More about Mike:

Mike has been a writer and activist almost all his life. He was born in 1962, in Memphis, TN, andgrew up in Marietta, GA. After graduating from the University of Georgia in 1984, where he waseditor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, he joined the Peace Corps. For two years he taughtfish culture to villagers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) where hespoke fluent Tshiluba and lived among some of the world’s poorest people with no runningwater or electricity. His first book The Ponds of Kalambayi tells that story and has remained inprint since 1990.

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Mike moved to the Washington, DC region in 1989 and worked part time for several years as acounselor to recovering drug addicts for the DC Coalition for the Homeless. His second book, Inthe Shadow of the White House, tells the story of the city’s crack epidemic through the eyes of addicts.

Mike spent most of the 1990s as a successful freelance print journalist, writing articles andopinion pieces for such publications as The Christian Science Monitor, National GeographicTraveler, Washingtonian, Reader’s Digest, American Legacy, The Boston Globe, TheWashington Post and others.

After travels in the Amazon rain forest in the early 1990s, he wrote Amazon Stranger, a tale of indigenous communities fighting encroaching oil companies. Readers Digest chose the book as one of the best nonfiction works of 1996.

Between 1997 and 2002, Mike served as a top writer for the Sunday travel section of TheWashington Post. In the process he got marooned on a desert island in the Bahamas, hitchhiked by boat to the end of the earth (really) with Australian lobster divers, and wrote about an excellent haircut he got under a mimosa tree in Vietnam. For his work he won four LowellThomas awards, the highest prize in American travel journalism.

Nature writing and conservation have been common themes in Mike’s work. In 1999, aWashington Post assignment to explore the vast and endangered wetlands of Louisianaeventually led to Mike’s most critically acclaimed book Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and TragicDeath of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast (Random House, 2003). The book remains in print with50,000 copies sold to date.

But in 2002, alarmed by the growing crisis of climate change, Mike walked away from hisfreelance writing career and founded the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He has servedas the group’s executive director ever since, leading clean-energy campaigns at the local, state,and federal levels while fighting the fossil fuel industry. In 2017 he helped lead a campaign tolegislatively ban fracking drilling for gas in his home state of Maryland. In 2020, he played a keyrole in the successful fight to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline for fracked gas in Virginia.

Along the way he continued to write dozens of newspaper op-eds and magazine articles on thetopic of climate change -- and wrote the book The Ravaging Tide about hurricane Katrina in2006.

Mike’s latest book is The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on OneAmerican Street. It tells the story of climate change through the visible impacts andconsequences on his one city block in Takoma Park, MD. The book, published by St. Martin’sPress in March 2025, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly which called it“Powerful … Tidwell is an excellent reporter whose hyperlocal focus shines light on how theclimate crisis shapes the lives of ordinary individuals. This will stick with readers long after theyfinish the last page.

”Mike’s interests include coaching youth baseball (now retired), teaching Sunday School at hislocal church, growing vegetables with his neighbors on Willow Avenue, and backpacking theAppalachian Trail.