Diseases Chip Away at ‘Mona Lisa of Forests’

The comparison is shocking, perhaps, but a small but determined group of conservationists finds it apt.

It’s like AIDS, they say: Appalachia’s most visible treasure, its forests, is fighting once-harmless diseases that may suddenly have turned lethal.

“Trees are dying,” said Orie Loucks, a professor and ecosystems expert at Miami University of Ohio. “They simply cannot resist disease anymore. The comparison to AIDS is certainly there.”

The conservationists fear for the part of the 100 million-year-old “Mixed Mesophytic” forest that rolls across the highest northeast-to-southwest ridges from Pennsylvania to Alabama.

“It’s the Mona Lisa of forests and we’re losing it,” said John Flynn, a volunteer for the Lucy Braun Assn., a new forestry group based in West Virginia.

Experts agree that the resilient forest is also the continent’s most diverse, with about 80 species of trees and plants. Yet in the last decade, disease has chipped away at 20 species on higher elevations.

Members of the Lucy Braun Assn. consider the phenomenon an immune-system breakdown that devastates plants in much the same way as AIDS does in humans.

In the hills and hollows of southern West Virginia, conservationists report that atrophied branches and trunks snapped like kindling. They say roots are rotting under some trees, consumed by fungus on others.

Hickory is nearly gone; butternut walnut and white walnut aren’t far behind, according to Flynn, a free-lance writer.

But forestry is a discipline of nuances, not numbers, and others in the field dismiss talk of imminent doom as premature and unscientific.

“I don’t dispute the fact that we have trees dying here and there. I do dispute that it’s from any particular cause. There’s no data to support that,” said Bill Gillespie, director of the West Virginia Division of Forestry.

“I haven’t seen any broad pattern that indicates we’re in peril,” he said.

Roger Sherman, chairman of the West Virginia division of the Society of American Foresters, said he has yet to see damage in areas other than a small part of West Virginia and that U.S. Forest Service surveys show many parts of the forest to be thriving.

“Let’s not assume that the sky’s falling,” said Sherman, who also works for Westvaco, a West Virginia paper manufacturer. “All we’re saying is that to jump to conclusions, if that’s what’s happening, might be counterproductive. Somebody who doesn’t have any stake in the outcome needs to take a look.”

Joe Aliff, the Lucy Braun Assn.’s West Virginia regional coordinator, said he knows of no independent study planned for the area.

The late Lucy Braun, known as “the mother of the forest,” first studied and catalogued the area in 1916, theorizing that it was the ancestor of all other North American woodlands.

Flynn remembers playing there as a boy and downing handfuls of plump, 2-inch mulberries. Now, he said, the red mulberry trees that produced the sweet fruit are fading fast.

“It’s just bizarre,” he said. “They’re being attacked by native diseases and insects.”

University of Wisconsin botany professor Hugh H. Iltis blames “a cascade of problems” on rough treatment by humans.

“We need to view this forest as ancient, full of unknown things,” Iltis said. “We need to study it. And most of all, we need to appreciate it.”

The forest courses through West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, central Tennessee and eastern Kentucky, and slivers of it reach into Pennsylvania and Alabama.

Societies settling and developing in Appalachia built their own “woods culture” and relied on the forest for everything from logs to game.

“Cultural traditions just can’t be altogether separated from natural ecology,” said Alan Jabbour, director of the American Folk Life Center at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington.

“None of us can understand what will happen if some of the major trees within this ecosystem are harmed,” Jabbour said. “It will have profound effects on the culture.”

Loucks, the Ohio professor, said a combination of acid rain, increased nitrogen and a decaying ozone layer may alter the way a plant eats and also weaken its immune system, though not at the molecular level at which AIDS devastates humans.

Although evidence points to immune-system problems, Loucks acknowledges that nothing is certain.

“These are diseases that have been around all the time, but until recently they haven’t killed trees,” he said. “So the question is, why are these diseases suddenly so aggressive?”

Attention that long has been focused on the world’s tropical forests and the woods of the Pacific Northwest must now shift so that the Appalachian forest can be treated before more damage is done, Loucks said.

“This forest is extremely significant to the people who live in those hollows,” he said. “They know the forest has changed. And they’re worried about what’s going to happen.”