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A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street
by Mike Tidwell
Book Reviewed by:A riveting and elegant story of climate change on one city street, full of surprises and true stories of human struggle and dying local trees – all against the national backdrop of 2023's record heat domes and raging wildfires and, simultaneously, rising hopes for clean energy.
In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, Tidwell's story depicts the neighborhood's battle to save the trees and combat climate change: The midwife who builds a geothermal energy system on the block, the Congressman who battles cancer and climate change at the same time, and the Chinese-American climate scientist who wants to bury billions of the world's dying trees to store their carbon and help stabilize the atmosphere.
The story goes beyond ailing trees as Tidwell chronicles people on his block coping with Lyme disease, a church with solar panels on its roof and floodwater in its basement, and young people anguishing over whether to have kids –all in the same neighborhood and all against the backdrop of 2023's record global temperatures and raging wildfires and hurricanes. Then there's Tidwell himself who explores the ethical and scientific questions surrounding the idea of "geoengineering" as a last-ditch way to save the world's trees – and human communities everywhere – by reflecting sunlight away from the planet.
No book has told the story of climate change this way: hyper-local, full of surprises, full of true stories of life and death in one neighborhood. The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue is a harrowing and hopeful proxy for every street in America and every place on Earth.
Introduction
The biggest trees on my street weren't yet sick and dying when I moved to the 7100 block of Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, Maryland. There were true giants back then, red and white oaks, tall and broad, offering a daydream greenery of good health. I was in good health, too. I was twenty-nine years old. I ran three miles per day. I grew native wildflowers in my backyard garden a few hundred feet from the border with Washington, DC.
But that was 1991, before the chaos of climate change really settled in over this narrow block of fourteen houses—and settled in over the world.
Thirty years ago, scientists and journalists had to travel to the Arctic or Australia's Great Barrier Reef to see the beginning impacts of global warming up close. Three decades later—after the dumping of nine hundred more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from oil, coal, and gas combustion—those impacts are everywhere. My neighborhood block, a microdot on any Google map, has ...
It starts with a murder mystery of sorts: what is killing the trees on a certain street in the Washington, DC suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland? The investigation sparks climate activist Mike Tidwell's obsession with spotting evidence of climate breakdown around his city. Along the way, he also discovers glimmers of hope, in the form of local scientists working on climate mitigation projects and residents coming together to make their neighborhood more resilient. Although the book's scope might initially seem overly provincial, the strategy of understanding global phenomena through a local microcosm is very effective. Wherever we live, all of us will have more examples of crazy weather, as former rarities become commonplace. It may be sobering to sit with the facts of climate breakdown while reading a book such as this, but knowledge empowers collective action...continued
Full Review
(796 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature
Beautiful. Not only is Mike Tidwell a very fine writer, there's almost no one I know who's earned more of a right to set forward their ideas about how we climb out of the climate mess. For decades he has fought the fossil fuel industry, and done it creatively, effectively, and tirelessly. I'm awfully glad he's taken the time now to reflect. Daniel Sherrell, author Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World
Few American writers render the climate crisis so vividly―not in statistics and headlines, but in the daily elegies sung quietly in the backs of our heads. This is a book about community, human and non-, holding together as the places we live in come apart.In The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, author Mike Tidwell offers an overview of strategies being researched and implemented to mitigate climate change. Overall, the main strategies are decarbonization and the drastic cutting of greenhouse gas emissions by switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Geoengineering technologies also aim to reverse the effects of climate change and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Here's a brief summary of a few specific approaches with the potential to slow the effects of climate change:
Solar Radiation Modification
Solar radiation modification involves reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere before it can reach the Earth and raise surface temperatures. This technology ...
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