Conscious Planet movement to Save Soil takes Sadhguru’s longstanding concerns about the well-being of the literal earth beneath our feet global with three main aims: 

1. Raising awareness about the threat to the world’s soils.
2. Mobilizing 60 percent of the world’s voters – or around 3.5 billion people – to push for policy measures that would support soil.
3. Convincing 193 nations to craft policy that would ensure all soils have an organic content of at least three to six percent. 

Life on the Road

To further these aims, Sadhguru decided to travel from the UK to India by motorcycle, stopping in 26 countries. The route went through Europe and the Middle East, with a stop off in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire for the  15th session of the Conference of Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. He is currently in India, and will conclude the trip at its southern tip in Coimbatore on June 21. Sadhguru ferried from London to The Hague and from Muscat, Oman, to Jamnagar, India, and also flew from Baku, Azerbaijan to Amman, Jordan, as well as to and from COP15 and the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. Otherwise, he was biking, sometimes for 12 to 14 hours at a stretch.

Justin Aubuchon, who has been volunteering at the Isha Foundation for the past decade and accompanied Sadhguru for part of the journey as a member of the audio-visual team, told EcoWatch about what life was like on the road.  

The daily routine varied. Sometimes, the team would spend three or four days in a city for events and Sadhguru would only be biking to and from appearances. Other days meant rousing around 6 a.m., driving to a border crossing, waiting three to four hours to cross and then biking another three to four hours to the destination. Aubuchon said days like that were exhausting in a car, let alone a bike.

“I couldn’t even imagine what he was going through,” he said. 

Sadhguru also persisted through a variety of road conditions, from steep, cobblestone streets in Rome to dusty, bumpy two-lane roads in Romania and Georgia. He drove through winds strong enough that truck drivers had to be put on notice, snow in Switzerland, and torrential rainfall coming into Rome that flooded the roadways. However, Sadhguru was not interested in arriving late.

“[I]t was just astonishing what he was putting himself through to get this message out,” Aubuchon said.

However, while Sadhguru was the only one riding a bike, he has not been alone in his efforts. At times there were as many as 40 to 45 people helping with the logistics of the journey, from organizing events to preparing food. A kitchen crew would even drive ahead with their trailer to be ready to serve a meal when the rest of the team arrived at a destination. Aubuchon said there was a sense of great purpose and camaraderie among all the volunteers. 

“I saw it and I continue to see it as one of the most important things I’ve ever done in my life,” Aubuchon said. 

Part of a Movement 

This sense of purpose wasn’t limited to the volunteers organizing the journey, but extended to the audiences and individuals Sadhguru spoke with along the way. This was something that Aubuchon noticed when he recorded video footage of events.

“I was just blown away by, regardless of what city we were in, what country, what language they were speaking, it was almost universal, how receptive people were to this message and how open and excited they were about it,” he said.

He remembered in particular an encounter between Sadhguru and German actress and influencer Toni Garrn in Berlin. 

“[S]he said something like she’s never been part of anything, any sort of movement before, but she feels part of this now,” he recalled. 

Of course, the entire purpose of the Save Soil movement is to encourage this kind of participation, and the mission will extend beyond Sadhguru’s journey.

[J]ust our voices is what he needs. And if you can create a big enough voice, then this will get noticed and it will be impactful,” she said. 

People inspired by the movement have taken the initiative to raise their voices in different ways. Volunteers in Canada have gotten Niagara Falls, the CN Tower and the Montreal Olympic Stadium lit up with the green-and-blue Save Soil colors. and one UK schoolboy wrote a letter about the issue to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and received a response. 

This encouragement to spread the word in unique and creative ways has made the movement very hopeful in a time of great anxiety over what we as individuals can do about environmental degradation, Jankowski said. Aubuchon observed that many of the events he filmed had a “very celebratory atmosphere.” They would begin with musical performances from the host culture and conclude with the Save Soil anthem and dance. 

