Are we ready for desperate measures? Veteran climate activist/author Mike Tidwell: the year of despair in his new book “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue – A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street”.  Award-winning conservation biologist and author Thor Hanson finds the awe:  “Close to Home – the Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door”. You can do it. Step up “Citizen Scientist”.

“Going into their yard, they discovered… the world.”

Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

 

LOST TREES, LOST WORLD

MIKE TIDWELL

Heads up.  Extreme climate change is coming to your neighborhood.  Long-time climate activist Mike Tidwell decided to chronicle ugly changes around his home in Takoma Park Maryland, right on the edge of Washington D.C.  Mike is a long time author writing for National Geographic and the Washington Post.  In 2002 he left it all to create a new non-profit, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.  Unlike other large environmental organizations at the time, his group was solely campaigning on climate change.

Tidwell wrote about hurricane threats to the Gulf before Katrina.  Mike spoke to us in 2012 and just last year we talked about Hurricane Helene in the Appalachians.  His new book is “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue – A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street.”

Listen to or download my 27 minute interview with Mike Tidwell in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

 

At first, I did not want to cover Mike’s new book.  Why look into just one place? We forget: we all live somewhere, and that is where climate change really happens.  Expect to see more focus on the hyper-local as climate continues to unfold.

Mike Tidwell chronicles the incredible record hot year of 2023, and it’s impact on his neighborhood.   That year there was a false spring in too-warm January, followed by an unusually cold Spring.  Wildfire smoke from Canada “contaminated my neighborhood” – all the way to Washington D.C.  There was a flash drought in early fall, then a deluge of rain that December.  It was a full climate-loaded year.

Regarding the health effects of being around large trees, Tidwell writes:

“Studies show a person’s blood pressure typically drops while ‘forest bathing.’ Just seeing a tree through a window can help patients recover faster from sickness.  Your immune system improves.”

If that is true, what happens to our immune systems when a city is sterilized of trees, leaving just the concrete and glass?

All along the U.S. East coast and into Canada, first there was an invasion of deer and then an increase in Lyme Disease.  Tidwell explains Lyme Disease, his own battle with it, and the connections to climate change.

THE COMPROMISE

As a long-time veteran of the climate and pollution movement in America, Tidwell outlines a compromise.  After about 2010, Greens realized global warming would not be stopped.  The new goal was reset to “avoiding the worst” consequences.  Is that it? Things are so advanced we have to settle for a “good-enough world” – or is even that falling out of reach now?

“… it was clear now: we weren’t ‘avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.’  We had waited too long.  There was too much carbon ‘banked’ in the atmosphere, and it would take another twenty to thirty years to fully implement the clean-energy changes now on the books.”

Mike is Bullish on the clean energy revolution.  He doesn’t think Trump and the fossil fuel Barons can stop it, though they may slow it down.  The bigger problem: clean energy came too late.  A couple of decades too late.

FUNERAL FOR THE TREES

“Time.  There’s not much left to save our fading seasons.  The cherry trees bloom so early now – here and worldwide – because the clean-energy revolution bloomed too late.”

In recent decades, thousands and thousands of trees died up the Atlantic coast.  But unlike in the West, the killer was not wildfire.  But climate lurked in the causes.  The seasons became unruly, with a false Spring in January setting up trees for failure.  Then extreme rainfall events, including an atmospheric river hitting the East Coast, flooded out the roots.  Sensing a weakness, harmful tree rotting diseases swept in.  Municipal crews piled up mountains of giant trunks and branches in scrap yards.

An arborist told Mike:

‘Many of our native trees just aren’t native anymore in this region.  Our climate has changed.  The trees are foreigners now, hanging on.  That’s why so many are dying.’”

Tidwell’s neighbor and scientist Ning Zeng found a logical way to help reduce all the carbon released as those big trunks and branches rotted.  In 2008, Dr. Zeng published on “Carbon sequestration via wood burial”.  I even heard suggestions humans might need to cut down parts of the Boreal forest and bury all the trees – to capture more carbon out of the air.  Few supported that. But where dead wood is harvested it should be buried.

Mike’s book explains the mechanics and benefits – how many tons of CO2 that would have been released can be sequestered.  Zeng’s experiments and research showed wood buried properly in clay soils can last a thousand years or more.

