To the editor:
Third invasive: In 2007, a random DNR examination of nursery plants in South Bend uncovered another dangerous new forest invasive, Sudden Oak death. This strange organism exhibits the characteristics of a fungus, a bacteria and an animal, and it kills red and black oaks. It was first discovered in California in 2006 in the John Muir Forest. Scientists now know that the disease has more than 100 alternative hosts, many of them commercially-sold nursery plants.
The year after the first discovery of an infected plant in a nursery in South Bend in 2007, Indiana Forestry brokered a voluntary sales ban on California nursery stock with Indiana retail nursery sales outlets. However, during that year, the disease had already spread to 34 other states. Oopsie!
Forestry and Entomology have continued to only randomly spot-check retail nursery sales. Because of misplaced priorities, they never empowered their employees or significantly increased their invasive efforts over the recent years. They concentrated their inspection efforts on retail sales rather than inspecting wholesale nursery plant shipments coming to Indiana. By the time that they noticed the disease’s presence again in Indiana in 2019, retail sales of infected plants had already happened at at least 90 Rural King and Walmart stores all over Indiana from ONE semi-truck shipment.
This news is a ticking time bomb for our forests. Forestry has not been able to trace the destination of those retail sales, especially the cash sales. I cannot find any major effort on the part of Forestry to deal with this serious problem publicly. We wouldn’t have known about it at all if it hadn’t been publicized in newspaper articles generated by alert environmental reporters from the Indy Star and the Bloomington Herald-Times.
Why is the Forestry director not instituting an effective public education program for the Hoosier public? Once again, the publicly established presence and potential of this ominous invasive in Indiana would highlight the incompetence in current Forestry planning and vision, and make it harder for them to do their logging business.
It is obvious to me that it is almost too late now to salvage our working public forests. Because of quick invasives movement by rapid transportation, the current severely disturbed nature of most of our state forests, and the continuing incompetence of DNR Forestry leaders, there is not much hope for the future. By us fighting only a rear guard action, our working forests are eventually doomed. (They call it “salvage logging.”) Our only hope is to immediately take all of our older-growth forests out of production. Older-growth forests, buffered by an intact food web, suffer much less damage from invasives than a severely disturbed working forest.
We must set aside our few remaining old-growth forests as a valuable repository of biological diversity, with the intent to use them to re-inoculate our working state forests with diversity after they become completely degraded. All we are doing by preserving these few older-growth forests is buying a little more time for state foresters to come to their senses and become proactive, rather than reactive. It’s our only hope.
Does anyone out there care?
From the heart of Yellowwood,
Charlie Cole, Brown County
