Notes from the CTE Library

The First Year Book: Mike Tidwell’s The Ravaging Tide

by Anna Bedford, Publications Coordinator, CTE

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused the largest displacement of American citizens since the Civil War, generating 1.3 million “climate refugees.” Mike Tidwell had predicted the coming of Katrina with uncanny accuracy in his book Bayou Farewell. The writing, he said, was on the wall, or in the piles of scientific documents obscured, questioned and even edited by America’s leaders.

In his latest book, The Ravaging Tide, Tidwell explains the science, the history, the anthropology, and the politics surrounding the growing crisis known as global warming. Using stark accounts of what happened in New Orleans to circumvent the abstraction of “climate change,” Tidwell warns the conditions of depleted wetlands, rising tides, and stronger storms are being exported from New Orleans across the globe and across America. “There was nothing ‘natural’ about this natural disaster. We did this,” says Tidwell of Katrina.

As a first year book The Ravaging Tide is particularly apropos, as it literally drives home its urgency and relevance with projections for the swelling Chesapeake, and the endangered Bay area, as well as hopeful initiatives for change already taking grassroots in nearby Takoma Park. As a first year book it is a frightening forecast for our own area, as well as the rest of the world. It is a call to action, and it is surprisingly hopeful. We are not yet too late, says Tidwell, as he offers examples locally and globally of meaningful change.

This is an environmental book that leaves you with a rare sense of opportunity in the face of somber realities. If you have watched or read accounts of seas swelling with warmth, polar bears drowning, and ice caps melting - as most of us have – this book is different in that it doesn’t leave you despairingly wondering whether there is any point in recycling when we’re all going to drown.

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The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities, by Mike Tidwell. Paperback: 208 pages. Publisher: Free Press; (Reprint edition June 5, 2007). Language: English. ISBN-10: 0743294718. ISBN-13: 978-0743294713. Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches . $14.00