All Climate Change Is Local: A Story of Takoma Park’s Trees With Author Mike Tidwell

In 2018, devastating rains hit Mike Tidwell’s community of Takoma Park, Maryland, leading to a loss of tree canopy the following year unparalleled in the city’s history. After the torrential rainfall, Tidwell went on a kind of detective’s quest to find out what was killing the trees of Willow Avenue and elsewhere in Takoma Park, and to try to connect the dots to climate change.

“One theory is that the ground was soaked for so long that it triggered the explosion of a latent underground mode called Phytophthora,” he said. “It forced the trees to begin borrowing nutrients and carbohydrates stored in their trunks.”

As a result, ambrosia beetles began to attack the weakened trees. 

“When the tree started to die in 2019, everyone in this neighborhood was aware of it. You could not not be aware of it,” he said.

Takoma Park resident Pat Neill next to the remains of her gigantic willow oak. Mike Tidwell

A result of his observations and reportage is his new book The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, which starts on his block and then expands into other parts of the state and the world. Tidwell writes about tree burial, solar reflection and the scourge of Lyme disease that is on the rise, and that he personally suffered from. 

“I want to tell the story of climate change through the trees on my block,” he said. “By keeping a record for one year of the credible impacts of climate change on my one block, I was able to see in microcosm the same sort of impacts we’re seeing worldwide to humans and ecosystems from a warming planet.”

In the book’s first section, Tidwell writes about the emotional impact of losing the massive trees that provided a huge and cooling canopy for the neighborhood. 

“There are literally hundreds of households in my little town of Takoma Park who’ve lost a dear friend,” he said. “I could have written a whole chapter about just the ceremonies people organize when their tree dies.”

A tree stump at the home of the Miller family on Willow Avenue. Mike Tidwell

As he dug deeper into his neighborhood, Tidwell also became of aware of a local church building a flood berm due to a flooded basement from the incessant rainfall. Ironically, the church had solar panels on its roof. 

“That just blew me away,” Tidwell said. Out of this, flooding became another story to tell in his book. 

“I was starting to see cascading impacts of climate change on my block,” he said. “These moments of surprise and discovery and cascading events and interlocking narratives — I didn’t know I was going to find that out. But as I really paid attention for a year and a half on this really small area, it was clear that that was what’s happening.”

Recent books such as The End of Eden by Adam Welz, Hope Dies Last by Alan Weisman, and recent documentaries like Sea Change and Earth Protectors are exposing the drastic impacts of climate change on the hyperlocal – local impacts that in turn, affect the globe. 

“Climate change has gotten so bad you could throw a dart at a spinning lacquer globe, and wherever that dart lands, you can write a whole book about that one little spot,” Tidwell said. “People may push back and say, how in the world could you claim that you can see climate change within a one or two square block area? I think it’s very compelling and parallels climate trends throughout the nation.”

Tidwell’s book is like a climate change memoir, exploring the topic through his own local story and observations, but also through scientists, activists and politicians. Another main character is Ning Zeng, a climate professor at the University of Maryland. Zeng is proposing burying dead and mature trees, a form of carbon sequestration, rather than letting them be turned into wood chips, or burned. Scientists have found that trees can store their carbon for thousands of years underground. 

 Mike Tidwell’s author photo

Tidwell also writes about “solar radiation modification,” an idea that entered the climate solutions dictionary more forcefully after the famous letter from climate scientists in 2023 that stated that drastic climate warming could no longer be reversed. To this end, Tidwell thinks that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth is a viable solution. 

“The metaphor is if the actual tree canopy, the protective shade of trees is disappearing in our neighborhood, is there a way to create an artificial solar shade in the stratosphere? We just haven’t managed the clean energy transition fast enough,” he said. “If we can’t store the carbon, and we started the clean energy revolution too late, what other options do we have?

“But — any efforts by human beings to artificially cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth must only be done after years of careful research and through an international process of deliberation and decision making,” he added. 

In addition to solar reflections, he writes about the idea of putting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere as another way to reduce global warming, like the cooling effect on the atmosphere after a volcano erupts. 

“Dr. James Hansen says the world’s countries must come together to do research on how we might mimic the natural cooling effect created when volcanoes erupt and emit sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere,” he said. “The question is, can humans artificially emit sulfur into the stratosphere for a few decades, slightly cooling the planet enough to give us time to complete the clean energy revolution? That will take years of careful research and international debate and inclusive decision making.”

Tidwell, as director of both the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and the CCAN Action Fund and the author of books on coastal flooding, has dedicated the last two decades of his life to promoting clean energy solutions. 

🌳 Tune into the latest @wdcgardener episode as author and climate activist Mike Tidwell shares the moving story behind his new book, "The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue." Discover why we're losing our trees & there’s still hope rooted in our communities. 🎧 Listen here: open.spotify.com/episode/7wbH…

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— Chesapeake Climate (@chesapeakeclimate.bsky.social) May 19, 2025 at 12:55 PM

Chesapeake Climate Action Network has had success in banning fracking in Maryland, stopping the Atlantic Coast pipeline, and helped pass legislation to help make offshore wind a reality. Of course, with the new Republican administration, some of these gains might be reversed in the short term. But Tidwell remains optimistic. 

“Donald Trump can do whatever he wants right now. It’s not going to change the fact that half of all new cars in China are going to be electric this year,” he said. “It can’t change the fact that Australia is going to reach 80% clean electricity for the entire country by 2030. It’s not going to stop the fact that the European Union is reducing emissions every year. It’s not going to change the fact that California and New England states and Minnesota all have policies that are pretty dramatic in terms of clean energy transition.”