sustainability

I’ve worked at the Takoma Voice and Silver Spring Voice for about a year and a half now. In that time, I’ve seen Julie Wiatt’s photo of a cat sleeping on Mike Tidwell’s corn-burning stove so many times I can describe the variations in the animal’s yellow tabby fur right down to the tip of her tail. Tidwell’s carbon-neutral lifestyle is regularly on display at his Takoma Park home, where he instructively holds a green open house several times a year.

To those of us who have yet to make his acquaintance, Tidwell, author, journalist and founder of the local Chesapeake Climate Action Network, appears to be a quintessential Takoman: well educated and perhaps a little righteous in his indignation against our oil-addicted establishment, fighting the good fight through energy conservation and innovations.

Last week I finished Tidwell’s latest book The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities (Free Press), and got a healthy dose of his perspective. I’m now convinced that Americans are setting the stage for more disasters by not reigning in our insatiable taste for electricity and petroleum. This book is a must-read for anyone who considers him or herself a citizen of the world.
In a nutshell, Tidwell blames Hurricane Katrina’s disastrous but predictable impact on the effects of global warming, which has been largely ignored by our current, oil-loving government. Denial and inaction has culminated in horror and irreparable losses. But there’s more to the story.

Tidwell explains his thesis with a combination of anecdotes and statistical data. His sources vary from Cajun shrimpers to internationally recognized climate scientists to his very own eyes. He focuses primarily on two aspects of climate change and how they set the stage for Katrina’s (and subsequently Hurricane Rita’s) threat.
First, near the mouth of the lower Mississippi River, where centuries-old levees have denied the River its natural ability to flood and replace land that washes away during heavy rains, the coastal “boot” of Louisiana has been gradually sinking, just as the state’s barrier islands have been disappearing. Previously forested areas, which would have provided at least some cushion from the storm traveling inward toward the city, were already covered in water, the trees long dead and bare of their canopy. He shows the significance of coastal deforestation with a comparison to the 2004 South Asian tsunami:

Researchers found that shorelines lined with mangrove forests suffered significantly less damage than areas where tidal wave met land denuded by human activity. This scientific analysis…suggests that just 30 trees per 120 square yards in a 100-yard-wide belt could diminish the maximum tsunami impact by more than 90 percent.

(The Ravaging Tide, p. 25)

While many Americans may have known, even before the spotlight of Katrina, that much of New Orleans was below sea level, most of us probably didn’t understand that that wasn’t always the case. The land loss and vulnerable state of New Orleans in particular was a result of the levee system.
Second, globally, the warming trend, caused by damage to the ozone layer that blankets the planet, is responsible for a drastic melting near the poles. Simply put, thanks to the resulting meltwater, our oceans are overflowing the world over, encroaching dangerously wherever land meets water.

To understand even a little of what the scientific community knows about global warming is to understand that our current behavior ties us to a track with a speeding train hurtling toward us. I believe, and I think you would, too, after reviewing the evidence Tidwell brings together, that Americans are at a fork in the road.

Rapid deterioration of coastal wetlands combined with more extreme weather systems (a trend also attributed to global warming, according to Tidwell) means any community within a hundred miles of the shore is at risk of a similarly ruinous fate. He cites frightening, wake-up-call statistics in passage after passage like the following:

Among the many disturbing impacts projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is this one: …by 2100 …every coastline in the world, …may soon find its relationship to the sea altered a full three feet in favor of the ocean, just like New Orleans. …The glad-it’s-not-me feeling you had toward post-Katrina should be fading by now. If you live anywhere from lower Manhattan to inner city Baltimore to the southern suburbs of Houston you now know what it’s like to be a resident of New Orleans prior to August 29, 2005.

(The Ravaging Tide, p. 66)

Tidwell identifies himself as an optimist several times in “Ravaging Tide,” but the label holds only if you consider Paul Revere an optimist. Though the book carries a similar topic and argument to his last one, the pre-Katrina Bayou Farewell, (in which Tidwell quite accurately forecast the catastrophe) you might say that what differentiates the two works, is (1) the pitch of his warning, and (2) the personal responsibility he demonstrates toward the halting the climate change phenomenon.

In the first half of “Ravaging Tide,” Tidwell painstakingly breaks down the factors that led to Katrina’s destruction, and then gradually, he illuminates a path for Americans. It’s a path that Tidwell has been on personally for about five years, since the time of another great American tragedy of this era, 9/11. Like 9/11, the devastation of Katrina is large enough to shape psyche and policy and behavior for generations to come. But will it?

Tidwell makes a compelling case for the direct relationship between our so-called “lifestyle” choices and the fate of the world. Tidwell spent several thousand dollars and about 6 months back in 2001 changing the way he uses energy in his home. The result is not only a remarkable cost and energy savings (his annual average of about 1800 kilowatt hours is approximately half of the usage in most American homes), but also a model for the community.

Tidwell does discuss some of the technologies already available to American communities that would have a large impact on our carbon emissions, technologies like windpower and biofuel. But quite practically, he offers us relatively low-cost examples of domestic tweaks we can implement today that would, one by one, help each of us to “get right with carbon,” if you will.

For $60, Tidwell replaced all of the light bulbs in his house with the compact fluorescent variety, which requires much less wattage. For another $36, he added power strips in his home to make it easier to cut off appliances when they are not in use rather than waste electricity keeping pointless power lights glowing, for example.

Bigger ticket items include the aforementioned corn-burning stove Tidwell purchased for about $2,400, which, in its efficiency, has just about paid for itself. (You’ll enjoy reading how Tidwell helped get a corn granary placed conveniently right outside Takoma Park; TP’s own Mayor Kathy Porter is a hero in the story.) His new Kenmore Energy Star fridge ($750) uses a third of the energy his 10-year old model had been gulping, saving $100 a year off the electricity bill. Rounding out his home equity loan, he added solar panels and a solar water-heating system to his house. These enhancements were most expensive of all, coming to nearly $4,500 for both even though he was able to find them used at a significant savings.

But the result of all these changes is more than a balance sheet of dollars, cents and kilowatt-hours. Tidwell’s home improvement project was an investment of time and cash, sure, but now that it’s long been done, he finds the alternate sources of comfort to be basically invisible. He throws open his doors about once a month to show his interested guests, it’s just a house. I think that’s the reason his ideas are likely to catch on.
Some might say the problem with this book is that it’s preaching to the choir; the people who really need to read it would never crack its spine. It’s true: several times as I read “Ravaging Tide,” I fantasized about what Dick Cheney would say in the face of some of the startling evidence it presents. Like many people in my progressive community, I like to think of myself as a member of the choir, but then, where’s my corn-burning stove? What can I do to get right with carbon? I was inspired by this book to make several personal changes that, hopefully, will one day soon be commonplace.