Society is not set up to understand wood burial.  We just dump the stuff and let Nature take care of it. Now masses of trees need to be cleared out, with dead wood that could fuel more wildfires.  The products of those projects need to be buried, buried well, and with monitoring, to sequester the carbon.  It was not easy to get even a pilot tree burial project approved in Maryland.  Eventually Zeng’s team succeeded, the first such experiment in the world.

As the “US Forest Service wants to remove six hundred million tons of dead trees from the forest floor in twelve states over the next ten years” – a huge tree burial project has to go with that – to prevent another burst of megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Ning Zeng calculated proper methods of forest management and tree removal followed by burial could “store one to two billion tons of carbon per year, up to a fifth of what the IPCC says is needed as negative emissions by 2060.”

GEOENGINEERING?

Mike tells us the idea of solar shading to cool the Earth came from Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko, In 1974, Budkyko proposed using human-launched balloons to release sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere “much like that which arises from volcanic eruptions.”

Radio Ecoshock guest Dr. David Keith estimated as few as ten aircraft could create a solar shield, releasing about 250,000 tons of sulfur per year in the early phase.  Then it takes more and more to counteract the still-mounting momentum of CO2 in the atmosphere, during the wind-down of fossil fuels.

There are many concerns, including possible changes to rainfall, including the Asian Monsoons that feed over a billion people.  Also, a solar shield means less power for solar farms on the ground, and for real farms growing food for billions of people.  However, we already have such regional shields due to industrial pollution, and had unintentional geoengineering in the sulfur emissions from shipping.  Those shipping emissions have since be cut by regulations.  Dr. James Hansen points to that as a major driver of surprising warming we saw in 2023 and 2024.

Another concern: if solar blocking is successful, humans may use that as an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels.  To avoid that, and the build up of catastrophic warming should the planes stop for any reason, David Keith suggested we apply enough geoengineering to cut only half the warming.  The rest would be up to the needed changes to our energy system and consumption.

MUSK WE DO THIS?

No one knows if Musk and Trump will approve spending for geoengineering research, as Trump thinks global warming is a hoax.  But Elon loves a technical fix.  Maybe his space company can make more billions from the government by launching reflective mirrors into space or some other weird.  A few people continue to suggest we should intentionally blow up some nuclear weapons to kick up a dust shield.  There’s a lot of ugly cards on the table.

It is ironic to read in Mike’s latest book about the “…X prize from Elon Musk on Earth Day 2024 for new ideas to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.”  Things change so fast.  Elon is not any Earth Savior, despite his electric cars.  Anything that even contains the words “climate change” is being defunded.  Most Universities are quietly complying, dumping on-going research programs and laying off scientists.  I will be covering the demolition of American climate science next week.

A SICK GOVERNMENT

Before the Musk/Trump Administration took power, Mike wrote:

“The larger lesson for the climate movement is still there: governments can grow ill, too.  They can fall prey to disease.  Like people, like trees, like the planet itself, governments have their own version of an immune system that, when attacked can either fail or – as on January 6 – narrowly survive.”

The attack on everything green, or even the language of climate science, seems like a pretty sick government in America.  Hopefully Europe, China, India and Australia don’t fall into the same trap.  We need to climate movement to keep going.  Will it?

PREVIOUS ECOSHOCK APPEARANCES

Killer Myths & Perilous Times
Posted on October 24, 2024

With author and activist Mike Tidwell, we talk hurricanes, Appalachia, and coping.

Listen to or download this 16 minute interview with Mike Tidwell in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

 

My 2012 interview of Mike Tidwell about his prescient book “The Ravaging Tide” is here.   November 6, 2012

Mike used the same techniques to study and write about the impacts of a hurricane on New Orleans. That was published in 2003 – two years before Katrina struck – in his book “Bayou Farewell, The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast“.

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DISCOVER THE REAL WORLD: CLOSE TO HOME

THOR HANSON

If you want to explore a planet – start where you live.  You can find strange intelligent life-forms in connected networks.  Anyone, of any age can become a citizen-scientist.  Our guide is award-winning conservation biologist and author Thor Hanson.  From his Gorilla years in Uganda through deep dives into seeds and bees, Dr. Hanson passes on ways to explore.  His new book is: “Close to Home – the Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door”.

