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Last month, Ed Macie, a retired forester, came across a striking scene while hiking in Bent Creek Experimental Forest: a handful of “really, really odd-looking, teepee-type tents” rising above the landscape. A nearby sign explained that the site was part of research by U.S. Forest Service scientists to combat the woolly adelgid, the tiny insect that has ravaged hemlock trees across Southern Appalachia.
To Macie, who worked for the Forest Service as its southern region urban forester for more than 30 years, those tents embodied something he’d been thinking about of late: Someone who knows what to look for doesn’t have to look too hard to find something connected to the Forest Service’s Southern Research Station, which for more than a century has made Asheville the locus of some of the country’s most significant ecological research…