too stupid for words

[low_delta]

Someone I know on Facebook posted:

"So many dead trees!!! We need to fix this!!!

I’m talking about trees in general. We have some dying pine trees.
Driving around I’m just noticing so many dead trees.
Is it chemtrails?
What causes the ash bore disease anyway? We get disease when we are compromised..."

Comments

[ranunculus]

I can't speak to the ash borer disease, but the bark beetle that has killed millions of trees had human help.
First there was a policy of suppressing all fire. Fire is natures way of clearing out the old and letting the new grow up. When done as nature intended it leaves a mosaic pattern of old and new growth. Suppressing all fire is a really, really bad idea.
Then there were the lumber companies who left huge swaths of second growth trees uncut and "Banked". As these forests aged they produced thousands of square miles of trees (mostly lodgepole pine) that are all about the same age and are all at the end of their natural lifespan and thus perfect targets for beetles. The beetles have attacked and killed 25 to 75 percent of trees forming a perfect opportunity for fire to come in an clean up.
I don't know what is happening with the ash borer but I'd bet it is similar.

[low_delta]

The emerald ash borer is a bug that came from Asia. It bores under the bark, killing trees quickly. Once it moves into your area, your ash trees will be dead within about three years. The only thing that will save them is injecting them with insecticide every couple of years. If you do this, the tree must be otherwise healthy, or it still might die.

It's a big deal here because ash trees are very common yard and street trees, though they are found in forests. The ones in forests don't get cut down, so there are standing dead trees in many natural areas.

[low_delta]

And while I wouldn't expect someone from the west coast to have heard of this, it's been very big news around here for several years, so someone asking about the cause of "the ash bore disease" is pretty ignorant, IMO.

Here's the pretty little bugger...