We knew this day would come. We knew because the day had already arrived in southeast Michigan. There was the isolated incident in a Wyoming lumberyard, then the episode in the suburb of Cascade. Now it’s officially here, reported in Heritage Hill last month: Agrilus planipennis, the emerald ash borer, an obnoxious Chinese bug feasting on any ash tree unfortunate enough to stand in the way.
They call it EAB for short. And actually the bug's been there a while – we just didn’t find it right away. Now everybody who is about to lose an ash tree from their yard or street will wonder what is to be done. Sadly, the answer is "nothing.”
That's right. There is nothing to be done. Barring some unforeseen deus ex machina kind of intervention, EAB will prevail. It's highly likely every ash tree in the City of Grand Rapids will ultimately be infected. Almost every ash tree infected will die. And the effects on the mature tree canopy of metro GR, a region striving to green itself in almost every way imaginable, will no doubt be heartbreaking, expensive, and long-lasting.
The state is quarantining infected locations, and calling on people not to move firewood or other potentially infected ash materials. The consequences for ignoring orders are hefty: fines range from $1,000 - $250,000, including prison terms of up to five years.
But it is in the nature of EAB to kill ash trees and, regardless of insecticides and other treatments, the bug will remain true to its nature just as surely as human beings are true to theirs.
We can warn people all we want about transporting infected firewood around in the backs of their pickup trucks (this seems to be the most popular insect-transportation scenario.) But there will always be some who don’t get the message, and others who don’t see why the rules should apply to them.
Preparing for the Inevitable
By way of disclosure, I met on a volunteer basis with the Mayor of Grand Rapids and city officials a year ago to discuss the ash borer invasion. We wanted to understand what we might do in advance of an infestation and to slow the insect's arrival. We wanted to know what we might do once it was established here, to slow its spread or to protect individual trees and groves.
Grand Rapids consulted early on with local and national experts, interested arborists, people in effected cities, and its own city forester. Nobody was taken by surprise.
We all tightened our belts like grownups and began talking about next steps. I’ll save you the tedium of the unfolding discussion, and let you have just the concluding scenes in this drama:
- If you hope to save an ash tree, you hopelessly sentimental fool, you’ll have to treat it chemically every year.
- There’s no guaranteed effective treatment for individual trees. What works this year might not work next year, and probably won’t work for long.
- There will be a lot of affected trees. The city hasn’t any money to treat the trees that are not on city property.
- The city doesn’t have any money to treat the trees that are on city property, either.
- There’s no money to remove dead trees.
- There’s no money to replace ash trees with new trees.
- There’s no money coming to our rescue from the Federal government, either.
"I asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture what it would do to assist us here with the ash borer disaster,” Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell recently said. “They told me that Michigan had been written off.”
Turning a Threat into an Opportunity
The only Federal money available here apparently will be used to quarantine the Michigan border and stop truckloads of firewood and other regulated ash materials from being transported to Indiana and Ohio.
Readers old enough to remember Dutch Elm disease in Michigan in the 1950’s are not surprised by any of this. And you no doubt can recall urban streetscapes swiftly denuded of trees. Grand Rapids has a diversity of trees. But the look, feel and function of numerous avenues throughout the city are heavily designed around ash plantings. Sooner or later, the appearance and livability of these places will be gravely altered.
Many believe that Dutch Elm disease arrived in New England from the Netherlands in 1928, in a cargo of lumber intended for the Ohio furniture industry. The Emerald Ash Borer, by contrast, arrived in Michigan in 2002, probably in wooden packing materials, direct from Asia.
In the long run it could cost upwards of $9 million for the Grand Rapids area to deal with all the far-reaching consequences of EAB. I don’t know how we get around that. But earlier action means mature and lush tree canopies sooner rather than later.
To me, this whole issue demonstrates the importance of having a well-funded city government. An organization equipped to react to, and cope with, the economic, environmental, and social consequences that arise unexpectedly in connection with our little personal projects and externalized costs.
Some of us might be satisfied with that North Dakota look. Not me.
In Norse mythology, the first man was made from an ash tree; the first woman, from an elm. I’d like to see us celebrate our woody origins, and begin to go in search of that $9 million. Certainly it’s a big number. But it needn’t happen all at once. Over a reasonable span of years, between business, foundation, government, and citizen support, a lot could happen to heal these scars.
Eventually, we could even find ourselves in a greener city than we are today.
Photos:
A tree marked as infected along College Avenue in Heritage Hill
A nearly dead tree infected with the Ash Borer on College Avenue
This Ash Tree canopy most likely will be lost along College Avenue
Infected tree
Photographs by Brian Kelly - All Rights Reserved