Mike Curran
Mike Curran
Introducing Area of Concern
Of the million extinction events playing out across this land, you’d be forgiven if you missed that of the ash tree. And yet, signs of this particular trouble are everywhere: along a boulevard, a line of trees with yellow tape wrapped around their trunks or orange Xs scrawled on their bark, spray-painted with a hurried hand; in a forest, a canopy yellowed and thinned, woodpeckers chipping off bark bit by bit, hunting for a jewel-colored beetle whose larvae feed on the tree’s connective tissue, disrupting its ability to move nutrients from root to branch.
That jewel-colored beetle—the emerald ash borer—was first found in Minnesota in 2009, with a significant presence confirmed at St. Paul’s Crosby Farm Regional Park a few years later. Endemic to eastern Asia where native ash trees have long developed natural defenses, the borer is thought to have been introduced to North America in the 1990s through the import of wood packing materials—an addition to the endless list of late capitalism’s unintended consequences. Nearly one billion ash trees are rooted in the soil of this state alone, many in floodplain forests like here at Crosby Farm. A hardy species, ash also comprises an estimated 20% of urban canopies in Minnesota, and as much as 60% in some communities. Unless injected with insecticide—a cost-prohibitive approach on a large scale—less than one percent of ash trees are expected to survive the borer’s spread, which many scientists and foresters have come to accept as an inevitability.
To counter this existential threat, the United States Department of Agriculture and local agencies coordinated a strategy of isolation resembling early responses to the spread of Covid-19. By 2020, more than a quarter of the United States’ land mass fell under a federal quarantine, with the transport of ash lumber and deciduous firewood banned in affected areas. Similar to Covid—as with most pathogens, plants, and insects deemed “invasive”—a militarized rhetoric has accompanied these restrictions; the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s “Arrest the Pest” campaign, for instance, encourages vigilantism towards an “aggressive non-native.” But, like Americans, ash borers are stubborn beings and have defied their containment. As a result, the federal quarantine was lifted in 2021, leaving each state to implement their own regulations.
I couldn’t blame you if you’ve become bored after reading this far. After all, the common language we have to speak of the ash borer is wrapped up in technicalities—in incubation periods, mortality rates, and canopy percentages. Rhetorically, there’s little difference between the loss of one million or one billion trees, just as the difference between two or three degrees of warming might seem minute. But the truth remains that each of those trees supports a bio-system composed of hundreds of worlds, and each degree of warming means the world to countless beings. This is the trouble of articulating a solid thought around either the impending loss of the ash tree or the unfolding climate catastrophe: between the sweeping scale and the recognition that the worst is still to come, we can be robbed of not only a collective future but the language to express our present.
The curatorial intention behind Area of Concern is to find means to express our shared realities of degradation that are infused with both liveliness and specificity. By inviting artists to burrow into this particular park and fix their attention on this particular tree, we believe there’s potential to introduce new ways of knowing the emerald ash borer, and thus expand perspectives on interrelated issues that the borer is tangled up in, including ecological grief and legacies of colonialism, displacement, and exploitation.
Area of Concern is a project in three parts. The first is the booklet you’re now holding, containing three texts written from the center and peripheries of the infestation. Kaya Lovestrand’s entry proposes a strategy for navigating the sense of ambiguous loss that accompanies both personal and ecological grief. On a similar note, Kathryn Savage’s intimate prose dissolves the distinction between private wounds and those stirred up by a summer storm. Su Hwang’s three-act poem then twists the violent, anti-Asian roots of “invasive species” terminology to propose a more complicated understanding of the ways humans share space and history with species we’ve tried to stamp out.
The project’s second part involves the physical structure where this booklet is intended to be read. Assembled by Tom Bierlein, it’s built from the wood of two infected ash trees that were felled at a nearby home in Apple Valley in August 2022. Functioning as both a temporary gathering space and a quiet place for reflection, it offers a site to sit with the forest as it adjusts to the loss of its leading tree. The structure’s plain, exposed heartwood mirrors the bare bark of the trees it foregrounds, evoking something like a memorial while also subtly suggesting an architecture made from the mess of our past.
Over the course of its installation, the structure will be animated by three events: April Stone—a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe who crafts baskets from ash fibers—will invite visitors to gather splint material from an ash log and try their hands at weaving; Kaya Lovestrand will perform a site-specific movement work that presents an embodied way of knowing the floodplain forest; and Hope Flanagan—a Seneca elder and the community outreach and culture teacher at Dream of Wild Health—will lead an educational walk that introduces participants to species beyond the ash tree that are found throughout the park, highlighting the ecosystem’s interconnectedness.
Equally important as this programming is the landscape of Crosby Farm itself. The Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet a half-mile southeast of the installation site; the area—known as Bdote—is the center of the world for Dakota people, whose nation’s origin story begins at this confluence. This legacy of stewardship continues on these lands, where the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change study was established with the support of more than 200 volunteers in 2020. The 20-year research project involves utilizing canopy gaps left by fallen ash trees to plant a range of trees adapted for warmer climates, providing insights for managing forests in rapidly-changing environments. We hope that, when you engage with Area of Concern, you’ll take the time to venture into the thick of this thinning forest.
