Chesapeake Climate Action Network founder Mike Tidwell once helped stop a power company’s plans to build a pipeline across Virginia. Yet, as he details in The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue (St. Martin’s, Mar. 2025), even after 25 years of activism he was stunned to recognize the effects of climate change on his Takoma Park, Md., community. Tidwell spoke with PW about heeding the warning signs in his own backyard.
Why was your city the right vehicle for telling a story of climate change?
In the summer of 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which would trigger about $1.7 trillion in clean energy spending. I should have been thrilled by our progress. Instead as I sat in my backyard, I realized that I’d been in denial about how much climate change was
already affecting my own neighborhood. I became profoundly distressed by how long we’d taken to act, and the proof of that tardiness was the trees.
What were you seeing?
Record rainfall in 2018 killed a lot of the roots of our oldest trees and made them more susceptible to beetle infestations, which were growing more intense because of warmer temperatures. We lost dozens of acres’ worth of tree canopy in just five years. As the trees die, we’ve become more vulnerable to the heavier rains because there’s less vegetation to absorb water. I learned the city is tearing up perfectly good sidewalks to build berms to protect properties from flooding. I also noticed Lyme disease was running rampant among my neighbors, because ticks are spreading with milder winters. So I just had this epiphany, “Oh my gosh, everything you’ve worked on was meant to prevent the kind of impact that you’re now seeing in your own neighborhood.”
How can you be sure climate change and not a seasonal anomaly hurt the trees?
We don’t have records on tree deaths, but we do have rain and temperature data that goes back 150 years. We had the record rain of 2018, which caused an explosion of underground mold that triggered tree mortality not seen by anyone in recent memory. These older trees are no longer native to the climate here—they’re native to the climate that existed before. We’re also seeing similar deaths among iconic, ancient trees all over the world due to a similar pattern—the cedar trees of Lebanon and the stone pines of Rome. It’s not an overreaction to see these majestic trees as a harbinger of what’s to come for all of us.
What’s it going to take to stop climate change?
We’re all going to be driving electric cars in the next decade or two and will be using utility-scale solar power. But I conclude in the book that clean energy alone won’t work fast enough. We either need to capture carbon and store it in the ground—with a technology that, frankly, isn’t ready to scale up—or we need to reflect sunlight away from the planet. Many people are against what’s known as solar geo-engineering because they say it’s “playing God” with the atmosphere, but we’re already playing God with everything we’re spewing into the air. We may have no other choice, so it’s important to start researching it now and figure out how to do it safely.