Listen to or download my 31 minute interview with Thor Hanson in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

 

CITIZEN SCIENCE

Along the way Thor introduces us to SciStarter, iNaturalist founded by ecologist Scott Loarie, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).  This is where your photo by phone, with a location and date, can become part of databases that help scientists.  You are the field contributor – and you can use those databases yourself.  For example, the migration of Monarch Butterflies might be recorded by thousands of people taking a picture in their yards.

This link up between local witnesses and science is all over the place.  There is the Treezilla project in the UK.  I am reminded of E.O. Wilson growing up in the South.  He hunted for ants and found a new species before he was ten years old.  Wilson cataloged local ant species for years, before becoming a pre-eminent world expert in the field.  His study began on his own home grounds.

IN THE INTERVIEW

In the interview, Thor refers to Dr. Robert Cichewicz, University of Oklahoma – soil chemistry expert.

GROUND LINK

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.”

– French novelist Marcel Proust

Millions more people are staying home.  Many work from home.  Thor’s book “Close to Home” seems to blend with a kind of hyper-localism.  This yearning for connection to nature – right here, right now – could it be a reaction by humans to a world mediated by machines?  Or is the local a lens allowing us to see connections to everything?

Connect with Thor at thorhansen.net
You might want to check out Thor’s 2021 book “Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid – The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change”.

ALEX RAMBLES ON…

Part of Thor’s book is a response to millions of people who, some for the first time, stayed home for long periods of time during the early days of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.  Many rediscovered what was in their “backyard” – used broadly to include streets and parks, or rural areas, around where one lives.

With fewer cars driving, and less disturbance, more wild animals and birds came into the city, roadsides bloomed without mowing.  Fewer animals died on the roads.  Whales, not deafened by ships, came closer to shore.  COVID limits on humans helped a short rewilding.

THE WILL TO CONSCIOUSNESS

But it was less a change in the other species, than more time for humans to notice what is actually going on around them.  Isn’t most of nature now a sort of “edge-of-vision” activity”?  We don’t look for life, unless it threatens or amuses us.  The rest is invisible even when we walk directly through, earphones playing Spotify, eyes checking messages and posts.  We may worry about our job or paying the rent all the way through the park.

That is why, I think, Thor emphasizes most of us need a “conscious effort to stop and look” – like training muscles out of shape due to lack of use.  Hunter-gatherer humans were much more present.  They had to be, and there were no alternatives, other than campfire stories and dreams.  The next meal might be hidden in a bush or swamp.  An unpleasant sting is resting on that rock.  Birds announce arrivals.  Flowers tell you the time, the time today and time of the year.  Have we lost all that? Or is nature so ingrained in us over long evolution that we quickly relearn?

I personally use my backyard space, and all the sky above it, as a kind of clock, as an experience of time.  Pear trees, first tree to flower in my yard, tell me not only where I am, but WHEN I am.  The movement of the seasons is marked by calls of migrating birds – or their sudden appearance in my space.

The idea that each of us is part of a celestial clock – which is also a living clock – is comforting to me.  This timer is also motivational: time to get seeds in the ground, time to harvest before frost, time to prune.  For a while, I can replace work schedules and human expectations with something running much slower and much grander.

We can log all these things, from weather to planting, in a diary or calendar.  Many people do.  We can learn from it, if we are patient enough.  This gives some people joy or satisfaction.  But even that is an abstraction from the reality of living in time, senses alert, conscious of being alive.  That cannot be recorded or communicated, put into a database.

NEXT WEEK: SILENCING CLIMATE SCIENCE IN AMERICA

Next week we try the impossible: to catalog the horrors of deconstructing climate science in the United States. Decades of research and learning, along with heads to understand, are being axed.  Elon’s algorithms scan vast government databases, many confidential, to find any mention of the keywords of climate change, like warming, extreme weather, it’s a long list.  They are hunting down – like criminals – across every agency to find those climate people and projects to fire and delete them.  Not since McCarthy, Stalin, or Hitler has repression of academia and science hit these abysmal lows.  It may go lower.

My special thanks to supporters of this show.  They pay for equipment, and free downloads for anyone anywhere in the world (where not banned).  If you can contribute – a little or more – please do it here.

Thank you for listening, reading, and caring about our world, even in the strangest time!

Alex