What Happened to the Power?

Vegetation is even more sensitive to pollution than humans, particularly because it causes them to lose natural immunity to pests, disease, fungus and drought, which are then typically blamed for forest decline, bark beetles and wild fires.

It’s invisible, but it’s there just as are oxygen, nitrogen and CO2. Except it’s toxic.

Annual agricultural yield and quality have declined, and longer-lived trees that absorb it season after season have passed a tipping point and are now dying in droves.

The damage done to vegetation by ozone has been well understood for decades and demonstrated in countless field surveys and controlled fumigation experiments.

If you actually look at the fallen trees, almost all are rotten inside or have injured leaves or needles, which are visible symptoms of ozone exposure.

Nevertheless, it is critical for people to understand, since we are also dependent on trees for oxygen and as a CO2 sink, as well as various other products and services, like fruit, nuts and lumber.

These scenes are from a beautiful wood, with beech, oaks, maples and tulip poplars.

That log on the right has been there for quite a while.

The decline of forests from pollution commenced long ago, but the important point is that in the past few years the trend has accelerated dynamically.

Signs like this festering wound are now to be found everywhere, on trees of all ages.

A new article in the Guardian nicely ties various isolated reports of tree decline together as a trend in UK Forests Under Unprecedented Threat From Disease (although it goes on to include fungus and insects).  As usual the onslaught is never attributed to ozone but instead the usual suspects wit a slightly nuanced perspective -  what actually, upon reflection, is rhaather xenophobically perfect: ”foreign interlopers”.   If you want a thorough and detailed explanation as to how fallacious and superficial this flawed analysis is, check this prior post, Hysteresis and the Vile Conspiracy to Blame the Bugs.

The discovery of the ash dieback fungus in East Anglia last week is just the latest invader to pose a serious threat to UK trees, but the government ecologists say that more than 3 million larch trees as well as thousands of mature oaks and chestnuts have been felled in the past three years to prevent similar fatal plant diseases from spreading out of control.

“We are under an unprecedented level of threat from a range of exotic pests and diseases, a lot associated with the international trade in live plants,” said the Forestry Commission.

“There are protections in place but the EU plant health regime is no longer fit for purpose. Too many pests and diseases are still getting through.”

More than 100,000 ash trees have already been felled to prevent the spread of ash dieback, or Chalara fraxinea, since the disease was identified in March.

But very many more larch trees have had to be cut down in the west country, Wales and Scotland this year to prevent a plant disease called Phytophthora ramorum spreading. 

Known as “sudden oak death” in the US, it so far has not infected British oaks, but since its discovery in the wild in 2009 it has been found extensively in larch populations in the south-west, in Wales and in south-west Scotland, resulting in a large number of the trees being felled over a wide area.

“We now have six to eight organisms in the British Isles that are a real concern. In the 1960s and 70s it was Dutch elm disease, which killed 30 million trees; in the 1990s it was a new Phytophthora which devastated alders along riverbanks.

But in the last 10 years we have had as many new diseases as we had in the previous 40 or 50 years,” said Joan Webber, principal pathologist at Forest Research, the Forestry Commission’s research arm.

Plant experts are particularly concerned about the oak processionary moth, which arrived in west London in 2009 and which has now developed two major populations. 

“It has the potential to spread anywhere there are oak trees. It is extending its range and has become established in the Netherlands and Belgium, possibly as a result of climate change and warmer winters,” says the Forestry Commission.

Plant pathogens are on the rise globally and Britain is particularly susceptible because of its increasingly warm, wet winters and because it is a centre of world trade.

Easy access to plants from around the world has encouraged gardeners to buy millions of exotic plants, many of which can arrive diseased.

Some plants can only enter Britain with “passports”, but the majority of diseases are only identifiable in laboratories.

The diseases and pests can arrive by several routes, say ecologists. 

In March, more than 250 live larvae of the Asian longhorn beetle which can kill oak and willows were found in trees in Kent. 

More than 2,000 trees had to be felled and burned. It was thought to have entered in the wooden packaging for Chinese stone.

Dothistroma needle blight, which affects a range of conifer species, threatens commercial forests by significantly reducing timber yields in plantation forests.

It has been found in all of the commission’s forest districts in England and Scotland, and three out of four forest districts in Wales.

Tony Kirkham, head of the arboretum at Kew Gardens, which has 14,000 trees and has seen many attacked in the past few years, said some of the most serious threats came from the oak processionary moth.

These were first found breeding in 2005 along a stretch of the A40 and in Kew and East Sheen, west London.

The caterpillars can cause serious defoliation of oak trees, and weaken the trees to the point that they are prone to other diseases.

I honestly don’t understand why foresters are so fixated on invasive insects, disease and fungus when ozone is well known to render vegetation defenseless against biotic attacks whether foreign or native – and agronomists working for governments are busily trying (unsuccessfully) to breed “tolerant” genetic strains of annual agricultural crops.  The power companies frenetically prune greater and greater easements, the city of New York makes quiet financial settlements for deaths and injuries from falling branches in parks, everyone is warned about extended power loss even when it’s just not particularly windy.

I thought at least these leaves look pretty but then I realized the tree is covered in seeds that never matured enough to fall off, those spinning helicopters with their sticky insides that you could attach to your nose.

Many conifers came down.

You could play hide and seek around one – or climb up and be invisible inside.  Now they are all transparent like this one – if they’re not completely bare.

 It looks like the trunk was almost hollow.

 The tree in the foreground has a large crack going up the trunk.

 And the branches from the tree that fell on the house are damaged inside.

Hearing that trees are good because they absorb pollution is a familiar adage – less familiar is the question of what happens to trees.  It’s similar to smoking tobacco – and we are seeing the results.

Other than the crane on the building on a skyscraper in New York (and the wind is much stronger that high up), I’ve heard of no structural wind damage at ground level.

I’ve seen no torn traffic signs or lights, or any other sort of sign, no broken windows or lost roof shingles.  At Wit’s End, all the odd assortment of gardening equipment left out was intact and undisturbed.

The only objects damaged by the wind that I can find are trees or the things trees fell on.

Leonardo da Vinci did a study demonstrating how trees are resilient in the wind, recently proven mathematically as cited in this post from last January.

As I got closer to Bramblefields having navigated past many live wires, I went by this nursery.

Most of the leaves have fallen early – others like this one haven’t even changed color.  It’s a landscape that is unfamiliar, and menacing.

 The brown needles indicate that this pine tree was on the verge of death anyway.

In fact the entire yard had remnants of several trees that had already necessitated removal, like this very large stump.

 Here is the view from first daughter’s kitchen.  Every time I glance that way it gives me a start.

Last night her husband was in the hospital until midnight, waiting in a crowd for attention.

A chainsaw had grabbed his sleeve and swallowed it, leaving him with a gash requiring 17 stitches.

From the inside though it’s clear it was not going to live out its natural lifespan of 300 or 400 years.

The next time we get hit by a big storm, even more trees will come down, and we will likely have freezing temperatures and snow to contend with too.  And that will be much, much worse.

2012-11-01 11:02:14

Source: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2012/11/what-happened-to-power.html