Recently, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum abruptly canceled my spring lecture based on my new book about climate change. The National Archives and Records Administration, under President Donald Trump, said that budget cuts were to blame. But were they? Officials in Trump’s administration are demanding whole federal agencies delete the words “climate change” from their websites and defund various clean energy grants.
Ironically, my book — “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street” — makes the argument that climate change is now so acute it cannot simply be “canceled” or rescheduled or otherwise dismissed from our daily lives. The impacts are visible right outside our front doors.
On my Maryland street, right on the border with Washington, D.C., Lyme disease is extremely common now thanks to milder winters that no longer kill off ticks. And extreme rain events are so frequent, my local government just spent $45,000 to build a 200-foot-long flood berm to keep water out of the preschool in the basement of my church, a block from my house.
But dying trees are perhaps the most alarming sign of climate change — not just in my neighborhood but across the nation, and in Georgia. So many older oaks have passed away on my block in Takoma Park, Maryland, in recent years — hammered by both record rain and historic droughts — that government officials here openly blame a shifting climate. One private arborist told me: “Many of our native trees just aren’t native anymore in this region. Our climate has changed. The trees are foreigners now. They’re foreigners. That’s why so many are dying.”
As a native Georgian who grew up in Marietta, I hear similar stories about trees when I come home to visit. Fruit trees blooming way too early, then hammered by unusually late frosts. The growing threat of forest fires from weirdly prolonged droughts and heat waves and high winds. And, most recently, the $5.5 billion damage to Georgia trees and human communities from the flooding, high winds and tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Helene. Hurricanes are growing more powerful in a warming world, and this one affected 8.9 million acres of forestland in Georgia and wiped out 70% of the state’s mature pecan trees. Meanwhile, the urban tree canopies in cities like Augusta were devastated.
These are no longer vague statistics affecting people elsewhere, far from our own daily lives. Today, you can throw a dart at a spinning globe and wherever that dart lands you can write a whole book about the profound climate disruptions happening in that one microdot on the planet. That’s what I did on my tiny block of 14 houses in Maryland, chronicling everything from the disappearing trees to my son’s earlier seasonal allergies to the young couples on my street who don’t want to have kids because of climate fears.
I could record different but related climate details on your street, I’m sure, be it in Buckhead or Warner Robins or Blue Ridge. In a place like Georgia, which ranks fifth among U.S. states most vulnerable to climate impacts, the dots are there to connect if you pay attention.
But, thankfully, the “solution dots” are there too, just as plentiful. The combustion of fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas — is what’s driving global climate disruption. And clean energy is the remedy. Few states in recent years have seen greater clean energy investments and job creation than Georgia.
The numbers are staggering. In 2024 alone, renewable energy and clean vehicle businesses in Georgia created nearly 4,000 jobs, bringing the total number of clean energy workers in the state to 82,000. From solar manufacturing in Dalton to EV companies near Savannah, the clean energy sector now employs nine times more Georgians than does the fossil fuel industry. Nine times.
But here’s the problem: We’re still not transitioning fast enough to clean power, in Georgia and worldwide. And we’re running out of time. Scientists say the “cascading impacts” of climate change are increasing. The rising heat thaws much of the world’s frozen tundra. That tundra then releases heat-trapping methane gas previously frozen below ground for ions. The escaped methane triggers still more warming.
We see cascading impacts, in miniature, on my Maryland street. Trees die from extreme rain and then can no longer absorb — with their roots — the even bigger rainfall events that are now coming, sending still more water to places like my church. The same rain creates damper soils that further assist ticks in thriving and harming people in a warmer world.
To me, the most important question is this: If our native trees are now dying and becoming foreigners, what are we? On a planet that gave rise to human civilization over the last 10,000 years, are we not foreigners, too?
The answer is an obvious yes. Which means, with or without Congress, and with or without Trump, individual U.S. cities and states and the rest of world must move forward and move faster in their conversion to clean energy.
It can’t be canceled, this effort. Our trees depend on it. And so do we.
Credit: Mike Tidwell/contributed
Credit: Mike Tidwell/contributed
Mike Tidwell is a writer and climate activist. He will discuss his new book, “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue,” at 7 p.m. April 7 at Trees Atlanta Kendeda Treehouse, 825 Warner Street SW, Atlanta. The event is sponsored by A Cappella Books.
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