People alking about invasive species got me to look something up, and it's even more catastrophically depressing that I was expecting.
Emerald Ash Borers are a huge problem in the northeast united states, and they hit the town I grew up in somewhere around 2015. I remember noticing the tree at the end of our driveway wasn't doing well, and had these weird little D-shaped holes in the bark. I looked into it, became rightly concerned, and confirmed a bunch of the other symptoms of an infestation.
I remember a sort of growing dread as I investigated the other ash trees on the street, in time that not only were most of them showing signs of infection, but most of the ones in the wider neighborhood were. I called a hotline to report it, because infection maps didn't show our area yet.
With maybe one or two exceptions, all of those trees are dead now. Quite a number of them have been removed, but even among the ones that remained, they are husks, woodpecker feeders. Gone. I'd say compared to when I grew up there's about 40% less trees in what was once considered a very wooded neighborhood. Ice storms weren't uncommon where I grew up, and trees go down all the time, but it's a noticeable and sharp change, because all the shade that used to be there is gone. There's no cover, no canopy.
I thought that maybe it was me glorifying my own memories, or perhaps my mom's neighborhood just got hit particularly hard. Like I said, all this mentioned got me looking, and it turns out that no, it's that bad everywhere.
Of the North American strains of Ash tree, fatality rates vary for an infection, but in almost all of them it's very high because of a combination of factors, not the least of which is that american Ash trees have no evolutionary defenses against it. For Black Ash, which was the kind all over my neighborhood, that fatality rate is upwards of 90%. If a tree gets infected, it is almost certainly going to die. Other than woodpeckers, there's effectively no natural predators here for the bug, and by the time woodpeckers get into it, it's usually already too late.
Emerald Ash Borers arrived to the US somewhere around 2002, and since then they've just been gorging a hole through the tree population, spreading through things like not checking firewood transported over small distances. One estimate I saw while looking this up put the toll at tens of Millions, and Black Ash trees are now officially listed as critically endangered.
Never mind that they get used in making guitars in the US, part of why I was fond of them to begin with, these trees are vital parts of ecosystems, especially in any swampy conditions. Despite my being known for Mecha and sci-fi, my passion for ecology and environmentalism runs bone deep, and this is hard to call anything other than a worse-case scenario. Trees do not evole quickly, certainly not to anything of this speed, and it's very well possible that black ash will go extinct in my lifetime.
It's a hard fucking thing to reckon with.
