Tidwell, Mike

PERSONAL:

Born in TN; married; wife's name Catherine; children: Sasha (son).

ADDRESSES:

Home—Takoma Park, MD. Office— Chesapeake Climate Action Network, P.O. Box 11138, Takoma Park, MD 20912.

CAREER:

Freelance journalist. Worked for the Peace Corps, 1985-87; Chesapeake Climate Action Network (nonprofit environmental organization), Tacoma, MD, founding director, 2002—. Documentary filmmaker of We Are All Smith Islanders.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Two Lowell Thomas Awards, for travel journalism; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; Conservation Award, Audubon Naturalist Society, 2003, for work on clean energy.

WRITINGS:

The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn, Lyons & Burford (New York, NY), 1990.

In the Shadow of the White House: Drugs, Death, and Redemption on the Streets of the Nation's Capital, Prima Publishing (Rocklin, CA), 1992.

Amazon Stranger: A Rainforest Chief Battles Big Oil, Lyons & Burford (New York, NY), 1996.

In the Mountains of Heaven: Tales of Adventure on Six Continents, Lyons Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2003.

The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities, Free Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Reader's Digest, National Geographic Traveler, and the Washington Post.

SIDELIGHTS:

Freelance writer Mike Tidwell was initially known for his many travel articles, which he contributed to magazines and newspapers such as the National Geographic Traveler and the Washington Post. A number of his best essays are collected in his In the Mountains of Heaven: Tales of Adventure on Six Continents. A taste for travel began early in life, and Tidwell spent two years in Zaire with the Peace Corps helping the local people construct fish ponds. He relates his experiences in The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn. During his travels around the world, Tidwell came to recognize the environmental destruction going on around him, and this led to his becoming an ardent conservationist. He has written several books about environmental topics and has founded the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in Maryland, which aims to increase the awareness of global warming.

Amazon Stranger: A Rainforest Chief Battles Big Oil relates Tidwell's stay in the Amazonian jungles of Ecuador. Here he finds the Coffin tribe, which is led, interestingly enough, by Randy Burman, the son of American missionaries who was born in the rain forest. The land and the tribe's way of life is threatened by the activities of local oil companies. Praising this depiction of the battle between industry, the environment, and native peoples in Amazon Stranger, a Publishers Weekly critic reported that Tidwell "paints a vivid picture of the rain forest and its people," and Alice Joyce called it a "deftly written book" in a Booklist review.

On an assignment in 1999 from the Washington Post to write about southern Louisiana, Tidwell traveled to Cajun country because he was fond of fishing and he thought the local culture would make an interesting story. What he found there utterly shocked him. The unique Cajun way of life, much of it revolving around fishing and shrimping, was disappearing because the land was literally sinking into the ocean at a rate of about twenty-five square miles a year. The cause was levees along the Mississippi River, which prevented sediments from depositing along the riparian shores. Instead, the silt was emptying into the Caribbean, allowing the ocean to creep into bayou country. Tidwell quickly saw this as one of the biggest environmental stories today, and he wrote about it in Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast, lamenting not only the environmental destruction, but also the resulting loss of Cajun culture. He also quickly saw an inevitable consequence, correctly depicting in 1999 the Katrina Hurricane disaster of 2005, which devastated New Orleans.

The answer to this problem, Tidwell insisted in a Mother Jones interview with Erik Kancler, is not to rebuild massive levees, but rather to restore barrier islands and wetlands, as well as to use alternatives to fossil fuels that are causing global warming. Tidwell asserted that "if we do not commit as a nation to a full coastal restoration program to rebuild the barrier islands and wetlands then we are in effect committing an act of mass homicide by rebuilding the city. It would be criminally negligent to send people to go live in New Orleans or the other parts of that coast." Audubon reviewer Frances Backhouse called Bayou Farewell "an eloquent call to arms," and a Publishers Weekly writer similarly declared the book a "lyrically intense travelogue will provide historians of the not too distant future with a guide to a vanishing landscape and a lost culture."

A year after Hurricane Katrina proved Tidwell right, he published The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities, in which he emphasizes the importance of reducing greenhouse gases. Tidwell predicts that cities such as London, New York, and Bangladesh will disappear from the map unless something is done soon. As a Publishers Weekly contributor reported, however, Tidwell remains "an optimist." He gives examples of governments repairing the environment, such as Japan, which has successfully spearheaded a reforestation program. With some wisdom and foresightedness, much of the damage can be repaired, Tidwell believes, warning Kancler how "in nature, everything is connected to everything. And if you fundamentally alter a significant component of a natural system you fundamentally alter all of it's major components."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Anthropologist, September 1, 1998, Thomas N. Headland, review of Amazon Stranger: A Rainforest Chief Battles Big Oil, p. 842.

Audubon, March 1, 2004, Frances Backhouse, review of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast, p. 99.

Booklist, May 15, 1996, Alice Joyce, review of Amazon Stranger, p. 1553; October 1, 2000, David Pitt, review of In the Mountains of Heaven: True Tales of Adventure on Six Continents, p. 313; February 15, 2003, Gilbert Taylor, review of Bayou Farewell, p. 1036.

Federal Probation, June 1, 1993, Edward M. Read, review of In the Shadow of the White House: Drugs, Death, and Redemption on the Streets of the Nation's Capital, p. 81.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2003, review of Bayou Farewell, p. 133; January 15, 2003, review of Bayou Farewell, p. 133.

Kliatt, May 1, 2004, Nola Theiss, review of Bayou Farewell, p. 40.

Library Journal, August 1, 1990, Beth Clewis, review of The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn, p. 118; April 1, 1996, Nancy J. Moeckel, review of Amazon Stranger, p. 112; September 15, 2000, Janet Ross, review of In the Mountains of Heaven, p. 105.

Mother Jones, October 3, 2005, Erik Kancler, interview with Mike Tidwell.

Natural History, May 1, 1996, review of Amazon Stranger, p. 8.

New Yorker, August 4, 2003, "Great Barriers," p. 11.

New York Times Book Review, December 3, 2000, review of In the Mountains of Heaven, p. 59.

Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of The Ponds of Kalambayi, p. 429; February 12, 1996, "Rainforest Warrior," p. 24; February 19, 1996, review of Amazon Stranger, p. 194; April 8, 1996, review of The Ponds of Kalambayi, p. 66; September 25, 2000, review of In the Mountains of Heaven, p. 104; January 20, 2003, review of Bayou Farewell, p. 69; June 26, 2006, review of The Ravaging Tide, p. 46.

School Library Journal, May 1, 1991, Claudia Moore, review of The Ponds of Kalambayi, p. 129.