Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley is Goshen’s urban forester
Eighteen years ago, a few tiny bugs showed up in Detroit. They arrived in the wooden packaging material accompanying imports from another part of the world. They were missed by poor vigilance at several checkpoints.
Nearly two years later, after ash trees in the Detroit area began mysteriously dying, these bugs were identified as the emerald ash borer (EAB). By that time, the bugs had long since discovered that ash tree species in North America had no defenses against them, and true to their name, they were tunneling through ash trees, eating them alive, and reproducing at an exponential rate.
It took another nearly two years of trial and error experimenting for officials to identify some strategies which might work against EAB. The biggest issue, however, was that it kept spreading in unexpected ways over long distances, given that it is a relatively lazy insect, not likely to move more than a couple miles a year on its own.
The problem was people who were moving infested ash trees around without realizing. A public education campaign ensued, which helped to slow the spread down. But not everybody heard the message, and not everyone who heard it took it seriously — they’re just trees after all. As a result, by 2020, EAB has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees from Maine to Colorado and from Texas to Ontario.
I’ve been thinking about EAB quite a bit recently in the context of COVID-19, even though EAB chewed its way through Goshen and Elkhart County five years ago. I’ve been wondering what the parallels are, and whether there are some lessons which could be applied from a tree-killing invasive insect to this people-killing virus. I’m not an entomologist and I’m not a virologist so I can’t make physiological or medical observations. Though I’m not a sociologist either, I am able — like other humans — to notice patterns in human behavior. It’s along those lines, the human behavior patterns, that I feel like there are some things worth noting.
The most obvious similarity to notice is that not everyone takes an official or authoritative word to heart. There are bad reasons for this, and there are good reasons for this.
Suspicion, or even outright mistrust, of our government and other leaders is something of a tradition for us in the country, and large numbers of us seem to default to it, rather than give the benefit of the doubt. In terms of EAB, this has meant that some people continue to turn a blind eye to the bug, either hoping it will magically skip them, or not feeling especially concerned about what will happen if it doesn’t.
An unwillingness to cooperate and change behavior means that ash will join a small, but growing list of important tree species which have been eradicated from the wild by invasive pathogens over the last 100 years: chestnut, American elm, and now the ash species. They represent an increasing erosion of our ecosystems.
Another similarity which I think exists between EAB and COVID-19 is the underlying and overarching theme of the economy. Current theory suggests that COVID emerged in a food market; EAB emerged in North America in an import market. These two markets are literally and figuratively worlds apart, and yet the marketplace drive for financial gain plays a role in the way that something seemingly benign was overlooked, or never even considered. Here in the U.S., the tug of war over whether the economy empowers people or people empower the economy influenced the way people responded to EAB — “we have to do something, or we’ll lose this valuable species,” versus “what’s the big deal, there are plenty of other trees.” This tug of war has become a cultural flashpoint in regards to COVID-19: “if people don’t feel safe, they won’t participate in the economy” versus “the cure can’t be worse than the sickness.” This is expressed in arguments over wearing face masks.
I’m not equating the EAB infestation and the demise of ash trees to the COVID-19 pandemic and all the human and collateral damage it is doing. EAB is just a little blip. COVID-19 is reshaping our lives. The effects of the two are vastly different. And yet, the causes are quite similar (globalized economies without safety breaks), as are the responses (socio-political paralysis). For me, it begs the question, are there other such episodes in our history that have a similar cause-effect-response signature? What are those episodes? What are the implications of this pattern for our society — at the national and at the communal levels?
There will be more of these large-scale, human-induced natural disasters. We should be thinking about how we respond, and why. And then we should have conversation.