The Paradox of Pestilence: Ecological Hope in a Landscape of Tree Death - Colby Galliher

An essay written and read by Colby Galliher.Colby Galliher is a writer, focusing mainly on conservation, wildlife, and environmental policy, in the form of book chapters, scholarly reports, and articles for local, regional, and national publications. He is the Editorial Communications Specialist at Northeast Wilderness Trust, and you can read more about him on his website.Read the full piece and discover additional content in the Winter 2025 Issue of From the Ground Up.Editors’ Note: Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities envisions a healthy New England landscape where long-term conservation supports biodiversity and healthy human communities, even in the face of climate change, habitat loss, and invasive pests and pathogens. Colby Galliher focuses on a few especially worrisome forest pests and muses about how our attitudes toward them might lead us to hope, rather than despair. What can we learn from the drastic response to chestnut blight in the early twentieth century? Can we do things differently? Are there lingering survivors of beech, ash, hemlock and elm that can lead us back to healthy populations of these species? Read on. Or, if you prefer, listen on.