That hopeful messaging was in evidence when Sadhguru met with school children planting trees outside of Baku, Azerbaijan. This is an area that is currently experiencing desertification, but was once very green, Aubuchon said. 

“[H]e talked a number of times about [how] it would be easy for you to get it back, get it back into a green place,” Aubuchon said. 

The next major Save Soil event is a walkathon being organized in more than 60 cities in the Americas on June 18 and 19. 

The organizers chose Father’s Day weekend in particular, Jankowski told EcoWatch, “as a way of saying that as a generation, as parents, that this is something we should be giving to our children and their children.”

Olivia Rosane

Olivia has been writing on the internet for more than five years and has covered social movements for YES! Magazine and ecological themes for Real Life. For her recent master’s in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, she completed a creative dissertation imagining sustainable communities surviving in post-climate-change London. She has lived in New York, Vermont, London, and Seattle, but wherever she lives, she likes to go to the greenest place she can find, take long, meandering walks, and write poems about its wildflowers. Follow her on Twitter @orosane.

(Sources: EcoWatch)

By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, June 23, 2022, Edited by Chris McDermott 

Sea sponges are simple marine animals that have been around for about 600 million years. Their skeletons are dense and porous and they adapt well to their particular habitat, attaching themselves to different types of surfaces, from rocks and corals to soft sediments, like mud and sand. They have even been known to fasten themselves to floating debris, according to the National Ocean Service.

New Zealand is currently experiencing the largest ever recorded bleaching of sea sponges, according to scientists, following recent marine heatwaves, The Guardian reported.

“As far as we’re aware, it’s the largest scale and largest number of sponges bleached in one event that’s been reported anywhere in the world… certainly in cold waters,” said James Bell, marine ecologist and professor at Victoria University of Wellington, as reported by The Guardian.

Last month, the southern coast of New Zealand saw its sea sponges bleached for the first time ever. At first, scientists thought thousands of sea sponges had turned white, but explorations of the country’s coasts over the last month have shown that many more have been bleached.

“At least millions of sponges have been bleached in those environments, maybe even tens of millions — this is one of the most abundant sponges in Fiordland and so it’s a really wide scale event,” Bell said, as The Independent reported.

New Zealand has experienced two record marine heatwaves with temperatures up to five degrees above normal, said Dr. Robert Smith, oceanographer at the University of Otago, reported The Guardian. The extreme temperatures began last September in some places and lasted 213 days, Smith said, adding that the length of the increased temperatures was abnormal.

“At the northern and southern limits of New Zealand, we’ve seen the longest and strongest marine heatwave in 40 years, since satellite based measurements of ocean temperature began in 1981,” said Smith, as The Guardian reported.

Even if bleaching doesn’t completely kill the sponges, it causes organisms that take up residence inside them and provide them with food through photosynthesis to be expelled, denying the sponges nutrients and reducing their defenses.

According to Bell, some species of sea sponge are able to bounce back from extreme bleaching, while others are not.

“Some organisms are going to be OK with a day or a week above average temperatures – but once you start accumulating that heatstroke… we’re going to start to really feel the effects,” Smith said, as reported by The Guardian.

While Smith said it would be hard to say human-caused climate change was the culprit of a particular period of increased temperatures, oceans across the globe were heating up more often with higher temperatures for longer periods of time, and the intensity and length was predicted to increase.

“This just highlights the kind of climate crisis that we’re facing,” Bell said, as Indiatimes reported.

Cristen Hemingway Jaynes

Cristen Hemingway Jaynes is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She holds a JD and an Ocean & Coastal Law Certificate from University of Oregon School of Law and an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. Cristen has traveled all over the U.S., first on road trips with her mother, then by Greyhound bus and Amtrak train. The American landscape, with its roadside cafés, strip malls and wanderers, figures prominently in her fiction. She is the author of the short story collection The Smallest of Entryways, as well as the travel biography, Ernest’s Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway’s Life. Cristen loves animals, music, hiking, cooking, painting, waterways big and small and collaborating with other artists and writers.

