1869, Ep. 138 with Scott Meiners, author of Tree by Tree

9:25PM Sep 12, 2023

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Scott Meiners

Keywords:

trees

tree

species

emerald ash borer

years

chestnuts

sorts

elm

pretty

ash trees

forest

forests

american chestnut

plant

insect

talking

pests

dying

maple

sugar maple

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Scott Meiners author of the new book Tree by Tree: Saving North America's Eastern Forests. Scott Meiners is Professor of Biological Sciences at Eastern Illinois University. His research interests generally revolve around factors that influence the dynamics and regeneration of plant communities, and he is also interested in a wide variety of topics in community ecology. We spoke to Scott about the two species that are already functionally lost from eastern North America's forests, the American chestnut and the American elm, and why these trees serve as cautionary tales for the challenges now facing the eastern hemlock, the white ash and the sugar maple today. We also discuss what we as citizens need to do both individually and collectively to protect our forests future. Hello, Scott, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Tree by Tree: Saving North America's Eastern Forests - tell us the backstory of this book.

So as a plant ecologist, you kind of accumulate this sort of information. And then it comes out at odd times, sometimes to my wife's chagrin, oftentimes, we were actually walking with friends, an ecologist colleague of mine and her spouse walking with them in Sacramento, and probably walking to dinner or from dinner or something like that. And we were walking along, and I started looking at some nice trees and like, what is this tree, I'm like, it looks familiar, but I can't quite place it. And we were basically along a street of American elms. And I kind of went around and actually found where they just recently treated them to keep the disease out of them. And that just that sort of simple thing, because it's beautiful, largest elms I've ever actually seeing other than in photos, just started this conversation. And somewhere along the line, I said, you know, tree by tree we're losing, we're losing our species, and nobody seems to care. My friend looked at me, he said, "That's a great book title, you should write that book". And so, so that actually kind of then like, no, no, that doesn't make sense. And then, because I don't know that much, and then you just kind of start thinking that seed gets planted to keep with the tree analogy, then that kind of came about. And then I had a sabbatical coming up, and I said, "Hey, this is a this is, this is a good time to sort of explore some of these ideas."

Excellent. Excellent. Now you'd mentioned the elm, how many elms are left and know that they were wiped out, effectively wiped out by Dutch elm disease, how many do you know still exist?

Yeah, there still are quite a few. We actually in a place that I work in New Jersey, there are a few sort of that have persisted in the old growth forests and we find seedlings up them. So there are still several shouldn't say several, but there are still some out there. I think if we were to be able to get rid of the disease magically, somehow they could actually recover pretty well. Most towns still seem to have a couple two, three, Charleston, where I teach, there's one really sad, half dead looking elm when I when I did my undergrad, we had a really, really pathetically bad that's that tree is almost certainly dead by now. But there are some still that persist. Some municipalities, particularly further west, where the disease spread was a little more patchy, some cities still have been able to maintain them. Obviously Sacramento maintains a pretty nice that they must have enough that makes it worth them going around and having a crew that will do that sort of thing. So that they are out there, but where you seem to find them are basically in towns and in cities, not out in forests, other than really, really small individuals, because the disease seems to persist. And then once they get large enough that, you know a bark beetle or something might be interested in them. They get a little hole in them, they get the fungus, they die. And that's that's the sad part of that so...

Wow. Well, you focus on several trees in the book, including the elm but also the American Chestnut, both of those have been effectively wiped out. But then there are three additional trees that you focus on the eastern Hemlock, the white ash and the sugar maple, among some others that are facing threats right now. I know that the American Chestnut that there have been successful kind of hybrids with a Chinese chestnut tell us that they're trying to like kind of revive like a hybrid chestnut into the United States.

