The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, by Mike Tidwell (Zaire 1985-87)
Book review by Ben East (Malawi 1996-98)
Title: The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue
Author: Mike Tidwell (Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, 1985-87)
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; March 25, 2025
Number of pages: 288
Available on Amazon, Bookshop, Goodreads, Thriftbooks, and more
Reviewer’s name: Ben East (Malawi 1996-98)
Reading The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue feels like strolling the hometown with an affable neighbor, one filled with deep respect for the natural world and a pragmatic concern for its demise. Along the way we meet other neighbors, including state and national political figures; students, scientists, arborists, and public works personnel; a farmer, a midwife, the local pastor. Despite dire news regarding humanity’s relationship with nature, the company makes for an exceptional walk.
On one level Mike Tidwell recounts a single year—2023—in a Washington, DC suburb whose residents cope with the local effects of global climate change. These are the tombstone stumps of new-fallen trees, the sudden gaps in rich canopy across which the wind now blows “like human breath over the tops of empty bottles,” the flooding school basement and sidewalk berm installed as a countermeasure against the coming torrents.
On another level, the narrative follows a much older story. It begins with an oak whose acorn took hold in the 1870s and which lived long enough to witness today’s green energy revolution. But that oak, fresh victim of changing weather patterns, serves as Tidwell’s paradigm for how the revolution has come too late. Damaged by extreme weather, the Miller oak is removed, which disrupts the cooling effect of shade on the street, decreases carbon absorption, and increases trapped atmospheric heat.
Tidwell’s urgent question is: if green energy’s too late to stop future extreme weather, how do we speed action along and clean the atmosphere now?
Two paths stand out among the answers he explores: the negative emissions effort pursued by his neighbor, Ning Zeng; and the solar radiation modification concept being studied by Ning’s former student, Dr. Tianle Yuan. If the first of these Chinese-born scientists is playing funeral director for fallen carbon, the latter might be accused of playing god, seeking to control the weather by reflecting sunlight back into space.
Ning cuts a contradictory figure, feverishly maniacal yet distressingly tender. A former University of Maryland climate scientist turned undertaker, Ning introduces Tidwell to a dystopian wood dump outside Baltimore. There lie some 25,000 tons of climate change-damaged trees, removed by public works from area neighborhoods, emitting CO2 as they decay. Ning’s passion is a pilot effort to halt this emission by burying five thousand tons of the load 15-feet deep in the clay-rich soil of a local farm. Readers will find in his heroic effort the perfect blend of dreamer and genius: delivering a heartfelt requiem for his carbon load, Ning turns to poetry—generated using AI.
Tidwell turns to Dr. Tianle Yuan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to demonstrate one potential method for reversing climate change through geoengineering. As Tidwell points out, human activity both cools and warms the planet, the warming part in greater measure. Our cooling activity, in the form of aerosol gas, turns the sun’s rays back into space. Geoengineering would replicate this—and natural phenomena like the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption—on a larger scale. It conjures a terrifying image: as many as 100 aircraft with 150-foot wingspans, fuselages packed with Sulphur instead of passengers, strafing the atmosphere with man-made aerosol, day after day, 24/7 until our grandchildren have grandchildren. Yuan, like Tidwell, doesn’t advocate this extreme measure; rather, they advocate studying the concept and comparing the risk of doing it vs. the risk of not doing it.
Within this framework Tidwell introduces numerous other inspiring figures, most notably that of his neighbor, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), elected to congress principally on a climate action platform. Confronted by family tragedy, the violence of anti-democracy J6 rioters, and chemotherapy for lymphoma cancer, Raskin maintains a hopeful view while touring local tree damage. “What keeps me optimistic? I think it’s the trees themselves…when one falls, so much sunlight comes in that we see what we’re missing and then new trees come and we start over again.” Raskin draws the same metaphor, sunlight as transparency, to heal our democracy.
Poetry courses through these pages, bringing emotional aliveness even as the narrative covers hard science, data, philosophy, ethics, politics, and business. Our strolling neighbor is a gifted observer, a translator of the natural world into lyrical prose. When a nurse and midwife tells Tidwell that her career has kept her at “the door where people leave this world and where they arrive,” he reflects on this “great door.”
Our fight against climate change—it’s at the same door. We’re throwing our arms around this planet and pulling back with all our might, standing in the threshold, alarms going off, trying to keep this living world from passing through to the other side, to death and mass extinction and the end of human civilization itself, perhaps. All the while, at the same door, amid the convulsions, we’re giving birth to something new, something so beautiful, a clean-energy world with fresh breath drawn in, a sparkling cry breaking out, a new life where big trees and all the rest of us can grow old together.
We can call Tidwell a hero, too. Boy Scout troop leader, Little League coach, Lyme Disease survivor, parishioner, neighbor, the author gave up employment at the Washington Post in 2002 to launch the nonprofit Chesapeake Climate Action Network. His advocacy led to incremental local and state legislative wins, swelling finally to the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which dedicated $369 billion in federal spending for clean energy, an estimated $800 billion in federal climate spending over ten years, and unlocking $1.7 trillion in private U.S investments.
Throughout his tidy narrative Tidwell grapples with the most universally disheartening issue of our day without sending the reader into despair. There is nothing naïve in this: he and his hero-consorts all contend with dejection in very real and personal ways. But they also move beyond it, each with the faith and resolution to carry on. Rather than spread the disease of hopelessness, we hear voices of reason who’ve dedicated their lives to climate action, in their own backyards and across the neighborhood. Tidwell’s final message: you’re not in this alone. “Step one is stop being an individual…Find an organization fighting climate change in your area and develop a relationship as a volunteer or donor or both.”
Ben East is the author of two novels and the forthcoming Profiles in Service, a nonfiction account of first-generation RPCVs who served as U.S. ambassadors. Ben’s fiction and nonfiction appear in Woodhall Press’s Flash Nonfiction Funny, The Foreign Service Journal, and the American Diplomacy website. He serves on the editorial board of The Foreign Service Journal and as fiction editor for the Virginia Writers Club. www.beneastbooks.com
Great review by Ben East of a great book