OH LORDY! Remember the airplanes spraying everyone's neighborhoods with diazinon during the fruit fly scare? I hope they don't start that again! Diazinon is still around, it's just not approved for home use. So many people got sick and so many beneficial insects and animals died from all that spraying. I'd rather not have palm trees than go through that again.

Great. Another one. Why is there never like 'buckthorn blight' or 'kudzu borer'? Anyway, it kinda seems like this is a natural progression that has been sped up by close contact with the Eurasian super continent. All of these pathogens come over from Asia and just whack their American cousins that have not co-evolved with the pathogens and have no resistance. So while American trees grew large and majestic, they were not developing resistance to pathogens. So now, with native species retreating, we have introduced scraggly, small, but resistant Asian species as replacements (siberian elm, chinese chestnut, ?? ash, etc).

Interestingly, there is some evidence that this has happened in the distant past ( http://www.nativetreesociety.org/tsuga/hemlock_gene_pool.htm) and that tree populations recover on their own over long time periods... not that we really want to wait 1000 years. In recent years, for example, several American Elm cultivars have been found to be remarkably resistant to Dutch Elm Disease, although for elm it is a one-two punch with Elm Yellows, so who knows? But the probability exists that, without intervention, American Elm would have recovered on its own. Chestnut too, was pushed back from the coast by phytophthora, but was safe in the cooler hills of the Appalachians - at least until blight showed up. It might just be too much too fast for the native tree populations.

In the late 70's Lethal Yellowing killed almost every coconut tree in S. Fla. It changed the landscape for many years. This new disease attachs 16 palm varieties. It would be hard to imagine our sub-tropical paradise without palm trees.

What is most discouraging to me is that sabal palms - our state tree - are susceptible.

Last year I started noticing some sabal palms near us that just were looking awful. They are completely dead now. I contacted the local county extension office about them. They said it was the bronzing disease. Once they get infected the only thing to do is to destroy them. You can hire a tree professional to inoculate them but it's expensive and has to be done on an ongoing basis, who can afford that? Anyway once the disease has completely taken over, it looks awful.

Have you communicated with your local ag extension about this?