(Sources: EcoWatch)

By Olivia Rosane, June 23, 2022, Edited by Chris McDermott 

Could Los Angeles become the largest city yet to ban the construction of new gas stations? 

The idea might seem improbable. The City of Angels is infamous for its reliance on cars. Its public transit system is considered one of the worst in the world, according to Jalopnik, and the amount of cars on the road meant that LA commuters wasted 46 hours each in traffic in 2020, according to the Urban Mobility Report. Despite this, the city announced on Wednesday that it was joining a growing movement of metropolises looking to stop adding gas stations.

“We are ending oil drilling in Los Angeles. We are moving to all-electric new construction. And we are building toward fossil fuel free transportation,” LA Councilmember Paul Koretz, who wrote the proposed policy, said in a statement. “Our great and influential city, which grew up around the automobile, is the perfect place to figure out how to move off the gas-powered car.”

In developing its no-new-gas-station policy, LA is joining the SAFE Cities movement, a project of the nonprofit Stand.earth, The Guardian reported. This is a movement linking local groups working to keep their communities “safe” from fossil fuels by taking measures like banning new fossil fuel infrastructure and transitioning to renewable energy, the website explained. 

In a new report, SAFE Cities said there were four key reasons to stop building new gas stations:

1. They harm the local environment: Gas stations can cause spills that pollute soil and water and release carcinogenic chemicals like benzene. 
2. They are a financial risk: Up to 80 percent of gas stations in the U.S. and Canada could be unprofitable in 15 years, according to a recent study, and when they shutter they are expensive to clean up. 
3. The climate crisis: Transportation is the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and the second leading cause in Canada. Halting construction of new gas stations can send a signal that new gas cars are not needed or wanted.
4. The future is electric: With the Biden administration and many cities promoting a transition to electric vehicles and charging stations, new gas stations could become stranded assets. 

The movement away from gas stations began in March of 2021, when Petaluma, California, became the first U.S. city to ban new gas stations, as Grist reported. 

“We are not surprised that many cities are following our lead to prohibit the development of new gas stations,” Petaluma Council Member D’Lynda Fischer said in a statement. “We have an obligation to stop fossil fuel expansion and new gas stations lock communities into many kinds of risks. This is one of many steps Petaluma is taking. We are proud to be part of this growing movement to stop fossil fuel expansion and phase out fossil fuels.”

Since Petaluma made its move, other California cities have followed suit, including Rohnert Park and Sebastopol. In addition to Los Angeles, the Californian cities of Windsor, Cotati and Santa Rosa all have policies in development, as do Bethlehem, New York, and Comox Valley Regional District, British Columbia. These mark the first such policies on the table in New York and Canada. 

The movement comes as gas prices are soaring. California has the highest in the nation, at $6.37 per gallon on average, Grist reported. But campaigners say building new stations isn’t the answer.

“Prohibiting construction of new gas stations is not going to do anything to impact gas prices right now,” SAFE Cities senior advisor Anne Pernick told Grist. “But the cost of new gas stations in terms of the health, equity, and safety of the community, as well as future stranded assets, is a bill that definitely ends up being paid by public dollars.”

In Los Angeles, Koretz hopes the policy will advance by the end of 2022, staffer Andy Shrader told The Guardian.

“Our daily bad habits are destroying the natural systems we depend on to exist. It’s really up to cities to turn around climate change,” Shrader said. “If you have lung cancer you stop smoking. If your planet is on fire, you stop throwing gasoline on it.”

Olivia Rosane

Olivia has been writing on the internet for more than five years and has covered social movements for YES! Magazine and ecological themes for Real Life. For her recent master’s in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, she completed a creative dissertation imagining sustainable communities surviving in post-climate-change London. She has lived in New York, Vermont, London, and Seattle, but wherever she lives, she likes to go to the greenest place she can find, take long, meandering walks, and write poems about its wildflowers. Follow her on Twitter @orosane.

