Tree Street Requiem

Drawing on the pedagogic wisdom of geographer D. Fink, I create final exams based on the goals I have for my students. In my introductory environmental geography course, one goal is that students will understand environmental stories differently because of the time they spent learning with me.

So each course ends with me either presenting them with such a story or -- better yet -- pointing them in the direction of such stories and waiting to see what they bring back. This gives students a chance to flex the intellectual muscles they have been developing and it puts me in touch with a wide variety of new ideas. 

And although I usually send them to a source I could read on my own -- the archives of Sierra magazine -- I never think to browse it on my own. So the articles they uncover are a real gift, and I'm regifting the latest one to readers of this blog!

This brilliant illustration by Ellen Weinstein
accompanies the article in Sierra

One of the essays that got my attention was about a 2025 article by Mike Tidwell, entitled "This Is How Climate Change Transformed a Maryland Neighborhood." I became even more interested when I noticed the subtitle of the article: Extreme conditions are impacting Takoma Park's trees. As Tidwell explains, Takoma Park was established as a trolley suburb of Washington, DC, one of many places that is now dependent on automobiles but that owed their origins to public trolley stops.

The author had moved the Willow Street in Takoma Park in 1991, shortly after I had moved away from Maryland. He describes the complicated series of climate-related events that removed all of its biggest and most important trees. 

The article mentions the increasing frequency of torrential rains, reminding me disastrous events in Ellicott City, another central Maryland community with which I am much more familiar, located about a 40-minute drive up US 29 from his home. Severe flooding there in 2016 and 2018 was the result of both incredibly irresponsible land-use changes and rainfall of unprecedented intensity. I have written about these events a lot on this blog, most comprehensively in Flood Flash (2016), Flooding: It's Not in the Cards (2018) and Burying the Survivors (2018). Some of these posts have subsequent additions related to other incidents of climate chaos. 

Tidwell goes far beyond the direct impact of extreme weather events, however, to explain how they can lead to pest infestations and ultimately the loss of trees. Replanting is admirable and necessary, of course, but ultimately insufficient, for a couple of reasons that Tidwell explains beautifully. First, a fully mature oak provides many ecosystem services that are only fully developed after more than a century of growth. Second, climate zones have shifted so dramatically that "the trees are foreigners now," so that restoration efforts should involve different species. He mentions cypress, for example -- a tree I heard a lot about on my recent swamp tour in Louisiana. 

The biggest surprise for me is Tidwell's discussion of the problem of disposing of felled trees. Mature tree giants are succumbing to storms and blights more rapidly than suburbia can repurpose them. There is not a sufficient market for the wood ships and salvage timber they provide, so that they take up valuable space and return greenhouse gases to the atmosphere once they been knocked or cut down. This article is the first mention I have seen of burying trees as a possibly meaningful contribution to carbon offsets.