The largest mass extinction event in North America since the Ice Age is happening all around us.
The Ash Extinction Project has two goals:
Raise awareness of the event and comprehensively document its unfolding in one place.
Preserve a community of forest ash for the future.
Support the survival of an ash tree in the Preserve:
$60 pays for three years of protection from the ash borer
Eight billion ash trees will have had the life sucked out of them in the next several years by the emerald ash borer, a stowaway from China that emerged in Michigan in 2002 with a winning lottery ticket. Ash is one of the half-dozen foundational tree species of our woodlands, the shade we escape to in summer, the linchpin of our region’s ecology. Perhaps this catastrophe would be more meaningful to us if it were unfolding in someplace more exotic.
We are asking you to sponsor the survival of an individual ash tree.
While it’s true that ash trees are not exactly lovable in a mammalian sense, they can be awesome. The Old Norse people believed that a very large ash tree, Yggdrasil, was the fulcrum of the cosmos. Ash are also very beautiful and important to people of diverse cultures in myriad ways, but they are passing from our environment with hardly a murmur. Here, we think, is an opportunity to make a small, but direct, gesture against the unraveling tide.
Work has already begun.
The Ash Extinction Project began last spring with a census of every ash tree on the main tract of Franklin Chthonics, about 260 acres. We flagged and geolocated nearly 3000 white ash trees with a stem 3" in diameter or larger; the largest were two “Yggdrasils” with trunks over 40" in width. This dataset allows us to consider the fate of each tree, and helped us identify our best and healthiest section of ash forest, which has now been designated “The Ash Preserve.” As the trees started to leaf out in June, it was painfully evident for the first time that the borer had indeed taken residence at Franklin Chthonics and was killing trees. As the census proceeded into the summer, we injected about one hundred ash trees in several locations, with sixty concentrated in one stand, the main site of the Ash Preserve.
Want to lend a hand?
Moving forward, the AEP will take on a range of initiatives to acheive its goals of publicizing this extinction event and maintaining our community of woodland ash, including:
Creating material for media distribution describing the Project’s program
Researching in greater depth the behavior of EAB and its advance across the continent
Following the experiences of treatment in other locations
Experimenting with ash coppicing as a strategy to evade the borer
Exploring ways to utilize thousands of doomed ash trees before they crumble
Developing the Ash Preserve as a kind of environmental awareness park
Designing memorial art that might catalyze an emotional response to this holocaust, possibly using bonfires as a medium
Establishing collaborations with craftspeople to celebrate the unique cultural importance of ash for traditional basketry, tool-making, furniture
We would welcome help with these initiatives, but our immediate focus is to build support for sustaining the Ash Preserve for a long haul. This experiment is almost a kind of time travel, transporting the ash to a future place where, possibly, some way to restore it might emerge. As the Earth enters its sixth mass extinction event of the past half a billion years, this one completely our doing, we ask you to join this singular journey towards life.