While researching an article on global warming last year, freelance journalist Mike Tidwell became alarmed. Scientists were predicting melting glaciers, rising seas, increasing drought, wildfires and floods.
"I freaked out," Tidwell said.
He started looking for solutions. And that's how a gleaming new 25-foot-tall grain silo came to stand at the end of a street of bungalows in this Washington, D.C., suburb, miles from any farmland.
Believed to be the only urban silo in the country, the structure holds 21 tons of organically fertilized corn from untilled fields that Tidwell and 11 other families now use to heat their homes.
It's their contribution to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a key factor in global warming.
