By Sara Van Note, a print and audio reporter based in New Mexico. Originally published at Undark.
In many places, people consider trees an essential part of their communities, providing critical food and materials alongside less tangible gifts like shade, cooling, and refuge. A mature forest or even a single long-lived tree can inspire humility and offer a template for resilience on a scale that dwarfs human lifetimes.
For the Tohono O’odham Nation of Arizona, tree-like saguaro cactus are kindred spirits; in a 2021 tribal resolution to protect the cactus they call Ha:san, they wrote they “consider the Ha:san as an O’odham person.” In New Zealand, giant kauri trees, which can live as long as 2,000 years, are regarded as “living ancestors” by the Maori.
Those of us who nurture trees from seedlings to saplings to maturity can relate. We offer them sustenance, we monitor their growth and their illnesses, and their deaths may come as a blow, or a warning.
For climate activist Mike Tidwell, when the trees in his suburban Washington, D.C. neighborhood began to die en masse from record heat waves and rainfall, he felt their loss keenly. “You look at the Miller Tree before she died — arms outstretched in graceful pose,” he writes of a neighbor’s tree, “and you don’t see a soul?”
In “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street,” Tidwell explores the myriad impacts — emotional, physical, spiritual — of the climate crisis on the people, and the trees, who inhabit his block in Takoma Park, Maryland, a city of about 18,000 people. In the process, he writes, he discovers that “what was happening here, in the middle of Takoma Park, was probably a pretty good proxy for city streets and stressed-out societies everywhere.”
Tidwell begins his story with a mysterious plague that felled nearly 1,200 trees over two years beginning in 2019. A record-breaking mid-Atlantic atmospheric river in 2018 led to fungus overgrowth, which weakened many trees and in turn led to a beetle infestation. Since the trees that died on his block were “spatial giants,” Tidwell writes, the canopy loss was even greater: “The graveyard of tree stumps is unforgiving.”
For Tidwell and many of his neighbors, the grief was magnified given the circumstances: “Are we grieving not just for the trees but for what they obviously represent — the passing of our entire planet?”
Like the ripple effects of climate change, the dying trees lead to other losses. He considers the Miller Tree, a felled southern red oak. “I thought again of all the critters it once sheltered in its crown, all gone now: wasps, possums, lizards, tree crickets, katydids, spiders, songbirds,” among others, he writes. “And I thought of the shade and the cascading sculpture of green — such soothing emotional medicine — it once gave to humans.”
Tidwell, a former journalist, is a companionable narrator. His hopefulness and close attention to the natural world mitigate, to some extent, the stark truths he communicates. Strolling through his neighborhood on a spring day, he writes, “Though reduced in numbers, the oaks were still cranking out a ridiculous volume of these golden, stringy flowers that clogged gutters and formed rogue tumbleweeds along sidewalks when they fell.”
He looks for solutions, profiling activists, scientists, and neighbors like his state representative, who wrote legislation for clean energy; the town stormwater manager forced to confront intensifying floods; and a farmer capturing methane from his cows. And he offers examples of neighborhood activism, like a collective effort to remove invasive English ivy choking mature trees that (for the time being) saved thousands of them.
Yet the book also reveals Tidwell’s grim climate reckoning: Once a believer in the potential for a clean energy transition and carbon reduction to halt climate change, by 2022 he was convinced that it was too late for these efforts to preserve a livable planet. As floods increasingly threatened the region, he writes, “I was now confronting the endgame scenario for my own neighborhood.”
Out of this urgency, Tidwell embraces a controversial fix: geoengineering technologies that reflect sunlight away to cool the planet, also called solar radiation modification. The world may need “two ropes,” Tidwell writes. First, the “negative emissions lifeline, sucking CO2 out of our atmosphere,” and second, geoengineering. He gradually builds his case throughout the book.
Parallel to his search for solutions, Tidwell tries to make sense of the climate changes that have disoriented his neighborhood, and continue to affect people across the globe.
In 2023, Takoma Park reeled from a succession of extreme weather events: In January a heat wave wreaked havoc on the trees’ seasonal rhythms; in June, thick smoke from historic Canadian wildfires blanketed the East Coast; and in July, massive thunderstorms downed many of the remaining trees. It was also the planet’s warmest year on record — soon surpassed by 2024.