(Sources: EcoWatch)

Ban on manufacture and import of six popular types of items will begin in December 2022, and sales a year later. 

By Tracey Lindeman, 20 Jun 2022

Canada laid out its final regulations on Monday spelling out how it intends to apply a ban on plastic bags, straws, takeout containers and other single-use plastics.

“Only 8% of the plastic we throw away gets recycled,” said federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos in French, adding that 43,000 tonnes of single-use plastics a year find their way into the environment, most notably in waterways.

Duclos was joined by the environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, on a beach in Quebec City to announce the final regulatory text, which includes banning single-use plastic bags, cutlery, straws, stir sticks, carrier rings, and takeout containers.

The ban on manufacture and import of those six types of items will begin in December 2022, and the ban on sale a year later. By the end of 2025, Canada will also ban export, making it “the first among peer jurisdictions to do so internationally”, according to a government news release.

“The Canadian population was very clear with us,” he said of the prevalence of plastic in soil, air, drinking water and food. “They’re tired of seeing plastic trash in parks, streets [and other locations].”

The regulations have a few notable exceptions. Retailers will be allowed to sell single-use plastic flexible straws if it is packaged alongside a beverage container, and as long as the packaging was done off-premises.

They’ll also be permitted to sell packages of 20 or more single-use straws, as long as they’re kept out of customer view.

Also absent from the new regulations are bans on plastic packaging for consumer goods – the leading source of plastic waste worldwide, though Canada has promised to ensure all plastic packaging contains at least 50% recycled content by 2030.

In 2018, Canada led the creation of the international Ocean Plastics Charter, which has since been signed by 28 countries including France, Germany and Costa Rica. The pledge includes steps to reduce plastics usage, and to work with industry to increase rates of plastics recycling.

(Sources: The Guardian)

The New England Journal of Medicine kicks off a series of articles Thursday with an examination of the effects of air pollution on children’s health.

By Victoria St. Martin, June 16, 2022 

For years, research journals devoted to the earth sciences have warned of the dire consequences that could result from global warming and pollution going unchecked.

Now, one of the nation’s oldest medical journals has committed itself to increasing the public’s knowledge about the health effects of the planet’s changing climate.

Beginning with the issue published Thursday, The New England Journal of Medicine is expanding its coverage of the intersection of climate issues and public health, starting with a series on fossil fuel-driven health harms. The Journal plans to devote regular coverage to the topic—on its pages and in its affiliated journals—going forward.

The opening article focuses on how children—particularly children of color and those from poor and working class communities—are affected by such factors as extreme weather events, heat stress and air and water quality.

“People care about children, and families and children are going to suffer the most from long term climate change issues,” said one of the authors, Kari Nadeau, who is the Naddisy Foundation Endowed Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and the director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University.

“For example, my children will see three times as many climate change extreme events than their grandparents did,” Nadeau said. “In their lifetime there will be 5 million deaths across the world due to climate change—we need to really focus our efforts on communicating how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. And we have those tools.

“The time is now, it’s urgent and we can do something about it.”

The article is just the beginning of a much-needed focus on the consequences of climate issues by leading researchers in the medical community, a deputy editor at the journal said.

After the editors of 200 health journals—including the New England Journal of Medicine—signed an editorial in September 2021 urging world leaders to take action against climate change, Caren Solomon, deputy editor at the journal, said she and others felt compelled to redouble their efforts to address the implications for health. 

“We’re coming together and attempting to address this topic from a range of perspectives,” said Solomon, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a primary care physician. She hopes the series will help doctors and their patients, and she said she hopes it helps people learn more about this issue and become more motivated to engage in climate action.

In the article, Nadeau and her co-author, Frederica Perera, a environmental health sciences professor at Columbia University and the director of the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, write that the effects of climate change are “a growing concern” for the health of children—both physically and emotionally.

