Re: Our Dead and Dying Trees

I hate to say it DQ, but the article is full of disinformation and fails to really put forward the number one problem facing our trees and forests today. That is the introduction of foreign pathogens and insects from overseas, especially Asia. I say that as a professional forester who manages 40,000 acres of forestland for the state of Massachusetts. With the possible exception of cockroaches and crocodiles, trees are one of the most resilient organisms on the earth. They have been around for a long, long time. I haven't seen any widespread die off in the East. Most of the problems that have happened out West are due to drought. Drought usually won't kill a tree but it weakens it enough that it is easy pickings for insects and disease. Sudden oak death syndrome is a bad problem, as the article states, but it is caused by a pathogen, not pollution, and it was most likely introduced from overseas. Pathogens and insects that cause only moderate problems in their native lands can wreak havoc when introduced somewhere else because their new hosts have no resistance built up against them. Similar to what happened when smallpox and alcohol were introduced to native people in North America. There are several introduced insects that are potentially big problems in the East. One is called the hemlock wooly adelgid, and it threatens to decimate a large percentage of Eastern hemlocks, which is a critical tree species that grows well in moist areas and thus is one of the critical watershed species. I am in the process of marking a timber sale where I am opening up around some large , healthy hemlocks to provide them more growing space (thus more light and water/nutrients) and also leaving an uncut control area. The feds are going to monitor it to see if these crop tree hemlocks fare better against the adelgid. Pollution might not be good for a tree, but in general it won't kill it or weaken it enough for something else to kill it. This usually only happens on poor growing sites. In the east we saw a decline in the spruce/fir community during the heyday of acid rain back in the 70's, but this tends to be the exception. Look in most urban areas and you will see trees growing amidst all of the car exhast. One of my colleagues who is an arborist and an insect and disease tree specialist gets hired by the feds periodically to monitor certain outbreaks and remove infected trees or cut trees to buffer an outbreak area to stop it's spread. He was down in Central Park a few years ago cutting down some of the big hardwoods there to try to stop the spread of the emerald ash borer and asian longhorn beetle and save the Park. For awhile there it looked like Central Park might lose most of it's trees. He was telling me on friday of a new insect that has been found in new england. He was on his way out to set up traps to try to monitor it. We inspect almost nothing that comes into this country from overseas. These insects can be in pallets that get off loaded and then spread from there. People driving around in the summer in the R.V.'s pack firewood with them and spread it further. Once it is here it is almost impossible to stop. The amazing thing is that supposedly China requires us to fumigate our wood before it gets off loaded to make sure that we don't introduce anything that could hurt their ecosystems, yet they get a free ride over here. Unfortunately the spread of these pathogens and insects is one of the bad side effects of globalization, and it is going to be hard to stop. It is going to get much, much worse before it gets better. If people want to do something tell their congressman to stop the free ride for China and allocate more money to monitor the problems and find solutions, which usually involves having to introduce predators from their native countries and/or developing some type of biological control, which can have it's own problems. Tweet