The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue

Title: The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue

Author: Mike Tidwell (RPCV Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, 1985-87)

Published: St. Martin’s Press, March 25, 2025

Review by: Eugénie de Rosier (Philippines, 2006-08)

Can you grasp that some wise U.S. scientists are studying ways to dim the sun from the Earth’s surface by artificial means to slow global warming? Breathtaking. Scary. Real, with significant ethical stakes.

We humans have been lax about climate change, with the United Nations’ secretary-general Antonio Gutierres warning in 2022: “We are on the highway to hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

Mike Tidwell, author and climate activist, says that the prediction’s outdated. Earth is getting hotter faster than we anticipated.

If we could have maintained carbon dioxide molecules (CO2, greenhouse gas)—in Earth’s atmosphere, our sky—at no more than 350 parts carbon to every 1 million molecules (“parts per million” or “ppm”) in the atmosphere, we could secure a “good-enough world.” One that would still allow big trees to grow on Earth. One that would bring two feet of sea-level rise, not 20. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Lab measured in 2024 that we’ve advanced to 424 ppm CO2.

The author writes from the perspective of Willow Avenue, his neighborhood in Takoma Park, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. across one year, 2023. His family has lived in this small town for 30 years and appreciated its canopied trees. Particularly the oaks, which supply plentitude with their stature, breadth, root systems, and nutrients that feed animals. For people, oak trees bring shade and beauty, exuding calm that influences emotional well-being and physical health. Tree health locally and globally is vital.

In mid-2018 and mid-2019, trees in northeastern states were imperiled by a jet stream that deviated to the Gulf of Mexico instead of to lower Canada, which brought systems of thrashing rainfall followed by weeks of deadly dry. The water-initiated mold, phytophthora, that eats oak tree roots, came, followed by ambrosia beetles who drill through bark, hollowing trees. By mid-2019 to mid-2021, Tidwell’s town of 18,000 lost 1,200 trees. A 2022 town study asserted the loss of 45 acres of tree canopy.

That weather battered human structures and changed the blocks around Takoma Park. Tidwell’s church down the street was flooded, and later, shored up by a berm to protect the basement preschool, at a cost of $45,000. Such weather will come again, and how will the congregation pay for other damage, he asks?

Deer were not present in Takoma Park 30 years earlier, and now they are common, at ease with warmer winters and better food access. They brought ticks and Lyme disease, infecting the author, who suffers from chronic Lyme, and many others.

In 2002, Tidwell left a long and flourishing position as a freelance journalist, prompted by the lack he saw in climate-change leadership. His decision at 40 to become a climate activist was motivated by his desire to preserve the planet for his son. His writing is smooth and vivid, and he reports alongside that of his maturing child and Willow Avenue’s changing landscape.

He founded the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and saw the inside of many jail cells for his protesting against the fossil-fuel industry and pipelines. He expanded his nonprofit’s reach to climate-change coalitions across Maryland organizing protests, filing law suits, leading local and national clean-energy campaigns, lobbying Congress to write clean-energy policy and pass laws immediately. With the help of many climate-activist groups, a significant bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, became law in 2022, a boon for the Earth.

But it was not enough. In June 2025, NOAA’s Global Monitoring Lab reported that the planet had reached 425.91 ppm of carbon. Americans are installing solar panels and heat pumps and buying electric cars in greater numbers. Off-shore windmills farms are being planted in the oceans, but Tidwell writes that clean energy alone can no longer save us. We need extraordinary new interventions. Our scientists’ work is vital and unending.

Two viable solutions Tidwell studied make the most sense to him: negative emissions—that is, drawing carbon out of the air and entombing it in the ground. The other plan is solar radiation modification (SRM) or geoengineering—reflecting sunlight away from the planet and back into space.

Ning Zeng, Ph.D., Tidwell’s neighbor and a University of Maryland scientist, devised and carried out a complicated plan to bury 5,000 tons of the state’s dead trees. Trees store a large amount of carbon. When a tree dies, its carbon continues to release CO2 into the air, heating it further. In the fall of 2023 on a landowner’s donated property, a small group stood at the burial site to bless the first load of sequestered wood sealed in clay soil. If left untouched, it will hold its carbon emissions at bay for thousands of years.

The other process, SRM, is appreciated by Dr. Tianle Yuan, a senior NASA researcher at the Goddard Space Flight Center and a proponent for SRM’s immediate study and field analysis. Historically, we know that the Earth cools after volcanic eruptions, with the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo blast in 1991 as a prime example. Tidwell explains that the sulfur spewed from volcanoes is the main source of the cooling, scattering and reflecting some of the sun’s incoming energy back into space.

Tianle emphasized that we need to understand any unintended consequences for cooling the planet. The author concurs. The ethical questions are formidable. Still, he is more encouraged that we have this avenue than not. What if we could disperse sulfur high enough in the stratosphere to reflect just one or two percent of the sun’s incoming rays? That would temporarily cool the planet long enough for us to get off of fossil fuels forever.

Thoughtful Harvard and NOAA scientists assess that in the first decade of seeding, humans would need fewer than a dozen specially equipped planes with 150-foot-long wings that could release nearly 250,000 tons of sulfur a year in the early phase with more released every year thereafter. By the 2080s, perhaps, we could begin to slow this project as we see the demise of fossil fuels.

Tidwell writes with hope amid all the challenges he identifies. He gathered a diverse community in writing this book, listening to neighbors, scientists, elders and youth, thinkers, a minister and midwife, farmers and arborists, legislators and public workers, librarians and business owners, excavators and building managers.

For readers looking for a way to make an impact on the fight against climate change, Tidwell entreats us to get out in the world and join a group that is doing something to save the Earth.

Originally published on peacecorpsworldwide.org, Aug. 11, 2025