Tidwell struggles with chronic Lyme disease, as do many of his neighbors, a disease he says was unknown in his community 30 years ago. A warming climate led to an expansion of deer ticks and an increase in regional Lyme infections. The extreme weather is “episodic in nature, coming and going,” he writes. “The ticks and Lyme disease, on the other hand, were always here, unrelenting.”
Tidwell’s connection to his block’s trees was deepened by a shared experience of illness. Shortly after he faced a Lyme health crisis in 2022, his 70-year-old pin oak began dropping limbs. “We were sick together, my tree and I,” he writes, “climate change our common threat, getting new treatments in tandem.’’
Searching for remedies, Tidwell embraces the vision of his neighbor, Ning Zeng: a burial program for the tens of thousands of tons of local trees that have been felled by climate change. A professor of climate science at the University of Maryland and contributor to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, Zeng plans for the dead trees to be interred in an oxygen-free “wood vault,” where their carbon can be captured instead of released via decomposition. (It’s a technique also being tried elsewhere in the U.S.)
But Zeng’s dedication is tested by bureaucratic hurdles like permitting, as well as the staggering scale of the need for carbon storage. His story illustrates the challenges of carbon sequestration, including the underdevelopment of the field, which Zeng compares to solar energy in the 1970s.
Tidwell tries to convince Zeng to consider geoengineering. But Zeng remains committed to the three primary solutions — mitigation, sequestration, and adaptation — saying it’s too risky to try solar geoengineering given the complexity of the planet’s systems.
Earlier in the book, Tidwell addresses these concerns, pointing to options like an international ban on large-scale geoengineering and a slow ramp-up of the technology to allow for monitoring. Yet he believes the urgency to confront the climate crisis means the technology must be researched seriously, and immediately. “The fight for our survival is in a phase much later than most of us have realized,” he writes. And in the end, his viewpoint is clear: “Yes, it’s playing god with the planet — and we’ve been doing it for centuries now.”
With President Donald Trump’s administration gutting federal environmental protections, proposing large cuts to funding for agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and freezing clean energy projects, the future is bleak for nationwide efforts to address the climate crisis. But perhaps this book will inspire Americans to turn instead toward our neighbors for solace and collective action.
Meanwhile, Tidwell suggests that as we nurture our trees, we also nurture our hope. The book illuminates our deep interconnection — humans, animals, pathogens, and trees alike.
Despite the climate chaos of 2023, he writes, his neighborhood oaks had a mast year, producing an unusually large crop of nuts, and the eastern gray squirrels and blue jays both feasted on and cached the bounty of acorns.
The jays and oaks co-evolved over millions of years, a symbiosis that ensured the survival of both. Now the animals were replanting the lost oaks in the graveyard of stumps, he writes, creating “a cemetery of new existence.”
For all the concerns of the author and Zeng, all they can think of and argue over are technocratic fixes. No discussion about the structural roots of the climate emergency – the socioeconomic system dependent on consumerism and constant growth.
Couldn’t agree more. Solar geoengineering, a fancy name for shooting sulfur in the sky every two years, solves nothing. We are currently exceeding 6 of 9 planetary boundaries, and solar geoengineering addresses exactly none of them. It only treats a symptom of one of them: the heating caused by excess CO2 in the atmosphere, while it would exacerbate one close to being breached, ocean acidification, by showering acid rain on us all as the sulfur falls out of the sky. That’s why it has to be done every two years.
And that necessity of keeping up these “treatments” is the real feature (not a bug) of this idea. Once started, if it’s found that it is disrupting monsoon patterns or acidifying the oceans, we would find ourselves with a Hobson’s Choice because stopping the geoengineering would lead to very rapid warming as the sulfur fell out of the sky. That’s because the warming masked by the reflective sulfur particles would rapidly resume in their absence.
But a billionaire who patented the process and built the specialized planes to spray in the stratosphere would have us by the short and curlies. Again, feature, not a bug.
What i expect to see, especially during this administration, is a lot of deniers with money behind them to bizarrely switch to advocating for solar geoengineering. “It’s not real” will become “We have to do this” because the heating problem is very real and there will be money to be made.
