Just about everyone on Mike Tidwell’s block has mourned a tree.

Not long ago, a lush canopy blanketed Takoma Park’s old homes, but today, hundreds of trees across the city are gone. The culprit, Tidwell and local arborists contend, is climate change.

Driven by an odd dip in the jet stream, heavy rains drenched the mid-Atlantic in 2018, drowning trees on Willow Avenue where Tidwell has lived for more than 30 years. A chain reaction followed: A fungus whose Greek name means “plant destroyer” took hold, damaging roots; then the beetles Tidwell calls six-legged “bloodhounds” finished the job.

Within a few years, Tidwell calculates, Takoma Park had cut down some 1,200 trees, many old oaks. One city report found that Takoma Park lost 141 acres of tree cover between 2009 and 2020, nearly a third after 2018. Only stumps now hint at former grandeur.

Times have changed. Tidwell, who might be Maryland’s original climate activist, began his career chasing environmental crises to the edges of the world as a freelance reporter. He wrote on Louisiana’s disappearing bayous, deforestation in the Amazon and retreating glaciers along Central Asia’s Silk Road.

“You had to go to the Arctic or to the Great Barrier Reef to see the early impacts of climate change firsthand,” Tidwell said in an interview on his Takoma Park porch. “Now it’s right outside your front door.”

So Tidwell wrote a book about what’s happened out front, “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate Change and Hope on One American Street,” a sentimental memoir exploring the toll of warming on his block in the funky (and still-leafy) Washington, D.C., suburb.

The book reflects on the consequences Tidwell has warned about for a generation, as well as the big and small steps his neighbors have taken to fight back.

Tidwell gave up his globe-trotting writing career in the early 2000s to found the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Maryland’s first organization lobbying singularly on climate change.

Today, the scrappy group employs 27 people championing the climate agenda in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and on Capitol Hill, and has helped to shape two decades of Annapolis legislation aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Its activists were among a coalition of greens who took top Democrats to the mat this year over plans to court natural gas plants to Maryland. The final version of that bill was pared back.

Strolling down his block last month, Tidwell, now 63, stopped to chat with neighbors. Some lamented their disappearing trees. One groused about $45,000 the city recently spent to raise a sidewalk 14 inches, forming a flood berm beside Tidwell’s church.

He counts other local climate warriors as neighbors: a pioneering University of Maryland climate scientist, Congressman Jaimie Raskin and Maryland Del. Lorig Charkoudian, an Annapolis authority on energy policy.

But he laments that the neighborhood now lacks the old orchestral rustle when September winds blow through the leaves. In recent years, the director of Takoma Park’s public works department has lost seven oaks in her own yard, while Tidwell writes that the number of tree removals permitted by her agency leapt from 170 per year to 600 during the height of the beetle invasion.

The canopies of entire blocks have changed, said Christopher Larkin, an arborist with Bartlett Tree Experts. Larkin has spent a career helping Takoma Park residents care for the giants in their yards, and the recent wave of tree loss is the most traumatic he’s seen.

“What was deeply shaded before is not anymore,” he said. Even when the tree belonged to somebody else, the loss is upsetting to people, he said. “It was their tree in that it provided beauty and majesty on their street.”

Much of Tidwell’s book tracks the unfolding impacts of climate change in 2023, then the hottest year on record. A windstorm that July toppled a massive willow oak across the street, in the backyard of his friends Pat Neill and Wabi Aboudou. The tree was removed well above its base, so a story-tall stump remains.

“The trees are very important to take care of,” said Aboudou, standing in a yard that’s lost much of its shade over the years. “They indirectly — and directly — take care of us, too.”

In Tidwell’s neighborhood, where each street is named for a kind of tree, these passings are grieved like family elders. After the death of one neighbor’s 80-year-old willow oak, she and Tidwell convened at dusk. They placed a candle where the tree stood, and Tidwell poured vodka on the ground to commemorate the oak‘s voyage “across the threshold, to the other side.”

Another community member is University of Maryland climate scientist Ning Zeng, whose efforts to counteract the effects of dying trees is a main plot-line in "The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue." Zeng hopes to curb warming through a method called “wood vaulting.” He wants to bury billions of dead trees to prevent their carbon dioxide from escaping back into the atmosphere.

Zeng has worked to establish one such gravesite on a farm in Cecil County, supplied by the Baltimore Department of Recreation and Park‘s Camp Small, which sold Zeng 15,000 tons of dead trees for a penny a ton.

That was before the overburdened Baltimore lumber salvage went up in flames last December, releasing carbon dioxide trapped in much of Zeng’s stock.

Tidwell isn’t optimistic that the world can bury enough trees to put a dent in warming. But if humanity is going to stop climate change, he believes it needs to consider radical solutions. His book explores his own fixation on a different approach: Could scientists reverse warming by reflecting the sun’s rays?

Takoma Park’s progressive government has tried to adapt, but Tidwell thinks it’s far from ready for the heavier rains predicted for the region.

If Takoma Park shells out for larger stormwater drains to evacuate rainfall into nearby Sligo Creek, Tidwell wondered, could the little tributary even handle it? Is the community really prepared to knock down a home on each block to build drainage ponds, or install cisterns on every roof?

Every place in the world has something it can’t adapt to, Tidwell concludes.

“Climate change is coming for all of us,” he said. “It’s coming on every street corner.”

Tidwell will speak about “The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue” at 6:00 PM Thursday at The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore.