Climate Writing, Climate Action

On Little Great Island, climate change is disrupting both life and love.

After offending the powerful pastor of a cult, Mari McGavin has to flee with her six-year-old son. With no money and no place else to go, she returns to the tiny Maine island where she grew up—a place she swore she’d never see again. There Mari runs into her lifelong friend Harry Richardson, one of the island’s summer residents, now back himself to sell his family’s summer home. Mari and Harry’s lives intertwine once again, setting off a chain of events as unexpected and life altering as the shifts in climate affecting the whole ecosystem of the island…from generations of fishing families to the lobsters and the butterflies.

Little Great Island illustrates in microcosm the greatest changes of our time and the unyielding power of love.

In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, Tidwell’s story depicts the neighborhood’s battle to save the trees and combat climate change: The midwife who builds a geothermal energy system on the block, the Congressman who battles cancer and climate change at the same time, and the Chinese-American climate scientist who wants to bury billions of the world’s dying trees to store their carbon and help stabilize the atmosphere.

The story goes beyond ailing trees as Tidwell chronicles people on his block coping with Lyme disease, a church with solar panels on its roof and floodwater in its basement, and young people anguishing over whether to have kids -all in the same neighborhood and all against the backdrop of 2023’s record global temperatures and raging wildfires and hurricanes. Then there’s Tidwell himself who explores the ethical and scientific questions surrounding the idea of “geoengineering” as a last-ditch way to save the world’s trees – and human communities everywhere – by reflecting sunlight away from the planet.

No book has told the story of climate change this way: hyper-local, full of surprises, full of true stories of life and death in one neighborhood. The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue is a harrowing and hopeful proxy for every street in America and every place on Earth.

Kate Woodworth is the author of the novel Racing Into the Dark (EP Dutton, 1989), hailed as “A compelling exploration of mental illness” by Booklist and as an “auspicious debut” by Publishers Weekly. Her short stories have appeared in Cimarron Review, Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah and other literary journals. A retired medical writer in addition to fiction writer, she has received numerous awards and recognition for her writing, including a Pushcart Prize nomination, multiple Utah Arts Council and Dalton Pen Communication Awards, and an International Association of Business Communicators finalist recognition. She received her MFA from Boston University.

Woodworth will be in conversation with Mike Tidwell and Jim Lardner. Tidwell is a writer and climate activist living in the Washington, DC region. His most recent book is The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street (St. Martin’s Press, March 2025). Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called the book a “powerful work (that) will stick with readers long after they finish the last page.” Mike’s previous six books include Bayou Farewell (2003) about the disappearing wetlands of south Louisiana and The Ponds of Kalambayi (1990), a Peace Corps memoir. As a past contributing writer for The Washington Post, he won four Lowell Thomas Awards, the highest prize in American travel journalism. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow whose work has been published in Audubon, National Geographic Traveler, Orion,Washingtonian, and elsewhere. A passionate conservationist, he founded the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in 2002, where he has led local and national campaigns for clean energy. He lives on Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, MD with his wife Beth and their cat Macy Gray.

Lardner is a journalist and one of the 70,000+ members of Third Act, a national organization of Americans over 60 working for a sustainable planet and a credible democracy. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Prospect and The New York Review of Books, among other print and online publications. His books include “NYPD: A City and Its Police” (co-author) and “Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences” (contributor and co-editor).

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