THOUSANDS of red spruce trees will be chopped down in a park in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, starting next week in a bid to prevent a Eurasian beetle from destroying
much of North America’s boreal forest.
The brown spruce longhorn beetle, Tetropium fuscum, is thought to
have arrived from Europe in cheap packing wood, now banned, via Halifax’s
container terminal, which is right next to the park. “It’s a potential
ecological catastrophe,” says Bill Freedman, an ecologist at Dalhousie
University in Halifax and a member of the task force charged with deciding what
to do about the infestation. “It’s much bigger…