Yeah. So the American Chestnut Foundation for more than two decades now has been sort of engaged in a breeding process. And so what they've been doing is crossing American chestnuts with Chinese I believe they're all Chinese chestnuts. And then they actually have an interesting screening, they grow them for a little bit, and then they just douse them with the fungus. So they're not going to wait for a fungus to come along, they're actually infecting these things more than they would be exposed to in the wild. And then the idea is then that as they go through that they keep the best ones that grow them up. Chestnuts do actually become reproductive, relatively young. And then so they're, they've been able to kind of push through generations pretty quickly. So that what they're trying to do though, is they're trying to get things that are much more sort of American chestnut, which was much more of like a nice canopy tree, I have a whole orchard of large, largely Chinese chestnuts, and they're much lighter, they're a lot more of a spreading tree, almost like a full size peach or apple. So that's not really a good forest tree sort of structure. So they're trying to both in a genetic sort of sense to kind of get closer to what the Americans were, but then also then in more of a stature sort of way. And that's, that's, that works been going on for quite a while. And they're starting to release some of their some of their plans to more natural environments to kind of see how they do and persistence and that sort of stuff.

Interesting, interesting. So that has there's some potentially positive news on that front. But for all intensive purposes, the American elem and the chestnut are cautionary tales. And what do they say about the the other trees that you're mentioning the eastern hemlock, white ash and sugar maple, how do we not get to the point where we're talking about them in the past tense?

Well, we might be a little too late already, quite honestly. And that's that's the sad part. I mean, the key is, you know, finding these pests, and then dealing with them quickly enough that we don't allow them to escape. And so with the, with the emerald ash borer, its attack, it attacks pretty much all ash species other than a few of the well, it will attack some of the Asian species, but they have natural resistance to it. That insect is so small, it spreads so easily that once that one got got established in the wild, it's pretty much swept across a large area of the native range of ash already, there's been a lot of biological control agents that have been released. And it feels to me that they are starting to get some success, because we've had emerald ash borer here for eight or more years, sort of active infestations where I am. And we have several we've got a ton of ash trees on the property, tiny ones, a few large ones, and they see trees north of our property started dying, kind of classic roadside trees started dying six or seven years ago, I'm like, okay, there goes our ashes. And our one tree has been showing symptoms for the last three or four years, but it's doesn't really seem to be progressing much. So they're releasing, basically insects that feed on the eggs of the larvae at different stages, all these other sorts of things. And if those to giant if but if those actually then build up enough populations and then can sort of keep the emerald ash borer, as you know, yet just another bark boring beetle, because we have plenty of them already, then we can have some level of control. The sad part is, you know, if you're looking north of here, almost all the ash trees are gone. And then where I grew up in Ohio, that area's just been decimated with with that, so there's there's going to be a lot of recovery that has to happen. And then, and then, of course, then you're going to replant trees, and then hope that those biological control agents move back. As the emerald ash borer comes back in again. So and there might be some individuals that are actually resistant to the emerald ash borer, people have been keeping an eye out for that I haven't heard of any people find like, remnant trees, and they get all excited, and then they go back three years later, and they're dead. So because the most resistant tree when the insects don't have anything to eat, you know, if you if it's not your preferred food, if you're really, really, really hungry, you'll, you'll eventually go after the better defended one. So but, you know, if we can react to those things very quickly and the past, as a biology that allows us to sort of mobilize quickly enough to deal with it, then then we can do that sort of thing. And the hemlock woolly adelgid is what's attacking the hemlocks. And we've released a lot of biological control agents for it and, and I haven't heard as much about how successful those are being. But again, it this, that tree in particular, is such a slow growing tree, and they're beautiful. I mean, they're bound to shade tolerant of a tree as you can get, which means they grow really, really slowly. So, you know, you might be looking at four or 500 years to get sort of real regeneration of hemlock forests. And so even, you know, a 20 year period where there were no hemlocks. And then we have to go back in and reseed and all that sort of thing, if we can get the, the the insect pests under control. That's, that's a pretty major impact long term. As far as what's attacking the maples now, that is another bark boring beetle. It's a beautiful beetle. It's a really large beetle, which makes it really easy to see. And it means it doesn't move that much. Now, when we say it doesn't move that much, it's still move, it can move a kilometer pretty easily. So that's still pretty good amount of movement. But we've had five different I think, five different invasions of that species in the US, some of those are still are either actively being removed, or still being they're under quarantine areas. And we've been able to mobilize pretty quickly on that. But the sad part for me is if we keep getting these insects being introduced, and keep having to go out and kill, you know, 100,000 trees, to keep it to keep it under control. You know, we're just, that's, you know, that's Russian Roulette at some point in time, they're going to get out and and that's, that's going to, then then we're gonna go the same route as the chestnut or the or the American out. So

