As a determined nurseryman , I ’ve been accused of consider everything through the setting of plants . Still , in trying to understand the looming coronavirus pandemic , I ’m find it utilitarian to think about epidemic I have already experienced , and these have all occur in the garden and my woodlot . I think of “ Dutch ” Elm Disease ( which seems to have actually grow in Asia ) and which struck down the allées of American elms that shaded the streets of my childhood . And of Beech Bark Disease , which has killed all the bombastic American beech in our woods in western Massachusetts . If we include encroaching insects under the class of epidemics , then we should consider the woolly adelgid that killed most of the hemlocks in the easterly United States and the emerald ash borer , which is doing the same for our aboriginal ash .
Indeed from the perspective of selected flora , the last hundred has been far worse than the fourteenth – the Black Death may have obliterate an estimated 30 - 60 % of Europe ’s human population , but the Chestnut Blight killed back to the roots about all of the American chestnut tree , a keystone mintage throughout the eastern timberland .
Pre - blight , American chestnut were a cornerstone of the rural economy in the eastern United States
Pre-blight, American chestnuts were a cornerstone of the rural economy in the eastern United States
One item of similarity between human pandemics and flora epidemics is the accelerating pace of dispersal . Global air travel has turn on the coronavirus to pass around worldwide in a couple of calendar month , whereas the Black Death , which was highly contagious at a metre when its vectors , rats and fleas , were omnipresent , took more than a X to move from Asia to Europe via sailing ship and foot travel .
A similar moral force has speeded up the spread head of industrial plant disease . Some years ago now , I interviewed personnel at an APHIS ( Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service ) plant life inspection station in Linden , New Jersey . The staff there was resolute , clearly committed to their caper of keeping flora plague and disease from invading our area . But they were also visibly timeworn . They look exhausted , in fact , and in an unguarded moment one of them fink to me that the inspections they performed at New York ’s John F. Kennedy Airport , the master entry point for foreign plants in the station ’s area , were like dip a spoonful into a river as it rush by . Not a reassuring simile .
Plants andHomo sapiensare , of course , vastly different organisms . Still , our experience with the former bring home the bacon food for thought for sentiment .
Pre-blight, American chestnuts were a cornerstone of the rural economy in the eastern United States
