The destruction of the chestnut

As I drive around town and notice the whitefly destroying ficus benjamina, I find myself thinking of the possibility of other trees being wiped out. Now, the ficus benjamina shouldn't be considered endangered. It IS an exotic and some might see it's downfall a positive thing.

The ficus benjamina doesn't do well in hurricanes. Its shallow root structure is invasive. The costs of maintaining it are exponentially more than natives. All in all, it's not a good choice. Yet plantsfromparadise.com and plantstromparadise.blogspot.com sold more ficus than anything else. The market wants what it wants. Cheap and fast growing.

Consider this article:

Chestnut blight was caused by a fungus eventually determined to be Cryphonectria parasitica. It was probably imported to the United States on the Chinese or Japanese species of the tree, which both show resistance to it. The blight destroyed billions of American chestnut trees in the first half of the 20th century. The loss of the chestnut, in terms of the sheer number of trees killed, the size of its range before the blight, and the variety of habitats affected by its demise, is unrivaled in the history of human-wrought ecological disasters, even though epidemics such as Dutch elm disease have received more attention.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/blighted-hopes

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Another effect of globalization...

Consider native alternatives like cocoplum to ficus. Green buttonwood is another alternative.