Wow, wow, there's a quote in your book, the question remains with the loss of major tree species. Why hasn't there been more of an outcry? And you talked about this whole idea of plant blindness. Tell us about this.

So one of the this is something that the botanical research community talks about quite a bit is because people you know, everybody notices animals, everybody. I teach intro plant classes, I asked people, you know, honestly, do you like plants more than animals? Nobody says, Yes, I always ask, Why do you like animals more, they do stuff. Okay, that's not that exciting. But you know, we'll leave that alone. When people look outside, as long as there are plants, or, you know, if it's a forest, as long as there are trees, they seem to be okay with that, we seem to forget that a lot of the things we see pretty commonly aren't native here. And that kind of carries over into, you know, when you're looking at your forest and your forest health, if you're interested in that sort of thing. As long as you have trees, you probably think it's okay. And so, you know, we lost the American ELMS. And then other trees took over those spots. And when we lost the chestnuts, largely oaks took over those spots. And so yeah, it was bad for a while, but 3040 years, we tend to forget things that are happening relatively quickly, as it turns out, as we move on to, you know, a new war, a new disease, a new whatever. And people just kind of look out and as long as they look outside, and they see some flowers, some fruit for the birds, whatever that sort of thing. It doesn't matter if it's an invasive species, that's, you know, knocking everything else out of the forest community, or it's an actual pretty functioning forest. People just sort of deal with them. As you know, as long as the world stays green, it's good. And as long as we can kind of maintain that, then that's, that's some semblance of, of at least function the way most people would think of it so

Interesting. Interesting. Now, you mentioned in the book, that there, there have been ebbs and flows of species simply because you know, the Ice Age and climate change throughout, you know, 1000s and 1000s of years, 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of years. But the the main reason why this is such a dramatic change is literally the time window is much shorter, we're talking about 50 to 100 years, rather than 1000s of years for the species to adjust to diseases and things that have been introduced to them. The question I had is, you know, worst case scenario, will these , we're talking about the hemlock, the white ash and a sugar maple - will they just move further north to the point where they're in areas where these these beetles or other pests will die over the winter is like, is there a spot where they can be saved? Or they can they can thrive?

Maybe? I've heard you know, I've heard people talk about those sorts of things. I mean, the the one of the other issues, though, is that, you know, when we look at our biological control agents, some of those don't do that. Well, the further north you go as well. And so there are some of the biological control agents, I think, I think this is more of an issue for the hemlocks, but I can't remember I can't remember which, which insect It was now, but But certainly, you know, colder climates, the predatory insects on the on the past weren't able to survive. So yeah, I mean, it is possible for some of these things. You know, the other thing to kind of think of is we think of these things as being relatively stationary. But, you know, if if you're a hemlock woolly adelgid, and you're the Earth, the northern limit of your range, there's a really strong selective pressure in all of those hemlocks that are just a little further north, just a little, a little too, a little colder than you're used to dealing with. And those sorts of selective pressures really can drive things really pretty rapidly. I mean, if If your average hemlock is living, you know, in a canopy situation two or 300 years, your will your average Woolly Adelgid, you know, a year ish, whatever they're, you know, you've got generations after generations after generations. So the potential for for evolutionary change that will then allow those, those pests move further, northward, is just sitting right there. I mean, we, we see that where I am, when we converted, pretty much everybody went to basically herbicide resistant crops. And now we have herbicide resistant weeds, because the only weeds that survive are the ones you're able to survive after being sprayed. And so they're the only ones that pass on copies of the genes. And now you have a population of things that are you know, that now you can't kill with what you have. And so the same sorts of things that we see in agriculture happen in the wild, whether we're driving it or not. So there might be a refugee up north. I wouldn't count on it all for a really, really long time period. And you'd certainly maybe it'll buy us a little bit of time. But but yeah, that's a that's a big gamble.

