April 16, 2026

#35 - Mike Tidwell

Show Notes

As a young man, Mike Tidwell traveled halfway across the globe to teach rural Africans a potential new livelihood. As with most Peace Corps volunteers, he found himself on the receiving end of the most prominent lessons. Decades later, after great success as a journalist, an author, and a climate activist, he still yearns to teach people about the environment. Only now, he works closer to home. Much, much closer. As in, his own backyard...

Mike Tidwell is the founder and Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a grassroots non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about impacts and solutions associated with global warming. He is also an author and filmmaker. His most recent book, The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street, tracks the growing impacts of climate change on his own neighborhood block, in a Maryland suburb bordering Washington, DC. The book will be the subject of a forthcoming PBS documentary. His 2003 book, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast, predicted the Katarina hurricane disaster. He is also the author of the book The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katarinas, and the Race to Save America's Coastal Cities. Global warming was also the subject of his 2004 documentary film We Are All Smith Islanders.

He has been featured in numerous media outlets, including NBC's Meet the Press, National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, Politico, and the Washington Post. In 2003, he received the Audubon Naturalist Society's prestigious Conservation Award. Two years later, he received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Louisiana's Nicholls State University.

Before all of that, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire). This was the setting for his lauded book The Ponds of Kalambayi: A Peace Corps Memoir.