True Intent (Nate Shepherd, #2)

by Michael Stagg

I didn’t have to read much to see that Michigan never stood a chance. In the early 2000s, people wondered why the ash trees southeast of Detroit were sickening. A lot of time was spent thinking it was a disease until a guy named Dave Roberts found larvae in a tree and sent it to a series of entomologists that led from Deb McCullough to Richard Wescott to Eduard Jendek, who finally figured out that an obscure bug from across the ocean was to blame. On July 9, 2002, they identified the emerald ash borer and quarantined the wood in five Michigan counties soon after. But it was too late. The borer had already spread and there was no way to stop it. Little was known at the time about the emerald ash borer except that it was a burrowing pest that was indigenous to China. They eventually figured out that the emerald ash borers had hitched a ride to the port of Detroit in cargo ships and from there, disembarked to attack the woods in the surrounding Downriver area. In China, the ash trees had built up a resistance to the borers but the ash trees of Michigan? Well, those were fresh, defenseless meat. The speed with which the borer spread was staggering. It's estimated that they first hit Detroit in the late 1990s but no one’s sure since they weren’t discovered until 2002. By the time my Sarah got involved in fighting the borer, it was 2007 and far, far too late. They tried everything: clearcutting, outlawing transportation of wood, you name it. But by 2014, almost every ash tree in...