The emerald ash borer is a persistently spreading pest that’s threatening many of North America’s ash trees. It turns out that in the northeastern United States and Canada, it’s also threatening the work of native basket weavers, who rely on thin strips of ash for their intricate work, according to Native Peoples magazine (July-August 2009)

Healthy ash trees, especially the favored black ash, are becoming increasingly difficult to find, and regulations meant to combat the borer “are severely hampering the weavers,” who produce some of the world’s finest baskets, the magazine writes.

Ash basket weaver Frank Meuse of the Bear River First Nation in Nova Scotia sees something more than a hungry bug at work here.

“The introduction of alien species was devastating to the First Peoples of this continent,” he tells the magazine. “Today we are still struggling to teach our children about the relationship they need to have with the land. We can only hope our elders are speaking the truth when they say the trees will make themselves invisible until we learn to respect them.”

Source: Native Peoples (article not available online)

Image of basket weaver Frank Meuse by John DeMings, courtesy of Digby Courier.

Trees of all sizes loom large in the world of Linda Underhill, the author of the new book The Way of the Woods: Journeys Through American Forests (Oregon State University). Underhill’s writing is clear, crisp literary journalism, moving with an understated grace as she covers specific types of forests, from rainforests to urban woodlands to the threatened hemlocks of Appalachia. Her writing on old-growth forests displays her deft touch:

Compared to tree plantations or woodlands managed for growing a certain kind of timber, the old-growth forest is an incoherent prayer, devout but disorganized, oblivious to any demands but its own growth and decay. This sacred chaos holds the key to natural processes scientists are eager to study, but there are few places left where people have not already altered their rhythms or otherwise destroyed the evidence of creation at work. The valuable timber in old-growth forests, where trees grow hundreds of feet tall and many feet around, has proved irresistible to those who know the price such wood can bring. But an old-growth forest also offers something less easy to price in the marketplace. It invites us to witness the miracle of creation and change the way we look at our own short lives. The tall trees inspire a reverence equal to any of our own great cathedrals, and they belong only to themselves. Chopping down old-growth trees and hauling them away seems akin to scattering the stones of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and selling them off as souvenirs.

I read the book last week while camping for a few days in the Midwest: first under a giant oak in the Mississippi bottomlands, then beneath the canopy of a maple forest, and finally under a small grove of black walnuts. My copy is a bit dog-eared, having been dripped on by rain-soaked maples and showered with pollen-filled oak catkins. But somehow I suspect the author wouldn't mind.

Source: The Way of the Woods

It’s easy to play good news-bad news when considering the environmental effects of the global economic crisis. Rhett Butler at Mongabay.com, one of our favorite rainforest conservation websites, gave us a bit of a lift in a recent commentary when he pointed out that “plunging commodity prices may offer a reprieve for the world’s beleaguered tropical forests.” Butler is a realist, and he readily cites the many environmental downsides of the current crisis, but he also notes that the price dive “may do what conservationists have largely failed to achieve in recent years: slow deforestation.”

It’s not just wood he’s talking about: He notes that in Southeast Asia, a collapse in the prices of palm oil and rubber “is causing a shake-out in the plantation sector, which has become one of the leading drivers of deforestation in the region.”

The Indonesian government, which has gotten bad press for the country’s rapid deforestation, rolled out a variety of tree-planting initiatives as it played host to the 190-nation climate summit held in Bali in early December. You know, predictable stuff: a nationwide effort to plant 79 million trees in one day, complete with a photo op for the president. A similar effort aimed specifically at women, with a photo op for the first lady. A district-wide marriage fee of five trees per couple.

This idea—implemented in the Sragen region of Java—makes a certain amount of sense, what with married people more likely to reproduce and increase their environmental impact. The 25-tree fee for divorced couples, on the other hand, is a bit of a head-scratcher.

(Thanks, Gristmill.)

—Steve Thorngate