Climate Change Hits Home: A Review of The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue

Mike Tidwell, climate activist and founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, posits that, if you were to throw a dart at a spinning globe, no matter where the dart punctured the surface of the globe, that actual spot on the Earth would have an ominous tale to tell of the effects of climate change.

Tidwell has chosen a single year, 2023, and the small block on which he lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, from which to sound the alarm over the damage being done by our sharply warming planet.  His book, The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue:  A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street (2025), tells how climate change has come to his own block.  It’s an eminently readable volume, but, to be blunt, it scared the shit out of me.

This account came into being when Tidwell realized the giant oaks on his block and in his town were in crisis.  These trees, which had survived for decades or, sometimes, for a century or more, were dying in staggering numbers.  The loss of giant oaks in a single suburban block cannot be missed, because they leave such a massive empty space at eye level and in the overhead canopy.  That is not the only impact.  He writes, “Oaks are the miracle trees of both urban and rural forests.”  (p. 128) They are crucial to the entire local ecosystem, hosting and supporting a wide range of insect and bird life.  And it wasn’t just the oaks in peril.  During the period from 2019 to 2022, Takoma Park, a town of just 2.1 square miles with about 18,000 residents, lost 1,200 trees, the largest portion of them oaks.  A study from 2022 reported the loss of a startling 45 acres of the town’s tree canopy.

The causes for this still ongoing season of death are myriad, but ultimately mostly tied to the increasingly weird and changing weather patterns that have taken hold as the worldwide climate warms.  Rising temperatures change weather patterns, fostering prolonged droughts and storms whose flooding downpours are fed by the ever greater amounts of moisture held in the warming atmosphere.  Seasons are marked by atypical temperatures throwing trees’ internal cycles out of sync with damaging consequences.  The deluges of rainfall saturate the ground fostering the spread of insects and fungus, which attack the already stressed trees.  Takoma Park experienced all of this.  A recipe for a local, national, and global ecological disaster.

The stakes associated with the death of trees are high.  By sequestering a significant portion of the carbon dioxide we’ve poured into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, trees have helped mitigate some of the worst effects on the climate of that greenhouse gas.  Though the loss of trees reduces their important contribution to the planet’s health, what particularly worries Ning Zeng, one of Tidwell’s neighbors, is the prospect that the carbon dioxide contained in those myriad felled trees will be released back into the atmosphere.  Zeng, a professor of climate science at the University of Maryland, wants to bury as many of them under conditions that will preserve them for centuries.  Tidwell recounts in some detail the time-consuming challenges Zeng faces as he works to arrange for the burial of 5,000 tons of dead trees.

I would characterize it as a noble response to the crisis, but a drop in the bucket.  For instance, at the time Zeng worked to remove 5,000 tons from a site in Baltimore, there were many thousands of tons of dead trees still there poised to release their carbon dioxide.

Tidwell documents the broad scope of climate change-induced blows that his block and his town has endured, a tale told well with vignettes of neighbors, experts, and local politicians who are engaged in trying to respond to the damage being done.  The efforts range from trying to divert rainfall from low lying areas, from streets and basements, to planting trees that have evolved to thrive in a wet environment, to installing solar panels on roofs now exposed to the sun due to the loss of canopy cover, to promoting electric vehicles, and so on.

It’s quite clear to him that more, much more is needed on an unprecedented scale and that it must have a potential impact that dwarfs what’s been done so far.  Clean energy isn’t enough to reverse the damage.  Geoengineering on a vast scale may well be needed.  He describes many of the proposed methods being explored to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  But he is clearly attracted to seriously researching a different approach:  solar radiation modification, that is, seeding the atmosphere with aerosols (particulate emissions) to reflect sunlight away from the planet.  It’s a bold approach that may hold great potential to addressing the immediate crisis, but also may bring serious, negative outcomes.  At this stage, we just don’t know.

He is influenced by The Open Letter Regarding Research on Reflecting Sunlight to Reduce the Risks of Climate Change, issued in early 2023 and signed by more than 110 of the world’s leading climate scientists.  The letter posits that reducing greenhouse gases at this stage is too late to address the planet’s current and future warming.  Instead, it is urgent that we explore quickly whether and how to put aerosols into the atmosphere.

It’s a sobering thought that solar radiation modification is the “hope” in the book’s title.