USA: In the 1930’s Tamarisk intentions backfired big time
In the 1930s, when the federal government was experimenting with an
array of projects to address bad times, tree-planting came into vogue
as a tool to fight soil erosion here in the West and on the Great
Plains. The shelterbelt program, as it was called, took trees from
many parts of the world — including a hardy species from the Asian
steppe, called tamarisk or salt cedar — and planted them by the
millions. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl finally, mercifully,
ended. But the tamarisk stuck around, and spread along riverbanks from
Texas to Kansas and Colorado to California, choking out native trees
like willow and cottonwood that had been there for millenniums.
“They’re relentless; they don’t stop for anything,” said Dan Bean, the
director of biology pest control at the Colorado Department of
Agriculture. Now, tamarisk fighters like Mr. Bean are hoping that
history may be turning again, that the same sort of tough times that
help spread the tamarisk may be the catalyst for a new round of
cleanup and conservation work to get rid of the trees. The model and
the basis of their hopes is the San Miguel River, a modest stream — by
Western standards, anyway — that burbles along for about 90 miles from
the 13,000-foot peaks around the resort town of Telluride, draining a
nearly uninhabited area roughly the size of Rhode Island. It flows
into the Dolores River, a tributary of the Colorado. In the tamarisk
fight, the San Miguel is the test river, the first river drainage
basin in the West to be all but completely scrubbed of tamarisk. A
combination of sweat equity from volunteer groups, corporate
philanthropy — Marathon Oil sent teams of workers to help — and the
knitting together of government programs, created a model for money,
logistics and labor. Work on the project was completed this month. A
little beetle from Kazakhstan plays a role in this story, too. The
beetles, which evolved alongside tamarisk in Asia and eat nothing but
the tree’s leaves, were studied for years in the 1990s — primarily to
make sure they would not munch down something other than tamarisk —
and then released in test batches in Colorado, Utah and elsewhere
beginning in 2001.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27tamarisk.html?_r=2
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