“All children are at risk,” Nadeau and Perera wrote, “but the greatest burden falls on those who are socially and economically disadvantaged. Protection of children’s health requires that health professionals understand the multiple harms to children from climate change and air pollution and use available strategies to reduce these harms.”

Those strategies, the authors said, include mental health counseling related to climate change or displacement, development of a heat action plan, education on the air-quality index and pollen monitoring as well as use of home air-filtration systems. Health professionals “have the power to protect the children they care for by screening to identify those at high risk for associated health consequences,” they said, “by educating them, their families, and others more broadly about these risks and effective interventions; and by advocating for strong mitigation and adaptation strategies.”

One strategy has been partnering with families to document the climate impacts on health that they are seeing firsthand.

Kim Gaddy, an activist, said she suspected that one in four children in Newark, New Jersey has asthma. And as a Black mom in a heavily polluted city, she said she knows the burden of the disease all too well: she has asthma and so did three of her children. Her eldest died last summer at the age of 32 after a heart attack. Founder of The South Ward Environmental Alliance, Gaddy is the national environmental justice director for Clean Water Action. She said she began to team up with a coalition of healthcare professionals to research how prevalent asthma was in her city. The data they collected proved her hypothesis was right—children in Newark have one of the highest rates of asthma in the nation. 

“They analyzed what was happening with asthma and they said, ‘Kim, you are spot on—one out of four,’” Gaddy said. “We need that validation from the health officials who oftentimes don’t sit at the table with us. And it’s a great thing when we can partner with a pediatrician and nurses who can now go out to these systems and share the information.”

(Sources: Inside Climate News)

Hundreds of blue, green and grey tents are pitched under the sun’s searing rays in downtown Phoenix, a jumble of flimsy canvas and plastic along dusty sidewalks. Here, in the hottest big city in America, thousands of homeless people swelter as the summer’s triple digit temperatures arrive.

The stifling tent city has ballooned amid pandemic-era evictions and surging rents that have dumped hundreds more people onto the sizzling streets that grow eerily quiet when temperatures peak in the midafternoon. A heat wave earlier this month brought temperatures of up to 114 degrees (45.5 Celsius) - and it’s only June. Highs reached 118 degrees (47.7 Celsius) last year.

“During the summer, it’s pretty hard to find a place at night that’s cool enough to sleep without the police running you off,” said Chris Medlock, a homeless Phoenix man known on the streets as “T-Bone” who carries everything he owns in a small backpack and often beds down in a park or a nearby desert preserve to avoid the crowds.

“If a kind soul could just offer a place on their couch indoors maybe more people would live,” Medlock said at a dining room where homeless people can get some shade and a free meal.

Excessive heat causes more weather-related deaths in the United States than hurricanes, flooding and tornadoes combined.

Around the country, heat contributes to some 1,500 deaths annually, and advocates estimate about half of those people are homeless.

Temperatures are rising nearly everywhere because of global warming, combining with brutal drought in some places to create more intense, frequent and longer heat waves. The past few summers have been some of the hottest on record.

Just in the county that includes Phoenix, at least 130 homeless people were among the 339 individuals who died from heat-associated causes in 2021.

“If 130 homeless people were dying in any other way it would be considered a mass casualty event,” said Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington.

It’s a problem that stretches across the United States, and now, with rising global temperatures, heat is no longer a danger just in places like Phoenix.

This summer will likely bring above-normal temperatures over most land areas worldwide, according to the latest seasonal forecast map produced by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.

Last summer, a heat wave blasted the normally temperate U.S. Northwest and had Seattle residents sleeping in their yards and on roofs, or fleeing to hotels with air conditioning. Across the state, several people presumed to be homeless died outdoors, including a man slumped behind a gas station.

In Oregon, officials opened 24-hour cooling centers for the first time. Volunteer teams fanned out with water and popsicles to homeless encampments on Portland’s outskirts.

A quick scientific analysis concluded last year’s Pacific Northwest heat wave was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change adding several degrees and toppling previous records.

