Environmental journalist Mike Tidwell had traveled the world, witnessing the deadly impacts of a changing climate. Then he saw that climate change was threatening the life he had made for himself and his family in an idyllic town on the District of Columbia’s northeast border.
In “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street,” Tidwell describes how changing climatic conditions can undermine the megaflora, the big trees, that define a neighborhood, a town, a region – and how that loss can impair the well-being of the people who live there.
Tidwell is the author of several previous books, including “Bayou Farewell” (2004) and “The Ravaging Tide” (2007). In 2002, he founded the Chesapeake Climate Action Network with a seed grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He continues to direct the grassroots organization from its home office in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Yale Climate Connections interviewed Tidwell via a Zoom call. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Yale Climate Connections: Thank you taking the time to talk with us, Mike. Let’s start by having you describe the neighborhood that you memorialize in this book. What was Willow Avenue like before climate change began to take its toll?
Mike Tidwell: I moved to the 7100 block of Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, right against the border between Maryland and D.C., in May of 1991. It was a different place then than it is now. We had a really healthy urban canopy of 70 to 150-year-old trees, including giants right on my block. But that has changed. Anyone in Takoma Park will tell you that they’ve seen so many trees disappear, especially in the last five or six years.
YCC: When did you begin to notice that things were changing?
Tidwell: I can remember precipitation events on or near my block starting around 2010. Rain started to affect my Presbyterian church, which is one block from my house, around 2011. We had a derecho storm in 2012 that was pretty significant. But it was really in 2018-2019 that we noticed truly unusual and sustained heavy rain, which then began to dramatically affect our trees.
YCC: How does sustained heavy rain hurt trees?
Tidwell: The best arborists I know think that the rainfall event of 2018 – when the jet stream dipped all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and brought to the mid-Atlantic atmospheric rivers that set records for precipitation- crossed a threshold. Maryland got two feet more rain than normal. The soil was soaked for so long it triggered this mold called phytophthora or plant destroyer. This mold gravitates to the roots of trees, especially white oak trees, and devastates them. You effectively have root rot.
After the soaking rain, the trees went through their normal autumn shedding of leaves. But in the spring of 2019, when they had to re-leaf, the damaged roots could not provide the water and the nutrients they needed. So the trees borrowed energy they had stored in their trunks in the form of carbohydrates, which the trees use as emergency food. But that process creates a scent that attracts ambrosia beetles.
So we went from record rainfall to damaged roots to trees that were so stressed that they were then attacked by ambrosia beetles.
YCC: Your accounts of the lives and deaths of trees, and how they connect with the lives of humans, are compelling. You write movingly about the grief you and your neighbors experience with the loss of these big trees.
Tidwell: Coincidentally, when I first moved to this block of Takoma Park, scientists were beginning to learn a lot more about trees. They aren’t just these mute beings that provide shade. They communicate with each other. They can share nutrients through their roots underground. And they warn each other when attacked by insects or threatened by drought.
We’ve also learned that human beings have a greater sense of well-being when in the presence of trees. Studies show that patients in hospitals recover faster if they can just see a tree through the window. Our heart rates will lower, our cortisone and stress levels will go down, when in the presence of trees. And so, if we know that the presence of trees is good for our health, good for our immune system, what happens when those trees disappear?
I believe two things are going on as places like Takoma Park lose their tree canopy.
One, we grieve. As one arborist told me, when a tree dies in a national forest, it’s a statistic. When it dies in your backyard, it’s a dear friend. Every block in my neighborhood has lost one to five big oak trees, and each one of those was a friend to the family whose yard it grew in. Everyone in my neighborhood has a story about what they did when their tree died. And about how they continue to grieve.
But, second, in the absence of that sense of well-being, the reverse seems to happen. People are more stressed and therefore more vulnerable to diseases like Lyme disease. As our milder winters kill off fewer ticks, there are more ticks spreading the bacteria of Lyme disease, to which we are more vulnerable because we lost the psychological and health benefits of trees.
YCC: At the end of this period, how many trees did you lose on your block in Takoma Park?
Tidwell: Well, in 2019, the first tree to go was a 100-year-old white oak in my neighbor’s backyard. It died in 2019. The grandfather tree, the tree that just dominated this block, was a 150-year-old southern red oak in the backyard of other neighbors, the Miller family. After the rains of 2018, this red oak too started to show signs of decline. It was cut down in April of 2021. On my block and in the rest of Takoma Park there was a real spike in tree mortality in 2019, 2020, and 2021. The rate of tree decline was lower thereafter, but removal permits for damaged trees in Takoma Park are still running about twice as high as they were before 2018.
YCC: Many different threads run through your book. You write, for example, about how Takoma Park has mitigated its own greenhouse gas emissions. You write about how it has adapted to some of the impacts that you’ve already described, like extreme precipitation events. I direct readers to your book to follow those threads. But this period also aligns with a significant change in your career path.
Tidwell: Yeah, I have been concerned about climate change for most of my life. I read Bill McKibben’s book, “The End of Nature,” when I was 28 years old in 1990. So I have been concerned about climate for quite a while. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s that I decided I had to leave a charmed career as a freelance journalist. I had traveled all over the world, writing for magazines and newspapers, and writing nonfiction books on politics, nature, and history. Then, in 2002, I formed the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, which became the focus of my work.
