For years, Mike Tidwell led an environmental campaign, one with few followers



In 2002, he started a neighborhood cooperative to buy and distribute organically fertilized corn kernels to burn in pellet stoves (a lower-emissions alternative to traditional fuel-oil boilers). At first, the cooperative consisted of just him and three other residents. But lately, after the release of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and last summer’s Live Earth concerts, his corn collective has ballooned to more than 70 members, some coming from more distant Maryland suburbs like Bethesda and Silver Spring. The group even built a 25-foot-tall cylindrical granary, holding 22 tons of corn, in a small lot belonging to Takoma Park. Attitudes, Mr. Tidwell said, changed, too. “In the American suburbs, people are suddenly literate in the language of carbon emissions and carbon footprints,” he said. “I’m hearing it in most mainstream places.” Author Mike Tidwell, founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Committee, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Congo Kinshasa.

For years, Mike Tidwell led an environmental campaign, one with few followers

Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You
Lou Beach

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: February 10, 2008

[Excerpt]

AS a suburban environmentalist, Mike Tidwell, 45, of Takoma Park, Md., always felt like a walking contradiction.

Though he had quit his job as a journalist to work for environmental nonprofit organizations, Mr. Tidwell viewed suburbs (his own hometown is just outside of Washington) as places built “to defy nature,” he said, giving everyone “their own little kingdom of grass and space” — not to mention 3,000-square-foot houses, heated swimming pools and hulking S.U.V.’s.

For years, Mr. Tidwell led an environmental campaign, one with few followers. In 2002, he started a neighborhood cooperative to buy and distribute organically fertilized corn kernels to burn in pellet stoves (a lower-emissions alternative to traditional fuel-oil boilers). At first, the cooperative consisted of just him and three other residents.

But lately, after the release of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and last summer’s Live Earth concerts, his corn collective has ballooned to more than 70 members, some coming from more distant Maryland suburbs like Bethesda and Silver Spring. The group even built a 25-foot-tall cylindrical granary, holding 22 tons of corn, in a small lot belonging to Takoma Park.

Attitudes, Mr. Tidwell said, changed, too.

“In the American suburbs, people are suddenly literate in the language of carbon emissions and carbon footprints,” he said. “I’m hearing it in most mainstream places.”

Last summer, Mr. Tidwell attended a picnic where, he said, a guest had brought a plate of kiwi fruit imported from New Zealand. “This very nonhippie, not-environmental-cliché-type woman I heard asking another person, ‘I wonder what the carbon budget of these kiwis are?’ ” he said. “I was just astonished.”

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Headlines: February, 2008; RPCV Mike Tidwell (Congo Kinshasa); Figures; Peace Corps Congo Kinshasa; Directory of Congo Kinshasa RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Congo Kinshasa RPCVs; Global Warming; Environment; Maryland