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- From: John MacGregor <jonivy@earthlink.net>
- To: gardenwriters-on-gardening <gwl-g@lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer
- Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 19:19:19 -0700
Apropos the current discussion:
The Union of Concerned Scientists passed on this interesting article on
invasive species policy from the Washington Post. UCS is suggesting that
now is a great time to write our Congressional representatives about our
concern about invasive species, because they currently have a lot of IS
legislation on their plates, and many are likely to have read this article.
Invasion of the Buggy Snackers (and Other Horrors)
< http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A737-2004Apr9.html >
By Steve Nash
A little beyond earshot of the Capitol, in the leafy suburbs
of Maryland and Virginia, the chewing sounds may soon be
getting loud. As spring arrives, a metallic green Asian
beetle that feasts on ash trees may appear in the landscape
as it did briefly last fall.
The emerald ash borer probably first arrived at a Great
Lakes port in wooden packing material on Korean or Chinese
freighters a couple of years ago; since then, it has
destroyed 6 million trees in Michigan and has also shown up
in Ohio and Canada. A few weeks ago, ash trees near Wolf
Trap in Virginia that might have been infested were cut down
in an effort to halt any spread of the pest in this area.
With luck, it'll work. But if it doesn't, there's a real
possibility the borer could do to Eastern ash trees what an
Asian blight did to chestnuts in the first half of the last
century -- wipe them out.
Global travel and trade have created a superhighway into the
United States for destructive foreign insects, plants,
animals and diseases that scientists call alien invasive
species. Yet we're pretending we don't have to pay much
attention. Countless other destructive alien species are on
their way here unless we enact immediate trade policy
changes and tougher cargo inspections. The costs will be
formidable, but the alternative -- more "free trade" in this
biological pollution -- is far worse.
Folks who are paying attention to the bug scene in New York
and Chicago have a fair idea of how difficult it is to
eradicate new pests. In both those places, the Asian long-
horned beetle has been drilling and killing maples and about
30 other kinds of trees. Despite nearly a decade of multi-
agency quarantines, search-and-destroy missions and the
removal of thousands of urban trees, it's still at large.
The problem isn't new, but its scale and frequency are. A
1999 Cornell University study estimated that the toll from
damage by species that aren't native to the United States,
and the costs of trying to control them, total $137 billion
every year. Not only the usual enviro-Democrats are alarmed.
Republicans whose League of Conservation Voters' ratings
typically hover near zero have also taken aim at the
infestations in their states. Alaska Republican Sen. Ted
Stevens has asked Congress for $1.5 million to fight the
mitten crab in his home state, while Idaho Sen. Larry Craig
is railing against noxious weeds in the mountain states.
Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio has introduced legislation to
fight waterborne invasives, which he calls "aquatic
terrorists," in the Great Lakes.
Congressional and agency initiatives tackle one invader
after another, but the most effective and cost-efficient
fight can't be waged after the pests are already on the
loose. Instead, we need to block the pathways they use to
get in.
Broadly speaking, there are two streams of invasive species.
One is imported plants and animals for the exotic pet or
food trades and micro-critters in dumped ballast water.
These are the beneficiaries of laissez-faire regulations
that allow them legal entry. The other arrivistes are
"stowaway" organisms that slip in inadvertently on or inside
trade goods or packing materials.
Federal agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and
the Fish and Wildlife Service maintain "dirty lists" that
are supposed to keep unwanted organisms out. But among
biologists, these lists are little more than a dirty joke.
Remember the snakehead fish that rattled Marylanders a
couple of summers ago -- four-and-a-half-feet-long, breeds
like a champ, can walk on land for three days, etc.? It was
a legal import at the time. Scientists warned 30 years ago
that snakeheads should be banned, as they finally have been
-- after showing up in nine states. But you can still import
countless other kinds of potentially destructive fish,
killer plants and exotic animals, such as the Asian swamp
eel, a species that is bedeviling Florida's waterways and
could easily spread all over the country.
International trade agreements and our trade-above-all
politics practically guarantee more of this lethargy. They
foster a species-at-a-time, innocent-until-proven-guilty
approach. If we mean to do a better job of keeping invasives
out, then the "clean list" approach adopted during the '90s
by Australia and New Zealand, which have drastically cut the
influx of biopollution, is a useful model. The logic's easy
to master: No non-native species can legally enter those
countries unless it has first been carefully assessed -- at
the cost of the importer -- for its invasive potential. If
it is proven to be unlikely to misbehave, it goes on the
"clean list." If it's not on the list, it stays out.