It’s always, always, about the Benjamins (as in Franklin).
The only non-destructive way of addressing the critical problem of warming is ending carbon spewing activities that are not essential to human welfare, like tourism which now contributes 9% of global emissions and is growing fastest in emissions. Ending the wars would be another essential step.
Another easy-to-spot failure of the geo-engineering concept is that if it is successful against global warming as long as the sulfate aerosol shroud is always maintained by fresh sky-shot injections, it remains an open ended door of permission to keep burning fossil carbon and skydumping it.
That will keep raising the carbonic acid level of the oceans till all our most favorite seafood species go extinct from ocean acidation.
The number of cars should be reduced. Only those who absolutely cannot live without a car should own one.
5 or 10 years ago, Mr. Tidwell’s local climate action group had a fund-raiser raffle for a donated Tesla. Not to be overly critical, but it struck me as representative of a consumerist, technical fix mentality.
So I read him blind. Not that it’s hard – they all for doing something as long as that something doesn’t affect their lifestyles, hence the fetish with technological “solutions.”
Lawyer’s axiom: “When the law is against you, argue the facts; when the facts are against you, speak in parables….”
The earth is 30% greener than it was decades ago because of the small increase in CO2.
But who cares about facts?
https://www.creaf.cat/en/articles/world-has-become-greener-over-past-33-years
Wowser, climate change deniers love to hang arguments on misleading indicators. From Vox:
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2024/2/7/24057308/earth-global-greening-climate-change-carbon
And of course, one big reason is glacial and polar ice cap melts, neither of which are good things.
See also: https://treelion.com/promo/the-earth-is-greener-but-it-may-not-help-climate-change/
See additionally, from the Washington Post in April:
https://archive.is/z1KkT#selection-2139.0-2266.0
A great answer, but this bit especially jumped out at me:
The other problem: While CO2 fertilization can make some crops grow faster, research has also found that it can decrease their nutritional value — such as the concentration of protein, and minerals like calcium and magnesium — for a number of complicated reasons. So pumping CO2 into the air means more but often less-nutritious vegetation (and globally, more than 2 billion people are nutrient-deficient).
It’s because it made me think of a fascinating interview that Derrick Jensen did of Dr. Irakli Loladze on Resistance Radio a few years ago. It seems like maybe Loladze did some of the basic research on this topic. Derrick’s interview guests are almost always good, but this one was fascinating because it was like the higher carbon dioxide for the plants was like humans having too much sugar. It’s like the plants are eating junk food, and they don’t really have any choice.
From the very article you cite:
Things were even greener and the CO2 higher in the Cretaceous Period:
These guys loved it.
I remember another version of the Lawyer’s axiom . . .
When the law is against you, pound the facts.
When the facts are against you, pound the law.
When the law and the facts are all against you, pound the table.
For another tree analogy for survival, I’d recommend a documentary on trees that survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. Many were scorched but some recovered and continue to grow. Life finds its way — even in the mass extinction and destruction of the ecosystems that is unfolding today.
Link to the documentary: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/5001460/
Help me, you are using Hiroshima to justify global warming destruction? Seriously? Is this a sick joke?
Not only that, but this is a logical fail. These attacks, although horrific, did not have planetary impact.
All it takes is ~7 years of bad harvests to trigger the collapse of a society. I think most would not like to be reduced to at best early 1800s subsistence farming.
Brian Schultz, Yves Smith, and Mr Moon Pie.
The article is from 2016. Many important data have been gathered — and climatic bounds knocked over –since then.
Further, the article is from a consortium of Catalan universities and organizations. Yet I cannot find the Catalan source article. There may be a reason for that.
Something has fallen apart since, eh?
Here is SeaGen making their contribution for the removal of carbon from the oceans, the largest sequester of atmospheric CO2 on the planet by far, by using marine algae (seaweed) as the final ‘sink’ –
https://www.seagen.io/about.html
Good Work!
‘Enhanced weathering in the US Corn Belt delivers carbon removal with agronomic benefits’
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2319436121
Farmers should be doing this everywhere they can, for the benefit of all.