After more than a decade of nurturing, it had come time to infect this 28-acre grove of American elms with a disease that would almost certainly kill them. Dressed in hunter-green muck boots, grey pants, and a brown Nature Conservancy T-shirt, Gus Goodwin knelt down to give the first tree its shot. Using a bamboo stake marked at 12 inches as a gauge, he measured that far off the ground, held his drill at a slight downward angle, and pulled the trigger.
“We need to create a wound,” Goodwin, the conservancy’s director of science and technology advancement in Vermont, said as the tool began to whir. He bore an inch-deep hole into the tree, the bit sending shavings spiraling out behind it. Putting the drill aside, he took a blue pipette from his tool box and injected 2 teaspoons of a clear solution containing roughly 100,000 spores of the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease.
“That’s it,” he said. “Pretty simple.”
One by ... Read more