That jewel-colored beetle—the emerald ash borer—was first found in Minnesota in 2009, with a significant presence confirmed at St. Paul’s Crosby Farm Regional Park a few years later. Endemic to eastern Asia where native ash trees have long developed natural defenses, the borer is thought to have been introduced to North America in the 1990s through the import of wood packing materials—an addition to the endless list of late capitalism’s unintended consequences. Nearly one billion ash trees are rooted in the soil of this state alone, many in floodplain forests like here at Crosby Farm. A hardy species, ash also comprises an estimated 20% of urban canopies in Minnesota, and as much as 60% in some communities. Unless injected with insecticide—a cost-prohibitive approach on a large scale—less than one percent of ash trees are expected to survive the borer’s spread, which many scientists and foresters have come to accept as an inevitability.
To counter this existential threat, the United States Department of Agriculture and local agencies coordinated a strategy of isolation resembling early responses to the spread of Covid-19. By 2020, more than a quarter of the United States’ land mass fell under a federal quarantine, with the transport of ash lumber and deciduous firewood banned in affected areas. Similar to Covid—as with most pathogens, plants, and insects deemed “invasive”—a militarized rhetoric has accompanied these restrictions; the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s “Arrest the Pest” campaign, for instance, encourages vigilantism towards an “aggressive non-native.” But, like Americans, ash borers are stubborn beings and have defied their containment. As a result, the federal quarantine was lifted in 2021, leaving each state to implement their own regulations.
I couldn’t blame you if you’ve become bored after reading this far. After all, the common language we have to speak of the ash borer is wrapped up in technicalities—in incubation periods, mortality rates, and canopy percentages. Rhetorically, there’s little difference between the loss of one million or one billion trees, just as the difference between two or three degrees of warming might seem minute. But the truth remains that each of those trees supports a bio-system composed of hundreds of worlds, and each degree of warming means the world to countless beings. This is the trouble of articulating a solid thought around either the impending loss of the ash tree or the unfolding climate catastrophe: between the sweeping scale and the recognition that the worst is still to come, we can be robbed of not only a collective future but the language to express our present.
The curatorial intention behind Area of Concern is to find means to express our shared realities of degradation that are infused with both liveliness and specificity. By inviting artists to burrow into this particular park and fix their attention on this particular tree, we believe there’s potential to introduce new ways of knowing the emerald ash borer, and thus expand perspectives on interrelated issues that the borer is tangled up in, including ecological grief and legacies of colonialism, displacement, and exploitation.
Area of Concern is a project in three parts. The first is the booklet you’re now holding, containing three texts written from the center and peripheries of the infestation. Kaya Lovestrand’s entry proposes a strategy for navigating the sense of ambiguous loss that accompanies both personal and ecological grief. On a similar note, Kathryn Savage’s intimate prose dissolves the distinction between private wounds and those stirred up by a summer storm. Su Hwang’s three-act poem then twists the violent, anti-Asian roots of “invasive species” terminology to propose a more complicated understanding of the ways humans share space and history with species we’ve tried to stamp out.The project’s second part involves the physical structure where this booklet is intended to be read. Assembled by Tom Bierlein, it’s built from the wood of two infected ash trees that were felled at a nearby home in Apple Valley in August 2022. Functioning as both a temporary gathering space and a quiet place for reflection, it offers a site to sit with the forest as it adjusts to the loss of its leading tree. The structure’s plain, exposed heartwood mirrors the bare bark of the trees it foregrounds, evoking something like a memorial while also subtly suggesting an architecture made from the mess of our past.
Over the course of its installation, the structure will be animated by three events: April Stone—a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe who crafts baskets from ash fibers—will invite visitors to gather splint material from an ash log and try their hands at weaving; Kaya Lovestrand will perform a site-specific movement work that presents an embodied way of knowing the floodplain forest; and Hope Flanagan—a Seneca elder and the community outreach and culture teacher at Dream of Wild Health—will lead an educational walk that introduces participants to species beyond the ash tree that are found throughout the park, highlighting the ecosystem’s interconnectedness.
Equally important as this programming is the landscape of Crosby Farm itself. The Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet a half-mile southeast of the installation site; the area—known as Bdote—is the center of the world for Dakota people, whose nation’s origin story begins at this confluence. This legacy of stewardship continues on these lands, where the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change study was established with the support of more than 200 volunteers in 2020. The 20-year research project involves utilizing canopy gaps left by fallen ash trees to plant a range of trees adapted for warmer climates, providing insights for managing forests in rapidly-changing environments. We hope that, when you engage with Area of Concern, you’ll take the time to venture into the thick of this thinning forest.