When you’re uncertain what you’re looking at, the catastrophic footprint of the beetle called the Agrilus planipennis Fairmaireis doesn’t really resemble a crisis. Perhaps it’s a fungus? Some genetic anomaly in the patterning and color of the ash tree’s bark?—maybe a blight at worst… Something like a pale vegetal rash.
Then you might notice how many of these trees are lying dead and dry among so many other thriving species. When you look closer, you notice half of the ash trees you’re passing have been cut off at the stump, perhaps still lying where they fell.
When it hits you and you realize they are dying of some sort of disease innate to the ash, it’s impossible to avoid pivoting immediately to the dire numbers literally surrounding you.
In the lowland forests below the bluffs of the driftless, I have walked with a sinking feeling. A forest of blighted corpses. Not a single ash in sight without some obvious symptom of the infection. In a woods below the bluffs I stood surrounded by a swift extinction. I could touch it. See it scattered everywhere. It was marked in blue spraypaint. But as horrifying as it was to behold at that moment I know the strange liminal nature of extinction now—because it was the thought of this forest ten years in the future that made me feel hopeless, that turned the pit in my guts rancid.
The beetle comes and does its thing. Then it leaves and the forest is devastated. Every last ash dead or proactively cut down. And then the cascade of death actually begins. Any dependent species will fade quickly. In the cedar—ash muskegs north of the Mississippi’s headwaters, the loss of the ash trees would mean a rapid shift in the understory. Shifts in animal and bird species. In the same region, lake shores would be rapidly and dramatically altered, and the growing bald eagle population would lose critical nesting grounds. From Minnesota’s wild rice habitats to the mountains of Appalachia where mixed forest habitats would be equally ravaged, the total loss of ecological balance cannot be comprehended nor computed in the present.
The emerald ash borer extinction event is a nightmare playing out in silent eminations and formlessness, liminal agonies, networks of loss in which a single species of beetle—ordinary in its original habitat—can no longer be comprehended as such.
This is not an isolated event in North America. Extinctions are occurring for reasons appallingly similar in the python-infested Everglades. While technocratic liberalism and the moralizing laptop class fed everyone else to the climate gods, their children ordered exotic pets on a corporation called Amazon, became bored with them, and stupidly and fatefully released them into already vulnerable habitats. Very real individuals are very much responsible for North America’s countless imploding ecologies, and they aren’t evil industrials cracking whips inside factories. The simple stupid greed of a nice suburban family, as it turns out, can be just as catastrophic as a thousand logging crews.
Taiga Quarto 