The goal of the climate movement 20 years ago was to switch to clean energy fast enough to prevent the worst impacts of climate change from happening. We’ve succeeded in making the transition to clean energy happen. I argue in the book that the clean energy revolution is unstoppable – with or without Donald Trump. The problem is we made the switch too late. We were delayed by politics and by fossil fuel industry deception.
If you consider all the impacts I describe in my book, I don’t think we can say we have succeeded in preventing the worst. And this is in a privileged, moderate to upper-middle-class neighborhood where we have resources to at least adapt for a while.
YCC: Many different people play important roles in your story, including some nationally known figures, like Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland. Again, I direct readers to your book for introductions. But we have to talk about Ning Zeng because he’s the one who recognizes that how we dispose of all of the dead trees could either accelerate global warming or slow it down.
Tidwell: The book begins with two chapters that provide some background to my neighborhood and to my career as a climate activist. But in chapters three through 12, I conduct an experiment. I keep a record of plausible climate impacts for the full calendar year of 2023, which proved to be the warmest year on record. [Editor’s note: 2024 subsequently surpassed 2023 to become the new hottest year on record.]
In February of 2023, I heard about a climate professor at the University of Maryland named Ning Zeng who was obsessed with sequestering carbon underground in the form of buried trees.
Scientists tell us the safe level of carbon in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million. We’ve overshot that safe level; there are now 425 parts per million in the atmosphere. So Ning and other scientists have realized, in addition to transitioning to clean energy, we have to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.
There are multiple ways to do that. Most of those techniques are in their infancy, technologically. Ning’s idea is to take many of the dying trees in neighborhoods like Takoma Park and, instead of having them wood-chipped into mulch, bury them whole in low-oxygen clay soil. This could prevent those trees from decomposing, releasing their CO2, and warming the atmosphere for a thousand years or more.
This book is about lost trees. It’s about grieving for these majestic, dynamic, life-giving creatures around us and how they passed away on my block and throughout this region. And in this story, Ning Zeng is an undertaker. He combines threads of mercy and science together to honor these trees and to sequester their carbon underground.
YCC: It takes Ning months to get permission to bury 100 tons of trees on a farm in Maryland. Then he has a legal struggle with Maryland’s Department of Environment. Many people are talking about problems with blue-state governance. How do you understand the problem?
Tidwell: Climate activists will tell you – whether it’s developing clean energy or trying to figure out ways to sequester carbon responsibly in the form of planting trees or burying dead trees – that permitting is a problem.
Dead trees are now accumulating in counties and cities. Baltimore is trying to keep these trees out of their landfills. They don’t want to incinerate the trees. They want to repurpose them as lumber or mulch, but the market is saturated.
Ning goes to Camp Small in Baltimore, where there are several hundred thousand dead trees piled up, and he says, “I’ll bury them.” But then he struggles to get permits from the Maryland Department of the Environment, which wants to declare burying wood the equivalent of a toxic landfill. He has to fight government to be part of the solution to climate change.
YCC: So one of the measures beyond clean energy is to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and store it. That’s the story you’ve just told with Ning Zeng. The other – and having read some of your earlier books this came as a surprise – is geoengineering. You ruminate at length on this controversial “solution.” How did you arrive at this choice?
Tidwell: There are three things we need to do to save ourselves on this planet and save all living creatures, including our magnificent trees.
One is to switch to clean energy as fast as we can. Get off fossil fuels and decarbonize our economy. I emphasize that repeatedly, and I have some optimism on that front. It’s just taking us too long.
The second is, well, if you can’t stabilize the climate through clean energy alone, if it’s too late for that, then can you pull carbon out of the atmosphere? And that’s the story I tell with Ning Zeng. One night I said to Ning, “It seems to me that direct carbon capture from air technology is where solar was in the 1990s.” And he corrects me: “No, it’s where solar was in the 1970s.”
So if clean energy can’t get us there fast enough, and if direct air capture of carbon isn’t ready, then what else can we do?
Dr. James Hansen, our most famous climate scientist, has said we need to research, not commit to but research, ways to reflect sunlight away from the planet. Hansen has been alarmingly correct about climate change going all the way back to 1988 when he testified to Congress. Now he’s saying that we need to consider geoengineering, solar geoengineering in particular.
Are there risks involved with geoengineering? Absolutely. But you can’t just declare that geoengineering is risky without saying risky compared to what? Real people, real trees, and real living ecosystems are being harmed right now. And so I posit that it makes sense to at least study this option. We should learn enough to rule out the truly crazy stuff and to offer guidance on what may or may not work – before someone tries to experiment with full deployment.
YCC: One last question: In an epilogue, you acknowledge that Trump has been elected. How would you like your book to inform climate activism under Trump 2.0?
Tidwell: Yes, my book went to press two weeks after the election. None of us thought it was going to be this bad. But what I say in the epilogue is still true: Trump and the Republicans can slow down the transition to clean energy, but they cannot stop it. There are blue states that are moving forward. He’s not going to be able to repeal the 100% clean energy goals of, I think, 17 states now.
And then worldwide, half of all cars sold in China this year, the biggest car market in the world, will be either hybrid plug-ins or full electric battery cars. Australia is going to hit 80% clean electricity by 2030. The European Union is seeing its greenhouse gas emissions fall. Trump’s just not the deciding factor.
Read: Electric vehicle adoption is stumbling, but still growing amid geopolitical clashes
My advice to climate activists is, one, don’t give up at the federal level. Keep fighting, keep holding rallies, keep defending workers at NOAA and NASA and elsewhere. Two, double down at state, regional, and local organizing. And, three, let’s do our best to remind the
