Climate change is such a complex and sprawling issue, it’s hard to compress it down to just one problem, let alone one country or continent. For this reason, discussions about the climate tend toward the abstract – like meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Cels ius above pre-industrial levels by 2100. But most people just don’t care about abstractions like this and so the climate remains a low priority for most Americans. Mike Tidwell has a solution to this problem.  He brings global issues down to the street level and lets people see climate chaos in their daily life. In his new book, The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, Tidwell — an author, journalist, and founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) — makes all the academic policy discussions about climate change powerfully real and human on a single street in his home in Maryland.  He kindly agreed to discuss the book with me for Baltimore Fishbowl readers.You select an unusual set of main characters to get into your story: the trees on the street where you live.  Trees are just such miraculous creatures. Science shows they are social – parents and offspring live side by side and communicate with each other and share nutrients underground through their roots. Trees sleep and can tell time and feel pain. And they provide countless ecosystem services to humans and improve our immune systems and our sense of wellbeing whenever we are close to them. So when they die in our neighborhoods, people grieve. I tell the story of that grieving as extreme rain and flash droughts in recent years – according to local arborists – have been killing our big oaks. In 2018 alone, Maryland set a record for annual rainfall – two feet more rain for the year than normal. This historic rain triggered a mold in the soil across Maryland called Phytophthora, “plant destroyer” in Greek. It devastated oak roots and made the trees vulnerable to ambrosia beetle attack. We lost 1,200 trees in 2019-2021 in our small town of Takoma Park, most big oaks. Again, it’s my city government that says it’s climate change.One thing that I think is brilliant about your book is how you weave together global topics into the texture of everyday life. For example, you to go to your local church, and talk about the pastor’s struggle with flooding because of increased rainfall. You talk about a neighbor of yours – a young woman — who is afraid to have children because of climate anxiety.  Why did you decide to write a book like this?I’ve spent two decades as a climate activist trying to prevent the worst impacts of climate change from happening. We’ve made great strides in this state and worldwide on clean energy – wind, solar, electric cars. But we started too late. The worst impacts of climate change ARE starting to happen. My proof is on my one block in Takoma Park where I draw portraits of suffering trees and people. The book is meant as a fresh alarm bell based on evidence not in the Arctic but in our front yards. Mike, you work all day in your day job — as founder and Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network — fighting for progress on climate change.  How do you grapple with the reality that a majority of American voters in November selected as President someone preaching the exact opposite message? What does Trump’s election say about any progressive issue – abortion, racial equity, gun violence prevention, climate? These issues are still very popular with a majority of American voters. But inflation was just too much for many swing voters. I don’t think they voted against climate action. They voted out of deep economic frustration to burn the whole house down. So here we are now with our house burning down and our planet on fire. One way you make the impact of climate change personal is by talking about your own struggles with Lyme disease.  What is the connection to global warming?The tick population continues to expand dramatically in the Mid Atlantic because our milder winters no longer kill off a big part of the population as in years past. I was bit by a tick in my Takoma Park backyard in 2008 and got Lyme disease. But I was misdiagnosed for SIX years. Now I have “long Lyme” or “chronic Lyme.” I manage the condition with periodic antibiotics and herbal remedies. It’s no picnic but many people have it worse. Lyme is RAMPANT throughout my neighborhood. Three other people on my block have battled tick-born diseases. For our Baltimore readers, there is a whole section of the book dedicated to a journey you took to our city. You drove to Baltimore with a scientist neighbor of yours, Dr. Ning Zeng, who is studying the idea of burying dead trees as a method of capturing carbon underground. Is this practical?    Dr. Ning Zeng is like an undertaker character in this book. He has some solid science backing up the idea that dead trees buried in the right clay soil in this region can keep those trees mostly intact for a thousand years or more. He calls it “reverse coal.” With so many trees dying in Baltimore as extreme rain and droughts and beetles descend, the tree “boneyard” in Baltimore, called Camp Small, has been overrun with deceased trees in recent years. The city’s goal is to keep the trees out of the landfill and away from the trash incinerator. But the mulch market and specialty lumber market is flooded from so many trees dying in recent years. So they pile up in a surreal and mountainous collection at Camp Small. Dr. Zeng’s goal is to bury almost all these trees — thousands of tons — on farmland outside of Baltimore and keep the carbon from flowing harmfully back into the atmosphere. By the end of the book, he buries his first 100 tons of trees in Cecil County and we have a “funeral” where there is a moment of silence and Dr. Zeng reads a poem. His vision of burying billions of tons of trees worldwide is one we must explore as a form of “negative emissions” in the fight against climate change. There’s reason to believe this could be done economically on a large scale. What did you think when the Baltimore wood recycling center you visited – beside I-83, just north of Cold Spring Lane – burned to the ground in a massive fire on December 5th, releasing all that carbon?When the five-acre mountain of dead trees burned at Camp Small, it was horrifying. So much of that wood could have been buried by Dr. Zeng. But regulatory red tape from the Maryland Department of the Environment delayed his plans long enough for the conflagration to happen. I disagree with your suggestion that one action the world should consider is “geo-engineering” – including the pumping of sulfur dioxide pollution into the atmosphere to block sunlight and cool the planet.  This, I think, would be a catastrophically bad idea. It would allow everyone around the world to keep burning fossil fuels – but not remove any of the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, just temporarily mask the symptoms caused by the pollution, until a budget crisis of some kind halts our heat shield.  Why do you think we can solve a pollution problem by releasing even more pollution?A close reading of this part of my book confirms I never argue we should definitely attempt any kind of geoengineering. Instead, I simply agree with America’s most famous and historically accurate climate scientist Dr. James Hansen who argues we should study it. Hansen makes the point that volcanoes naturally emit sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere during eruptions. And sulfur dioxide reflects part of the sun’s rays back into space, cooling the planet. The 1991 eruption Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, for example, cooled the Earth by more than one degree Fahrenheit for over a year. The question is this: Could we safely become a “human volcano”? Could human beings artificially cool the planet by injecting sulfur into the atmosphere using balloons or planes? It’s definitely doable. But will there be risks? Absolutely. But only by studying the risks, running the computer models and conducting some testing, can we have some idea of what the main problems might be, like slowing the recovery of the ozone layer. But keep in mind: These are risks compared to what? Compared to the runaway climate change we’re seeing now? Launch EventMike Tidwell will be in conversation with Tom Pelton at The Ivy Bookshop, at 5928 Falls Road, May 1, 6 pm. 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