Yeah, sure. Sure. Just trying to find some hope in this situation. Well, speakingof hope, like, what what can so you know, I'm reading your book, or someone's listening to this podcast, and they read your book, what can an average person do? What is there any? Are there any groups, like you were mentioning with the American Chestnut group that was trying to help the American Chestnut come back? Are there any groups that you recommend? Or what would you recommend to someone who wants to help out and change things?

Well, I think, you know, there, there's a group working with American elms, there's there multiple groups working with chestnuts, those are, those are worthy groups, to support with financial or working with them, they always need more people to do that sort of thing. You know, I think other sorts of things, the simplest thing to do is, it's also the hardest thing to do, if we can just stop bringing in new problems, we have plenty of problems already. We don't you know, every time we let these Asian Longhorn beetles, the ones that are, that are attacking maples, and then they actually are pretty generalist. So it's not just maples, but they really like maples, every time we get, let those escape, that's another chance that they're gonna get established. So, you know, thinking from a political standpoint about figuring out ways to prevent these sorts of things coming in, whether it's the sad thing is we already have regulations on wood is packing material, and it's supposed to be dry or treated or whatever. And, as it turns out, it's not always dried or treated, or whatever the heck it ends up being. And, and, and every one of these invasions that we've seen, has been close to someplace where you have an international shipping hub where crates are sitting outside. And APHIS intercepts so many things every year, in their their shipping and examination facilities, that it's crazy. I mean, they're doing as much as they can, we need to give them either more resources or whatever. And people say, Well, that, you know, you're you're against, you know, open free economy. I just don't want to pay for all these, all these other sorts of things. I'd rather pay a little more for what I'm actually using and not have the forest to be destroyed and all these other sorts of things. I mean, think about all the folks that do maple sugaring, and all that sort of stuff. I mean, if you ask them, you know, would you rather have, you know, a cheap motor part? Or would you rather have your livelihood, I'm pretty sure they're going to pick their livelihood. And regardless of how we chop this up, the issues we're generating with bringing in these forest pests are expensive, and we just need to make up our minds as a society. Do we want to pay for these things upfront preventative costs, and again, we all go to the doctors and doctors always push preventative care because it's way cheaper in the long run? Or do we want to wait until something escapes, and then we have to throw everything at it research money, all these other sorts of things to figure out how to fix it, mitigation costs, all those other sorts of things. The tricky thing with being proactive is you'd never know what problems you have, right? Because you took care of them before they even got established. And yet insurance companies are perfectly happy to pay for that sort of thing because they know long run. It's it's a it's a much better, it's a much better return on investment. So those are those are the discussions we need to have. And those are people that are concerned about these sorts of things. When these issues come up, then that's a that's a more responsible packaging, shipping, all that sort of stuff is really important for folks that have land. You know, we all know that if we quit mowing our lawn, it's going to go nasty and all these other sort of things. So we're used to the idea of land maintenance. People get pieces of woods and that sort of thing. Like oh, I don't have to do anything and You know, if you've got that really nice piece of timber then good for you. My little bit of woods that I have is not very nice at all. And it's got a lot of invasives in it and all the other sort of thing and people have to get used to the idea of of managing lands and allowing people to manage lands, people seem to have this idea that forest management is always logging and for judgment can be just keeping the invasives out, some of the trees aren't good. There's a lot of exotic trees that are out there as well can be selective firewood cutting, I do that. I take the nasty trees out there, all the trees grow better. You know, it's there's there's nothing wrong with that sort of thing. And that's just something that we need to be better at, you know, Soil Conservation Service, all that sort of thing. We've got pollinator habitats and all these other sorts of things. We've got a local forester here, and I don't think he hardly does anything, because nobody, nobody knows to go out and sort of ask for help on how do I manage things or building management plans and that sort of stuff. And that's, that's sorely sorely needed for a lot of people so.

