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A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street
by Mike TidwellA 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.
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.
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