Oregon Is Burning Trees in Order to Save Them

Ebba Patterson was driving home from work along Highway 101 in Oregon this April when something caught her eye—a flash of red along the side of the road. Peterson, a plant epidemiologist, recognized it as the foliage of sick trees and pulled over.

After bushwhacking to reach the site, Peterson was dismayed by what she saw: two trees, seemingly in the throes of a disease called sudden oak death. They had flaring brown-red canopies and blackening twigs. “I’m looking out the window, I see these dead crowns, I think: ‘Shit!” Peterson recalls.

She clipped some samples and took them back to her lab for analysis. “The second time I cursed was when I looked at those petri plates,” she remembers. The culture tested positive: It was sudden oak death.

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