The new National Invasive Species Council (NISC), an
interagency group created by executive order in the waning
days of the Clinton administration, is trying to orchestrate
federal efforts here, but with a minuscule staff and a
budget to match, it's overburdened. Indeed, science and
management resources across the country are strained. "The
people working on this issue, their dance cards are full,"
says Jamie Reaser, NISC's former international affairs
specialist. "We need more people, more resources, more
dedicated staff to get the job done."
The sobering chronology of the emerald ash borer makes
Reaser's case. The borer is a cargo stowaway, a pest no one
intended to import but no one's trying hard enough to stop.
Despite the dire warnings of the Michigan extension agent
who discovered the ash borer, it took officials more than a
year to develop a hazy sense of the problem. By the time a
moratorium on shipping ash trees across the country was
declared, the genie was out of the bottle, and the borer had
spread through Michigan and Ohio. In any case, the
moratorium wasn't serious. A Maryland nursery took delivery
of more than 100 infected Michigan ash trees last August and
sent them out to be planted in Virginia and southern
Maryland.
Similarly, inspection regimes at U.S. ports are of the do-
more-with-less school of self-delusion. Only 1 to 2 percent
of the millions of cargo containers that enter U.S. ports
each year are given a look. Compare that with a get-serious
program: Dr. Carolyn Whyte, a biometrician and risk assessor
with New Zealand's border management agency, says that in
that country "each and every container is now unpacked in
the presence of a person that has been trained and
accredited."
Recent changes in U.S. trade rules require Hong Kong and
Chinese shippers to certify that they have heat-treated or
fumigated wood packing materials to ensure that more live
beetles like the borers aren't coming over. But the follow-
through has been questionable. Late last year, the Columbus
Dispatch of Ohio quoted federal inspectors as saying, "Our
officers don't place much faith in the fumigation
certificates" and "Some importers tell us that Chinese
shippers will ask them if they want the fumigation
certificate or the fumigation." A reporter and photographer
for the newspaper said that officials in China refused their
repeated requests to visit wood packaging fumigation sites.
A recent General Accounting Office report notes that federal
efforts lopsidedly target invasives affecting agriculture
rather than forests, rangelands, lakes, rivers and other
natural areas, whose fate is just as crucial. Nearly half of
all endangered and threatened species in the United States
are at risk because of invaders that are severely disrupting
natural ecosystems. These losses don't show up on the trade-
balance sheets, even when they are vital to maintaining
clean water and clean air, not to mention habitat for wild
species. Even so, the tally of what we're losing in natural
areas is becoming hard to ignore.
In recent years, alien insects and diseases have wiped out
nearly all butternut trees and Fraser firs in the
Appalachians and half or more of all native dogwoods. Native
hemlocks have been disappearing from Connecticut to the
Carolinas during the past couple of decades because of a
European insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid. It turned up in
Great Smoky Mountains National Park last summer, and studies
indicate that the prospects of survival for the park's
groves of 400-year-old hemlocks are nil. Shenandoah National
Park, in Washington's backyard, has more than 200 alien
plant species, many of which are spreading and are, for now,
ineradicable.
"Whatever we're doing now, it's not working," says Richard
Kinney of the Florida Citrus Packers, who is a veteran of
several federal advisory panels. "We've got a Band-aid over
a cancer that is eating us up. Long-horned beetle? We ought
to be enraged in this country over the potential
devastation."
If that indignation takes hold, there's plenty to be done.
We need more public education and volunteer anti-invasives
campaigns, and both national and local programs for early
detection of new invasions. We need an emphatic "rapid
response" system to eradicate problem species before they
become established. We need more stable, long-term funding
for research on prevention and control. But the first order
of business should be clear: Plug the holes in trade
regulation that allow too much easy, free entry to too many
new, unwelcome arrivals.
Steve Nash teaches journalism and environmental studies at
the University of Richmond and is the author of "Blue Ridge
2020: An Owner's Manual" (University of North Carolina
Press).
John C. MacGregor IV
815 Park Avenue #4
South Pasadena, CA 91030-2788
(626) 799-1554
jonivy@earthlink.net
-
[gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Lon J. Rombough, 04/19/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Carolyn Ulrich, 04/19/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Pamela K, 04/20/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Tom Ogren, 04/20/2004
-
RE: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Jeff Ball, 04/20/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Ron Whitehurst, 04/20/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
John MacGregor, 04/20/2004
- RE: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer, Jeff Ball, 04/21/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
John MacGregor, 04/20/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Ron Whitehurst, 04/20/2004
-
RE: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Jeff Ball, 04/20/2004
-
RE: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Jeff Ball, 04/20/2004
- Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer, nancy szerlag, 04/20/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Tom Ogren, 04/20/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Pamela K, 04/20/2004
- Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer, Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp, 04/20/2004
-
Re: [gwl-g] Emerald Ash Borer,
Carolyn Ulrich, 04/19/2004
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