At the end of the street on which I grew up, there was a substantial bit of forest. "The woods," we called it. It was a perfect place to be a kid with an active imagination.
There was a brook running through it, and there even were paths already in place because the Great Worcester Tornado had cut them in 1953, six months before I was born. When I came back from my first year in college, the woods were gone, replaced by a housing development that had used the old paths as a blueprint for new streets. Anyway, this developed in me a great love for forests.
I even worked for three summers in a state forest down by the Rhode Island line. Consequently, I was sorry that all the thunder about the midterms caused me to miss this great piece by Catrin Einhorn in The New York Times about the perilous state of America's forests due to their infestation by various invasive insects. And these plagues are right here down the street, by the Charles.
The woolly adelgid is killing the hemlocks. A Japanese microorganism is killing the beeches. We've already lost the elms and the chestnuts to invasive diseases.
By the way, the ash trees moved in to replace the elms and now the ash trees are being attacked. One way scientists are fighting the infestations is with ... other insects. As Einhorn points out, the scientists are aware of the irony.
It's a crisis, and it's all bugs on deck.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
