Forgotten Landscapes: Native Americans and Cool Shade

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. The video that goes along with this essay is here.

In this book, I describe one ecological problem that white European and American villages had that Cherokee and other Native villages did not was the problem of how to stay cool in the summer.

The video shows my neighborhood in Alsace, France. It is densely populated, and there are hundreds of condominiums right next to my building. Our condominiums are very energy-efficient, even the ones built a long time ago, such as mine. Our windows and walls are thick, which keeps our units quiet as well as insulated. And this is how that efficiency is achieved:

• Sources of energy. Instead of each condominium having its own individual heating units, as is often the case in America, these buildings get their heat from hot water going through radiators. The hot water comes from a network from a centralized power plant where furnaces burn methane to heat the water. The methane (as I described in the previous video) comes partly from food wastes.
• Required energy efficiency. Whenever one of the condominiums is sold, the building owner has to meet new standards of energy efficiency, e.g. through improvement of insulation; the building owners pass the costs to condo owners who pass the costs on to renters.
• Little but deliberate things. In the middle of our courtyard there are a lot of trees, which provide cool shade. There are two reasons for this. First, the leaves absorb sunlight energy and emit the heat straight up into the air, away from where we live. Second, transpiration (the evaporation of water) uses up some of the heat energy. These îlots fraîcheurs (cool islands) are a deliberate part of urban planning. Some American cities do this also. Las Vegas recently decided to plant trees to help deal with the over-110-degree summer heat. The problem is, where are they going to get the water for the trees? It can be done, but has to be planned.
• Air conditioning. Very few French apartments have air conditioners. We are just lucky to live 48 degrees north latitude where we can get away with not having air conditioners.

In my book I describe Cherokee villages that were filled with trees that kept them cool. Meanwhile, white cities would, at the time, cut down all the trees. The Cherokees were probably puzzled that white people would work so hard to cut down the trees and then get, literally, hot under the collar about the summer heat.

I doubt that the Native Americans knew more ecology than white Americans. They just thought cutting the trees down was a lot of hard work with nothing to show for it.