"Real, visible and consequential ecological catastrophes are playing out all around us."
"Wander into the woods in most places in the eastern United States and you’re likely to come across a towering trunk with sandy-colored, diamond-shaped ridges rising to bare forking branches and little holes peppering the bark, signaling where small, green beetles have crawled out and flown away after doing their dirty work. This decaying monument is — or rather, was — an ash tree. Its kind will not be back in your lifetime, perhaps ever.
If you live in the other half of the country, just wait a few years. The emerald ash borer is coming for your trees, too.
Humans are setting in motion a mass extinction of life, only the sixth in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. A recent United Nations report put this in stark numerical terms: As many as 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of annihilation. Such an astronomical figure, while intended to impress, can actually make the threat hard to relate to. Too often we view the global biodiversity crisis as remote or abstract, involving the disappearance of exotic, charismatic megafauna such as tigers and elephants, or obscure species most of us don’t recognize to begin with.
The crisis isn’t remote, or abstract. The ash tree demonstrates that real, visible and consequential ecological catastrophes are playing out all around us.
But in 2017, in an announcement that received virtually no coverage in the United States, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which keeps track of threatened species, declared five American ash tree species — white ash, green ash, blue ash, black ash and pumpkin ash — critically endangered, the last step before total extinction. The rarer Carolina ash also was designated endangered."
Gabriel Popkin reports for the Washington Post May 23, 2019.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/23/want-understand-biodiv...
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