Even Boston is exploring ways to protect diverse neighborhoods like its Chinatown, where population density and few shade trees help drive temperatures up to 106 degrees (41 Celsius) some summer days. The city plans strategies like increasing tree canopy and other kinds of shade, using cooler materials for roofs, and expanding its network of cooling centers during heat waves.

It’s not just a U.S. problem. An Associated Press analysis last year of a dataset published by the Columbia University’s climate school found exposure to extreme heat has tripled and now affects about a quarter of the world’s population.

This spring, an extreme heat wave gripped much of Pakistan and India, where homelessness is widespread due to discrimination and insufficient housing. The high in Jacobabad, Pakistan near the border with India hit 122 degrees (50 Celsius) in May.

Dr. Dileep Mavalankar, who heads the Indian Institute of Public Health in the western Indian city Gandhinagar, said because of poor reporting it’s unknown how many die in the country from heat exposure.

Summertime cooling centers for homeless, elderly and other vulnerable populations have opened in several European countries each summer since a heat wave killed 70,000 people across Europe in 2003.

Emergency service workers on bicycles patrol Madrid’s streets, distributing ice packs and water in the hot months. Still, some 1,300 people, most of them elderly, continue to die in Spain each summer because of health complications exacerbated by excess heat.

Spain and southern France last week sweltered through unusually hot weather for mid-June, with temperatures hitting 104 degrees (40 Celsius) in some areas.

Climate scientist David Hondula, who heads Phoenix’s new office for heat mitigation, says that with such extreme weather now seen around the world, more solutions are needed to protect the vulnerable, especially homeless people who are about 200 times more likely than sheltered individuals to die from heat-associated causes.

“As temperatures continue to rise across the U.S. and the world, cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, New York or Kansas City that don’t have the experience or infrastructure for dealing with heat have to adjust as well.”

In Phoenix, officials and advocates hope a vacant building recently converted into a 200-bed shelter for homeless people will help save lives this summer.

Mac Mais, 34, was among the first to move in.

“It can be rough. I stay in the shelters or anywhere I can find,” said Mais who has been homeless on and off since he was a teen. “Here, I can stay out actually rest, work on job applications, stay out of the heat.”

In Las Vegas, teams deliver bottled water to homeless people living in encampments around the county and inside a network of underground storm drains under the Las Vegas strip.

Ahmedabad, India, population 8.4 million, was the first South Asian city to design a heat action plan in 2013.

Through its warning system, nongovernmental groups reach out to vulnerable people and send text messages to mobile phones. Water tankers are dispatched to slums, while bus stops, temples and libraries become shelters for people to escape the blistering rays.

Still, the deaths pile up.

Kimberly Rae Haws, a 62-year-old homeless woman, was severely burned in October 2020 while sprawled for an unknown amount of time on a sizzling Phoenix blacktop. The cause of her subsequent death was never investigated.

A young man nicknamed Twitch died from heat exposure as he sat on a curb near a Phoenix soup kitchen in the hours before it opened one weekend in 2018.

“He was supposed to move into permanent housing the next Monday,” said Jim Baker, who oversees that dining room for the St. Vincent de Paul charity. “His mother was devastated.”

Many such deaths are never confirmed as heat related and aren’t always noticed because of the stigma of homelessness and lack of connection to family.

When a 62-year-old mentally ill woman named Shawna Wright died last summer in a hot alley in Salt Lake City, her death only became known when her family published an obituary saying the system failed to protect her during the hottest July on record, when temperatures reached the triple digits.

Her sister, Tricia Wright, said making it easier for homeless people to get permanent housing would go a long way toward protecting them from extreme summertime temperatures.

“We always thought she was tough, that she could get through it,” Tricia Wright said of her sister. “But no one is tough enough for that kind of heat.”

AP Science Writer Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi and AP writers Frances D’Emilio in Rome and Ciaran Giles in Madrid contributed to this report.

Follow Snow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/asnowreports

(Sources: AP News)