The Silent Killers

The state’s ill-conceived effort to expunge the irrepressible emerald ash borer has wasted precious Michigan tax dollars, cost businesses and homeowners millions of dollars in damages, and led to the destruction of billions of North American ash trees.

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In the closing minutes of Clint Eastwood’s hit movie Gran Torino, the film’s credits scroll across the screen over a striking panoramic view — Lake Shore Drive going east through Grosse Pointe Farms.

While the picturesque view of Lake St. Clair’s shoreline was undoubtedly Eastwood’s focus, the cameras also showed a stand of graceful, healthy ash trees lining the boulevard, a sight that, in years to come, might exist only on film, as the popular landscape tree faces extinction in North America. In fact, thanks to a misguided government rescue plan, the devastation of billions of stately ash trees has already cost businesses and residents millions of dollars in damages, with more on the way.

Several years before it was discovered in 2002, the tiny — yet prolific — green beetle dubbed “the emerald ash borer” began relentlessly attacking and killing ash trees, first in Canton Township, then across western Wayne County, and now in every county in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Officials believe that the lethal pest hitchhiked into the country, undetected, on packing crates from China. Compounding the problem is southeastern Michigan’s status as a major player in world trade. Over the past seven years, even as federal and state officials allocated more than $50 million of taxpayer money trying to stop it, the ash borer has been like a plague, burrowing its way across Michigan and leaving scores of ravaged ash trees in its wake.

What the government got in return for the $50 million hasn’t been encouraging. In Michigan alone, more than 30 million trees have perished, and the borer is showing signs of expanding into the Upper Peninsula. Overall, the emerald ash borer has killed an estimated 50 billion ash trees in at least nine other Great Lakes and Midwestern states, as well as in the Canadian province of Ontario. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates this has all cost the lumber industry some $60 billion.

Because of its leafy qualities and its hardy resistance to disease, ash was the tree of choice in recent decades for municipalities and landscapers across the country who were eager to replace another devastated tree species — the Dutch elm. In the middle of the 20th century, millions of elm trees were wiped out by a fungal disease spread by the dreaded elm-bark beetle. Scientists have yet to develop an effective cure for Dutch elm disease, but they have created hybrid trees that are resistant to it, although they don’t match the majesty of the original.

While the ash was initially a popular replacement for the Dutch elm, it, too, has succumbed to an outside predator. In fact, the emerald ash borer has proved to be such a virulent killer that businesses, homeowners, and state and local governments could face another $7 billion in costs in the next 25 years removing and replacing ash trees, according to federal estimates. According to the USDA, ash trees represent a $100 million to $140 million annual market for nurseries nationwide.

Even the Great Lakes haven’t proved an effective barrier to the borer. Last year, it was found in Wisconsin and around Chicago. Ash tree attacks have also been reported in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, and West Virginia. The borer’s invasion into Windsor has already spread east to Ottawa and Montreal, near the U.S. border, where it threatens New York and Vermont. The prognosis for ash trees is grave enough to prompt the USDA to sponsor a program in East Lansing where seeds of mature stands are being collected and stored for the future.

 The ash tree devastation has contributed to price hikes for consumer items such as tools, hunting equipment, and electric-guitar bodies, not to mention millions of replacement trees in office parks, residential neighborhoods, college campuses, and urban squares. Even Major League Baseball is being affected. Louisville Slugger, the official supplier of bats to our national pastime, is closely monitoring the borer. In the 1950s, the company locked up hundreds of acres of ash-populated woodlands in Pennsylvania. As it stands, around 80 percent of the 1.6 million bats used by major-league players each year are ash — or, more specifically, old white ash.

Some Pennsylvania white-ash vendors reportedly cut down their trees early, to stockpile the wood for future bat-making.

Authorities say that campers who take firewood from home, RV owners who move infested firewood, and nurseries who exported ash stock to other states (it’s now prohibited by law) are among the main culprits who inadvertently contributed to the ash borer’s devastation.

Each fall, the dreaded beetles begin a one-year cycle from the time eggs are deposited on the bark of trees. Their eggs burrow into the bark and develop into tiny, tunnel-carving larvae that effectively cut off the flow of water and nutrients from the tree trunks. Adult borers emerge in June, and before dying in three weeks, the female can lay nearly 100 eggs.

In recent years, local arborists have had varying success saving individual ash trees, such as those on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe Farms, by injecting them with an insecticide that kills the larvae. Meanwhile, the development of a spray to control the ash borer has been a priority for scientists at Michigan State University.

Some experts, however, believe that by the time the borer was identified as the culprit by MSU plant pathologist Dr. David L. Roberts in 2002, the bug had such a head start that it may have been too late to save the ash population.

As trees began to die in alarming numbers at the start of the decade, scientists, including some at MSU, erro-neously blamed the cause on a disease called ash yellows. Others said it was the work of a common native insect, the two-line chestnut borer. By the time Roberts settled that debate, the emerald ash borer was established in more than half a dozen counties in southeast Michigan.

With no history of the insect to guide them, local response by the Michigan Department of Agriculture has been an effort of trial and, mostly, error.Before turning to biological warfare, state officials launched a three-year program in 2003 to snuff out the emerald ash borer. Records show that before abandoning the program, the Department of Agriculture spent $9.3 million.

Some critics believe that the program not only failed, but that it allowed the emerald ash borer a passage out of southeast Michigan.

Under the “cut and chip” program, as it was called, paid for by the USDA but run by the state Department of Agriculture, the public, local governments, and home and business owners were urged to cut down healthy and infected ash trees, and dump the lumber in four official collection yards around the region. The wood would then be reduced to 1-inch chips and trucked to an electric power plant in Flint for disposal in the facility’s wood-burning incinerator.

MSU scientists and the agriculture department officials were convinced that grinding ash wood into 1-inch chips would kill the emerald ash borer. At the time, 13 counties around metro Detroit were placed under a quarantine that prohibited moving ash wood out of those areas. But before the first tree was cut down, the program stumbled.

First, officials at the state Department of Management and Budget, who handled the contracting for the work, inexplicably awarded the initial multimillion-dollar, wood-grinding contract to a Philadelphia-based national tree-trimming company. At the time, the company did not own a single grinder and had no experience in the business.

In doing so, officials passed over Environmental Wood Solutions Inc. in Lake Orion, a top-flight grinding company in the Midwest. In fact, the company’s experts had been consulting with state officials as they were formulating the wood-grinding operation.

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