posted 06-27-2001 09:50 PM            

This is very depressing. The friend who wrote me is an avid gardener and
lives north of San Francisco. If anyone knows anything helpful it would
certainly be appreciated.

Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2001 10:41 PM
Subject: Our land is dying

> My country is dying. The seventeenth species of the fungus Phytophthera
is
> killing tan oaks, live oaks, black oaks, bays, madrones, huckleberries,
and
> now manzanitas. If you get up on the ridge and look down on Cascade
> Canyon, or if you get up on Mt.Tamalpais and look around the county, you
> will view a sea of grey and browning trees, dead and dying, with no
> particular pattern visible in the spread.
>
> All the madrones along Cascade Creek are dying. The infection shows first
> as black spots on the leaves, and then the tree seems to burn up, the
> leaves yellowing, spotting, wilting, then the bark turning black and the
> whole limb dying. Black skeletons, tinder, where living trees where. The
> manzanitas up on Happersberger Ridge seem to be infected, leaves turning
> brown and yellow, bark nasty black. Oaks on the canyon floor that had
been
> green are now standing grey, gaunt and bare; they drop huge canopy limbs
> on the ground, adding to the fire hazard.
> So far we have been informed that 16 species of Phytophthera were known;
> that this #17 was until now a fairly weak infection of insignificant
impact
> on European rhododendrons; that it is airborne, that it has appeared as a
> result of two wet years, which weaken oaks; and that the disease works its
> way in from the outside, and into the part of the plant that carries fluid
> downward; when it has gotten to heart, it then attacks the part of the
> plant that pumps fluid upward; by that time there is no hope.
> We have lost two huge oaks in the front yard and a hunk of a madrone by
the
> garden across the creek; oaks are dying everywhere; at the rate this
> disease is spreading here, by October there will be no madrones left along
> the creek and life will be inside a tinder box waiting to burn.
> Our country is dying. We don't know what to do. I wonder, did anything
> like this ever come before? How, pray tell, did a no-count infection on
> European rhododendrons come to the air of Marin County? Was it in a
> shipment of nursery plants? I am dubious. This is a damned lot of air to
> be so impacted by a mess of nursery stock. What is going on here?
> And more to the point, what are we to do? The trees are dying, and that
> means the whole place will burn up, in a terrible holocaust. It is not
> just us humans who will be thrown out.
> I need - we need - the trees and fish and birds and deer need an elder, a
> wise woman or man to help us with information, with prayer. . .we are in
> trouble. Our land is dying.

posted 06-29-2001 09:44 AM            

RTW- I liked your idea about going into the "bubble" business! It seems like one of the main ideas in a lot of older science fiction, I think we might need to get right on it!