Emerald ash borer’s home is the ash tree. The gem-like beetle, viridescent as a flourishing ash’s crown, summers in its leaves. Shimmering protective forewings clasp over an abdomen crimson as sun straining through smoke. Inside, eggs may wait to be laid in bark furrows so larvae can emerge and bore through to feed on soft, living sapwood. An overabundance of ash borers can sever the tree’s flow of nutrients and water.
Then the ashes falter. Branches go bare. Bark sloughs off. Skeletal trees haunt the streets. Rows of stumps dot roadsides.
Noticed and named in the U.S. only when they became a problem, emerald ash borer carries the blame. The mug shot shows short antennae, big eyes we can’t read, brilliant jewel-green sparkles. They’re devious and insidious. They’re invaders from other countries. These are the kinds of things we say.
The story goes that larvae-laced ash trees in Northeastern Asia were felled to make lumber and planed into shipping pallets. Imported here with Walkmans, floppy disks, or Air Jordans, the beetles exited what had been a tree to find a new continent with millions of ash trees and none of their usual predators.
But we could start the story earlier, before the beetle’s inadvertent arrival, when lumber companies introduced North American ash trees to northern Chinese plantations. The ash borer’s population surged afterward in its home range, causing for the first time major damage to ash trees across the region. Ecological disequilibrium there wrought by commerce may have increased the risk of disequilibrium here.
Or we could start the story nearer: Americans swapped in ash after ash to replace elms dying of Dutch elm disease, because we still didn’t understand that resilience comes from diversity. And before that, settlers planted elms and more elms to line their streets, practicing sameness as they colonized the land.
Factors outside the bodies of the beetles have led us to circumstances ripe for the devastation of ash trees. To pin the destruction solely on the insect—a displaced animal brought over accidentally with the commodities we desired—elides the whole: a world we shape with shipped imports and exports, chosen homogeneity and the resulting vulnerability, our climate gone haywire, drought-stricken trees and a breakneck pace of change. The problem, like most problems, is manifold. It’s hard to take a mug shot of all this.
This glinting creature, smaller than a penny, reliant on the ash, can’t desire decimation any more than we do, even as its rapid spread leads to astonishing loss—for the ash tree and for the web of life the tree holds.
Under ash bark, larvae leave tracks that twist and loop across the trunk. Serpentine feeding galleries they’re called, a phrase that recalls both the S shape of a snake on the move and something sinister. My friend’s child searches for those telltale lines etched into ash and calls the engravings secret writing. If we look beneath the first layer, we can read in the wood a fable about belonging.
—
Illustrated by Lara Schaberg
