As I worked outside every day during June at temperatures hovering between 92 and 97 degrees—with afternoon temps in the meager shade of our backyard's microclimate rising frequently above 100—I wondered about how insane it is to live in a place so hot.   I wondered about the latitude of Austin, a fabulous city located "deep in the heart of Texas," "at the intersection of four major ecological regions and...consequently a temperate-to-hot green oasis with a highly variable climate having some characteristics of the desert, the tropics, and a wetter climate."¹ When I looked up our latitude—30° 16' 0" N—I was surprised to find that there are no U.S. cities west of Texas as far south as we are (except, of course, for the whole state of Hawaii), and that Austin is just a little south of Baton Rouge, a little north of New Orleans, and on approximately the same latitude as Jacksonville FL, Agadir Morocco, Cairo Egypt, Al Basrah Iraq, Quetta Pakistan, and Hangzhou China.  We're south of the northern part of Africa!  And way south of all of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea.  I don't know why I wasn't aware of that before. Then last week I read an article about one of the most important influences on American cities during the last half of the 20th century—air conditioning.  Without it, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't live here.  I think I can safely guess that my father wouldn't have moved his family from Ohio to Dallas if we had to suffer through weeks and weeks, if not months, of temperatures in the 90's and sometimes 100's, without the cooling relief of air conditioning. According to the LA Times article, during the last 50 years, the South grew by 96% and the West by 143%, while areas in the North only grew by around 25%. The article goes on to discuss how the use of air conditioning has heated up our cities, aggravated global warming, and fostered our ever-increasing dependence on air conditioning (kind of like how Catholicism is a cure for it's own disease -- no offense intended to any other Catholics out there).  Almost no new car or home is built without A/C, and buildings are no longer built to deal with the heat in the more sustainable ways of the past. It's a pretty good read.  Please read it here: "AC: It's Not as Cool as You Think." Next time I'll share some tips on what we do to attempt to mitigate our impact on the planet.