Wow, I mean, what you say speaks to, you know, the tragedy of the commons that, that even though you know, you're a landowner, but there's also public land, and what you were talking about earlier with plant blindness, hey, if it's green, it's fine. But the reality is that there are invasive species, both plant and insect, that are causing problems. And so it's almost an out of sight, out of mind perspective, particularly for people live in the city who don't have hardly any interaction other than a park, for example, that this is this might be too far removed from their reality, but then contextualize it for the person that may not know the forest as well as you, what are the economic and ecological costs when we when we do lose a species like we have lost but the elm and the chestnut, kind of walk us through, like what actually happens?

So you know, when when we lose a tree species, there's two sort of immediate economic costs. One would be if that species is used for something in particular, So for sugar maple, is used for some, some wood instruments, that sort of thing. butcher blocks are pretty commonly made out of maple, and then of course, then maple syrup. So you lose that species, the direct economic use of that species goes away. And that's a cost. Depending on the species, you know, black walnuts are having some issues. Now, that's a really valuable timber species. But we also don't have that much of it, it's a really small, that would be a pretty small overall impact. You also are going to have then the impacts of for those, those folks that are in suburban or city sorts of areas, you have these trees dying, and they they can't just if they fall on a forest, make a noise and nobody really cares. But if so, kind of jumping towards the ash. Now, ash was one of the most commonly planted street trees across the vast majority of the US because they grow fast. And most of them are pretty tolerant to soil compaction, pollution, that sort of thing. So when ash trees get the emerald ash borer, then you they die, and you end up then having to remove these street trees. And so where I grew up in Ohio, as sort of the sort of most abundant sort of early successional tree, so you start farming, an area, eastern red cedars come in, nobody likes those. So they take those out, they've got these nice ash trees that let's find, you know, growing up, there are people that had like whole front yards that were nice little forests, and they're all ash trees. And now they have basically a bunch of stumps. That because the trees grow, they had to bring in tree companies to take out priests, they had to do all this other sort of stuff. And tree companies were basically as taking out the sort of highest priority trees, because literally everybody had trees, they needed to take down. If you're in a municipality, the city has to pay for the trees they have to pay for if you have one in your yard, you might be spending two or $3,000 to to have your tree cut down. And then of course, there's all the cooling from the shading. There's air pollution mitigation, there's there's a lot of research that talks about, like exposure to greenness, and whether it's trees or shrubs, or gardens and all that sort of thing, that that's there psychological benefits for all that sort of stuff. These are these are all sort of costs that that environmental economists can put on these sorts of things. People like to say that the emerald ash borer is going to be the single most expensive tree issue we've ever had. Okay, well, it was doing that sort of work when the chestnuts died and people depended on them for food and lumber and a whole bunch of other things. So not sure I really buy that argument. But it's certainly expensive and it's it's expensive. It's been expensive at a governmental level for all the control things they've done. It's been expensive at local levels where people are Since municipalities are having to remove the trees, and then down to the individual level where you need to replace your trees and all the stuff, so those are the economic costs for really any sort of tree loss, the ecological impacts are really difficult to know there's the immediate, you had a tree, however much of the forest canopy it was suddenly that's no longer there. So now you've got openings in the canopy, and you're gonna have then this sort of race of what plants are in the understory to try to make it up into the canopy. And so the tricky part that we have an awful lot of the Eastern US is, there's a lot of exotic shrubs that are there invasive shrubs, and the one thing they do really well in is this nice little burst of light. And so what you have, then are these shrubs that are getting in there, and then perhaps out competing the tree seedlings and that sort of stuff. And those trees that do get growing, then and get above the shrubs, then there's gonna be a whole bunch of, of woody vines that are also kind of really going through population explosions, there's, there's a nice area of all dead ash trees just north of our property here. And they're all completely covered with like Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and grapes. And so those species are going to be super, super abundant. And those species also have the ability to sort of strangle young trees and do all those sorts of things, then if you kind of go a little further down the road, the nutrients that those trees would have been pulling up, the whatever interactions they're having with their local environment, those are all going to be changed, you might end up with more soil erosion, you might end up with more or less of other sorts of nutrients going out into the waterways, things that depend on those species for food are going to start going through issues. Most of the time, we don't know who all those, those intricate interactions actually involve, until things disappear, we're really good at doing, you know, the Monday morning like, oh, that's what happened. So, once things go bad, we can kind of draw those lines in there. But even if you go out, you know, 100 or more years, you know, when we lost the chestnuts that was over again, within an individual forest probably was a 10 year sort of prospect, the whole sort of range, 50-60 years, you know, all of those trees and a particular forest would have gone relatively quickly, the oaks largely took over those spots, maybe a couple different species of oaks, they kind of came in there. Now those oaks are starting to snap, and they're starting to die. So now we've got basically a pulse of recruitment. So instead of individual trees dying, like you would expect an old growth forest and being replaced, and this nice sort of constant sort of ebb and flow of species, you've got this big pulse of trees, that all got established, at the same time, they're all going to get old and start dying at roughly the same time. And you know, it might be 1000 years before you get back anywhere close to being with the forest dynamics actually were and then again, associated with that, then how the the other the other organisms interact with those dynamics. And so it's, it's, it's almost impossible to fully know what the impacts of some of these things really, truly are. And again, we, when we know to look at things we pick up on it, but when we still are learning an awful lot about forests, and so we, we still don't necessarily know what all these long term impacts are going to be.

