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Boston Globe

Nature's warning sign of democracy's fragility

Advertisement Leafless and forlorn, it stands there like a reminder of the fragility of everything that surrounds us: A small green beetle comes and lays its eggs in the bark, a few seasons pass, and what seemed invulnerable, the very definition of life and strength, now awaits the chain saw. The author's three ash trees. Amanda S. Merullo I did some research and read about a new treatment that could save some of the trees — or at least prolong their lives — if administered before too much damage has been done. Yesterday a young arborist from a local company came for an inspection and gave us the good news that our three ash trees might be saved by the injection of a special pesticide, noxious only to the EAB. I love those trees — they have a special meaning for me, as if they're emblems of the history we've made in this place — and so, without any hesitation, we signed up for the program. Advertisement My wife, Amanda, and I spent two months in southern Italy last winter, way down in the heel of the boot. The land there is so different from where we live in Western Massachusetts, flat as a tabletop and a stranger to snow and ice. There are said to be 60 million olive trees in that part of Italy — some of them, according to locals, more than 500 years old. But 20 years ago some of those gorgeous trees started to become infected with the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa , carried by insects with cute names like spittlebug and meadow froghopper. So far, 20 million olive trees have died. When you ride the train south from the beautiful city of Lecce, all you see out the window is a landscape of devastation, row after row of dead olive trees, thousands of them, their thick, beautifully twisted old trunks holding up nothing but a canopy of withered gray branches. The price of Italian olive oil more My late mother, who had a philosophical side, liked to compare trees to the human body. Some of them thrive and live long lives, she said, and some of them die young. Some are healthy and some diseased, but eventually they all go back into the soil, food for new life. Advertisement Lately, I've been thinking of trees more in terms of whole societies, of nations, of democracies. Healthy for a long stretch of time, seemingly invulnerable, they're attacked by an invasive beetle or bacterium that feeds on them from the inside. The damage is invisible at first, but it doesn't take long for the leaves to wither, the trunks to weaken, the once-vibrant branches to morph into skeletal arms. Next week the experts are coming to inject our three beautiful ash trees with a substance that's supposed to prove fatal to most or all of the emerald borers. I hope we didn't wait too long to begin the treatment.