American trees are dying of epidemic disease in a grim sequence. In the forests of the northeastern United States one species fails and then another, brought down by insects and bacteria that enter the country through global trade. The crisis is not a single outbreak with a beginning and an end. It is a procession.

Each new organism finds trees with no evolved defence. Mortality then runs through a species with a speed the woods cannot match. Before that loss can be absorbed, another insect or bacterium arrives, and another part of the canopy begins to go.

“The pathogens and the pests come with commerce. The epidemics stay with the trees.”

— Kings Journal

When cargo becomes a carrier

Global trade is the route of entry. Insects and bacteria reach the United States because goods cross oceans as a matter of routine. Markets treat that circulation as ordinary. The forest experiences it as invasion. A border open to commerce is, in practice, a border open to living organisms that kill trees.

These organisms do not remain at the ports. They spread into woodland and they persist. Native trees, which evolved without them, then suffer epidemics of a severity they are not equipped to survive. The result is not a scar on one species alone. It is a chain of losses that alters the forest itself.

“In the northeastern woods the losses no longer look exceptional. They look like the new condition of the forest.”

— Kings Journal

A woodland rewritten by loss

The forests of the northeastern United States sit in the path of this sequence. Mixed woodland, rich in species, is being thinned and simplified by disease. Each epidemic takes something that will not quickly return. What remains is a poorer woods, assembled from the species that have so far been spared.

  • American tree species are dying in successive epidemics rather than in a single outbreak.
  • The agents are insects and bacteria that enter the country through global trade.
  • Forests of the northeastern United States are being transformed by the accumulating losses.

The epidemics have not run their course. As long as trade continues at its present pitch, new insects and new bacteria will keep arriving. American trees will keep meeting organisms they have never known. Some of those meetings will end as pandemics that begin with commerce and finish in quieter woodland.