Yeah, and as you said, sometimes we figure it out too late, which is unfortunate. And that's why you've written the book is to try to make sure that it's not too late. Right? So if you could, you know, your books out now and you could put it in the hands of someone, you know, you haven't and your friends and your colleagues and your, your social group has it? Who is someone that you would want to read this book that potentially could make a difference? Like a pol? Could it be a politician, or

Yeah, I think politicians, my hope with writing this was to try to not just talk about individual trees and all these other individuals to kind of paint the picture of, there's a lot of things that are happening, relatively few of them are good. And, you know, this is this is something that we need to deal with. So the more politicians that read this and start thinking about these sorts of things, and then when it comes time for a fusses budget and that sort of thing, that maybe they're a little kinder with the budget or maybe thinking about, you know, putting more teeth in our import export markets. It's not I don't think we're exporting a lot of weeds, other places, or pathogens, other places, but maybe we are but you know, thinking about that sort of stuff, you know, this is this is national security at at its at its kind of heart, you know, we have our resources and we need to protect them. And and the way we're doing it doesn't seem to work all that well. We've we've come up with some great things. I mean, the research that's been done to figure out which biological control insects to release I mean, the time between mean, emerald ash borer showing up. And then the time of for the first insect was released was was like eight years or something like that. I mean, that's crazy fast. We've got biotechnology that we can now. And they're doing this some with some of the tests that you can do gene editing and sort of put in resistance genes into plant embryos and grow them up and do all these other sort of things. We have all this technology, we have the ability to do these things. Trying to limit the number of things we need to fix would be useful. And then making sure that we have the resources to go back and fix the things we weren't able to head off before they got established, is going to be really, really, it's really going to be necessary as we move forward if we're going to continue this pace of new of new things showing up so

Wow. Well, I want to thank you for writing this book. This is incredibly important information that people need to hear. And we're gonna do our best to get it in the right hands. And anyone that's listening to this, please tell your friends and your community about Scott's new book, Tree by Tree: Saving North America's Eastern Forests. It was great talking with you, Scott.

Great talking with you, Jonathan.

Take care.

Thanks.

That was Scott Meiners, author of the new book Tree by Tree: Saving North America's Eastern Forests. You can purchase Scott's new book as an affordable paperback or ebook at our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast