Along the upper reaches of the Connecticut River, Christian Marks is restoring what was destroyed. He and a team of volunteers are planting thousands of American elm trees where their ancestors, killed by disease, once stood. “There’s something romantic about it,” says Marks, a Massachusetts-based ecologist for The Nature Conservancy. “It’s a kind of nostalgia for an aesthetic that was lost from our landscape.” That landscape can be both physical and cultural.
When an icon like the elm is suddenly eliminated from a region, its significance can be measured by the size of the hole it leaves behind. Trees are woven into the fabric of American lives: They shade neighborhood streets and define cityscapes. They are the material of everyday objects—transformed into furniture, baseball bats, toys and homes. They feed the people and the animals around them, and they provide warmth and shelter. But even the greatest of cultural giants, the most well known trees, are vulnerable.
In the elm’s example, an invasive fungus killed millions of trees, radically altering city streets and forests in the eastern United States. Similarly, the American chestnut plummeted from ubiquity to near extinction across the Appalachians under the weight of disease, taking with it a vital source of food and timber.
As travel became easier for people and goods in the past 150 years, bugs and pathogens have been transplanted with disastrous effects. Invasive pests and diseases have killed billions of trees since the turn of the 20th century and cost more than $2 billion a year to remove nationwide. In response, researchers have bred trees immune to certain diseases, introduced new predators to attack insects and simply tried to slow down infestations long enough to find ways to stop them altogether.
They have their work cut out for them. There are many trees in trouble. Featured here only are some of the most recognizable, each representing different stages in the struggle against an invader.
Where ecologists once saw only losses, others like Marks now find hope. If an iconic tree like the American elm can nearly die off yet survive to make a comeback, there’s hope for other giants. It requires a bit of ingenuity and a lot of science, but the forests may just be more resilient for it.
Click here to read more.