What does it mean to protect nature in 2023?

We will need to go far beyond cordoning off land and water

Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for signing up for The Nature Beat! I had no idea if anyone would be interested in such a newsletter, so it’s very gratifying to see how many people have signed up in just the first few days. (Special thanks to those who have purchased a paid subscription; I’ll do my best to make it worth your while.) Please enjoy this inaugural post, and feel free to share any suggestions you have for improving this newsletter.

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“Protected forest” along Mattawoman Creek in Maryland. Photo by Leslie Brice

I suspect every writer has certain obsessions — topics that they’re drawn to again and again, for no apparent reason. One of my obsessions is things that kill trees.

I’m thinking a lot about tree killers this week because I’ve been spending time at the USDA Interagency Forum on Invasive Species. (Yep, it’s a mouthful.) It’s what you might call a niche meeting, but it’s my niche, full of talks on emerald ash borer, hemlock woolly adelgid and so on, and lots of photos of dead and dying trees. I even gave a talk this year! Better yet, the forum is always held in Annapolis, just down the road for me, which means something important to any freelancer: affordability!

OK, now the serious stuff. The insects and diseases discussed here, almost all introduced from some other part of the world, have devastated some of our most important trees, and they’ve persisted despite decades of scientists’ best efforts. Emerald ash borer alone has mowed down ash trees across half the continent and has its sights set on the rest, with enormous and still largely unknown knock-on impacts on insect, spider and bird biodiversity. A study that came out a few years ago by one of the scientists who presented today found that tree-killing insects and diseases in the continental U.S. release an amount of carbon dioxide comparable to wildfires.

Our tree species will almost certainly recover from whatever ails them — most, after all, have been around for tens of millions of years, through ice ages and all kinds of stressors, and you don’t achieve that kind of longevity without some serious resilience. But these recoveries are unlikely to abide by time lines relevant to us. For example, the American chestnut has not recovered at all, more than a century after chestnut blight ravaged its population, meaning three generations of Americans have known a world almost without chestnuts. There’s a major effort, which I’ve written about, to bring the tree back using breeding and biotechnology, but even if it’s wildly successful, it will be decades more before the chestnut plays a meaningful role in our forests again. I’ll be lucky to see even the beginning of its restoration. (At the moment, the biotech tree is slogging its way through a years-long regulatory process; for the latest update, click here.)

The chestnut is an interesting example, because I get the sense that when the blight ripped through the Appalachians in the early 1900s, killing up to one in four trees, the public was bereft. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why people today aren’t more fired up that we’re losing so much of our most important trees. Part of this surely has to do with the fact that since the time of chestnut blight, we’ve become extremely disconnected from nature. Most people can’t recognize even common trees, so how would they know when one is disappearing?

We’ve also become used to thinking about our environment as degraded, so when we see a bunch of dead trees, it may just confirm our existing biases, rather than stand out as something to be alarmed about.

I believe the media have also played a role. In recent years — roughly the time I’ve been working in the field — climate change has more or less gobbled up environmental journalism. Topics like forests and ecosystems receive far less coverage. Even Substack offered me only “science” and “climate and environment” as possible categories for this newsletter, certainly not something so mundane as “nature.” (As you might already suspect, this will likely be a theme of my writing for this newsletter.)

Even when the media do cover an invasive species story, they rarely frame it as a biodiversity story. Scientists, by contrast, have identified invasive species as one of the gravest threats to biodiversity — posing far greater danger, for the moment at least, than climate change. To understand just how transformative our global species swapping has been, consider that the continents were, for the most part, biologically separated for millions of years before Columbus et al crossed the Atlantic in 1492. Now there are U.S. counties where the most common understory plant is from another continent. We can export invasive species, too: A single snail from the U.S. Southeast has wiped out dozens of species on islands in the Pacific.

The bottom line: In just over 500 years, we’ve upended an evolutionary state of affairs millions of years in the making. The impacts of this upheaval will be playing out far after all of us are gone.

Meanwhile, efforts to protect nature usually focus on protecting pieces of land or water in the form of national parks and monuments, or if they’re privately held, conservation easements — sometimes called the “fortress conservation” paradigm. Today’s most prominent conservation effort is without question the so-called “30 by 30” initiative, proposed just a few years ago by a handful of scientists and now embraced by both the Biden administration and the signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which includes nearly every country other than the U.S.

In my opinion, 30 by 30, while well-meaning, reflects yesterday’s thinking. In the age of global trade and transocean species movement, just cordoning off more land will not protect the species on that land from today’s threats. I’ve spent the past three years documenting wetland forests in Maryland that have been hammered by emerald ash borer. Despite being theoretically protected, some of these areas have been stripped of virtually all their large trees and don’t even look like forests anymore.

Marsh replacing forest at Mattawoman Creek

Also heavily impacted is Shenandoah National Park, where one in 20 trees is an ash. The park is losing five percent of its trees, despite enjoying one of the world’s most robust land-protection designations. For a forested preserve that’s a crucial natural respite for millions of Virginians and DC-area residents, this is devastating.

(Climate change, of course, also doesn’t respect protected area boundaries. Unfortunately, one of the most hyped solutions for helping nature adapt to climate change — wildlife corridors — may sometimes also help invasive species spread.)

I don’t want to give the impression that no one has tried to shut the door on damaging tree pests. The U.S. government, working with others around the world, has made it much harder to bring live trees into the country, which used to be one of the top vectors for new pests, including chestnut blight and hemlock woolly adelgid. The government has also ratcheted up inspections of wood packaging and penalties for companies found to be shipping live wood-boring insects. But those measures are being counteracted by enormous increases in the movement of goods and emerging, hard-to-regulate pathways such as e-commerce and passenger air travel.

We humans seem to have an insatiable appetite for possessing other forms of life, including exotic ones, and the Internet and cheap air travel have made it far easier to see what’s out there and get our hands on it. If this makes you uneasy, it should.

I don’t see the effort to reduce species movement getting much of a boost from the energy driving 30 by 30 or other large-scale conservation initiatives. For example, the budgets of the divisions of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS — another mouthful), the branch of USDA responsible for protecting plants, including trees, from introduced pests, have not increased at all in the last few years. APHIS actually abandoned the effort to stop the ash borer from spreading two years ago; unsurprisingly, the ash borer soon popped up on the West Coast, an enormous jump that puts at least seven additional species of ash trees endemic to the western U.S. at greater risk.

To truly protect nature, we need a new, holistic conservation paradigm. It may need to include things that seem far removed from our typical conception of “nature”: things like tighter inspection of wood products and packaging coming into our ports, early-warning detection systems for new potential threats, better regulation of online plant and animal sales (it turns out you can even order known invasive species and have them sent to you with a few clicks) and a better understanding of the connection between our consumer behavior and the health of our forests and ecosystems. It probably also needs to include things I haven’t thought of. I hope I and my fellow journalists can play a more helpful role than we have so far in expanding this conversation.