To the editor:

Today is Earth Day. While the world focuses on the flu outbreak, Pennsylvania’s trees are dying by the tens of thousands from diseases caused by human activity. The evidence is all around us, in residential communities, state parks and protected forest preserves.

Some blame the devastation on exotic insect pests, but the problem goes much deeper than that. Trees growing in healthy, intact forest communities with functional ecosystems have a natural immunity against invasive pests and disease. Be it gypsy moths, lanternflies, woolly adelgid or the latest pest-of-the-month, invasive insects are the symptom, not the cause, of an unhealthy environment.

The relentless push for new and wider roads, energy infrastructure, cell towers, and timber harvests is fragmenting the forest ecosystems that protect trees from disease.

Geoengineering, weather modification, electromagnetic and light pollution are disrupting the seasonal and diurnal rhythms that regulate breeding cycles, resulting in death by attrition for many forest species. The mass extermination of insects by chemical and biological spraying is wiping out beneficial species and microbial life at the very foundation of forest ecosystems, leaving trees vulnerable to death and disease.

Start paying attention to what is happening to the natural world around us.

Juliet Perrin

Albrightsville