This story by Mike Tidwell in the Fall issue of Sierra Magazine gives us a different perspective on climate change, far beyond the oceans, floods and polar caps.
This story is for tree lovers everywhere.
This Is How Climate Change Transformed a Maryland Neighborhood
The biggest trees weren’t sick and dying when I moved to the 7100 block of Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, Maryland. There were true giants on my street back then, red and white oaks, tall and broad, offering a daydream greenery of good health. I was in good health too. I was 29 years old. I ran three miles a day. I grew native wildflowers in my garden just a few hundred feet from the Washington, DC, border.
But that was 1991, before the chaos of climate change really settled in over this narrow block of 14 houses.
Thirty years ago, scientists and journalists had to travel to the Arctic or to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to see the early impacts of global warming up close. Now—after oil, coal, and gas combustion dumped 900 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—the impacts can be witnessed everywhere. My neighborhood, a microdot on any Google map, has shifted to a whole new universe. Maybe you have seen this shift where you live too.
“When a tree dies in a national forest, it’s one among thousands.
When it dies in a backyard, it’s a friend.”
Those old oaks formed a durable ceiling of branches here in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then came the years of heat, the weird rain, the beetles, and, in 2019, a sudden calamity. Today, tens of thousands of mature trees across Takoma Park and adjoining cities and counties survive as mute tombstones, chainsawed stumps in a region-wide graveyard of lost giants.
