It's got people scared.

It's a bug that's killed between 50 and 100 million ash trees in the U.S., with up to 40 million trees affected in Michigan alone.

It hasn't made it to Maine yet, but when the emerald ash borer does arrive, it will have a devastating effect on Maine's forests, and one of the oldest art forms in America.

(woman) It's part of the tradition, that all the families on the reservation make baskets, and it's our tradition to use brown ash.

(narrator) Support for this MPBN produced program is provided by a National Science Foundation award to Maine EPSCoR at the University of Maine.

Maine Sustainability Solutions Initiative is a statewide research project based at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center at the University of Maine.

[drums, bass, & piano play in bright rhythm] ♪ ♪ [violins play softly] (narrator) John Neptune is following in the wake of his Wabanaki ancestors honoring a centuries-old tradition.

He's looking for a tree, a very special tree, a symbol of his Native American heritage, the brown ash, or black ash as it's also known, and to those who weave its fibers, Wikpiyik, the basket tree.

[flute, drums, & orchestra play softly] (John Neptune) Oh yeah, that's perfect.

Yeah, that's a nice one there.

Before we cut a tree down, traditionally we always like to give an offering of tobacco or something like that to give thanks for the tree, because this is a gift for us.

So we're going to do that; I'm going to offer a little bit of tobacco here, to give thanks for that.

Fancy medicine pouch-- I had another one but it's on my hunting pants so I got to use the old plastic Ziploc!

[loud buzzing] (narrator) John is Penobscot.

A hundred miles to the northeast Passamaquoddy basketmaker Jeremy Frey is honoring the same centuries old tradition.

I weave black ash baskets because that's what I learned.

There's thousands of years of people trying it out; it's almost like the tree grew to be a basket.

(narrator) Richard Silliboy is a Micmac basketmaker from even farther north.

(Richard Silliboy) The making of a basket is very enjoyable time.

Once you get the wood prepared down for that.

It is such a blessing to be able to share this with other natives.

(narrator) For the Wabanaki, the coalition of Northeastern tribes collectively known as People of the Dawn, making baskets isn't just a craft.

It's an expression of their spirituality.

Ash, especially brown ash, is a special tree to the Wabanaki tribes, and even some of the creation stories one of them talks about Gluskabi, who was a teacher sent by the creator, and how he created humans by shooting an arrow into the ash tree, into the basket tree, and then from the tree came the people singing and dancing.

So it really has a deep spiritual significance to us.

It's not a tree that we can ever replace.

(narrator) Nor is it a tradition that can ever be replaced.

(Jennifer Neptune) It's one of the oldest artistry traditions in the state.

We have been here as people since the glaciers retreated, 12,000 years or so.

(narrator) The biggest threat to those thousands of years of tradition is the potential invasion of a small invasive beetle that kills ash trees, the emerald ash borer.

(Molly Neptune) I'm hoping emerald ash borer will not come to Maine, but I've heard it's been seen near Maine.

It's so sad.

It really is sad.

(narrator) Introduced into North America on shipping pallets from China in the 1990s, the emerald ash borer, or EAB, was first reported killing ash trees around the Detroit, Michigan and neighboring Windsor, Ontario areas in 2002.

Since then, the borer has been documented in 15 states, which infestations throughout lower Michigan, Ohio, northern Indiana, the Chicago area, Maryland, and recently as close as New York and parts of southern Quebec.

(Colleen Teerling) That's what the adult looks like.

The larva is a little worm anywhere from maybe an inch long to a couple of inches long, and it tunnels underneath the bark of the tree.

The adult will lay her eggs in the bark, on the surface of the bark, and then the larva is the one that does all the damage.

It will tunnel down underneath the bark.

And you can see here a tunnel, and it basically just girdles a tree from the inside.

It eats the whole cambium layer and the tree can't bring up any nutrients or water at all, and the tree dies.

(narrator) That kind of damage kills ash trees and renders the wood unusable for basketmaking, a tradition common to tribal groups throughout northern New England, eastern Canada, Michigan, and as far west as Minnesota.

(Darren Ranco) Basketmaking is a tradition reflecting so many aspects of culture.

There's obviously the deep historical ways of thinking about it, the creation stories, that sort of thing.

(narrator) But more than tradition is at stake.

Darren Ranco is looking at the bigger picture.

Ranco is a UMaine anthropology professor and chair of the school's Native American Studies program.

Through the Sustainability Solutions Initiative, or SSI, he heads a team of scientists, Native basketmakers, and other partners tackling this new threat to Maine's basket trees.

Their goal: helping to sustain livelihoods and vital life ways.

For us, working on this project to try to prevent the emerald ash borer from coming to Maine and impacting brown ash trees, is something we've been working on and talking about the last 3 or 4 years where it allows us to use our skills as researchers to protect an important resource for our community.

(narrator) They join more than 100 researchers at Maine colleges and universities, who through SSI are embracing a new way of combining their expertise in environmental, social and economic issues to study Maine's changing landscape and how to sustain it for future generations.

These researchers are doing sustainability science, which aims to promote economic and community well-being while protecting the planet.

Key to this work are SSI partner organizations like the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, who were among the first to sound the emerald ash borer alert here in Maine.

[singing in their native language] ♪ ♪ (narrator) For the basketmakers it's about preserving ancient traditions, and the emerald ash borer could mark the end of those traditions.

Maine basketmakers come together at festivals, like this one in Bar Harbor, to celebrate Native traditions and customs, to offer baskets for sale, and demonstrate their craft to the public.

It's a tradition that Maine's Native basketmakers have maintained here on Mt.

Desert Island since the 1840s and at this festival for nearly 20 years.

This celebration here today at the College of the Atlantic brings together Wabanaki artists from all tribes here: Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot, and people get a chance to come and experience our culture and particularly the basketmakers who, our group, The Maine Native Basketmakers Alliance has worked really hard to keep the traditions alive of ash and sweet grass and are very concerned about the emerald ash borer and our ability to carry forward this historic tradition that has been handed down through all of our families.

For me to learn the traditions and culture, I don't know any other way.

That's the way, since I was a little kid; my first memories as a child is drumming and ash pounding.

I had ash pounders all around me when I was younger.

The language, all that stuff, is something that is just a part of who I am; it's a part of who traditional people are.

(narrator) Darren Ranco wants his research to serve Maine's Native basketmakers.

His reasons are both professional and personal.

I'm Penobscot; I care about natural resources and the environment.

All my research projects have been about things that impact our communities, our health and well-being, and I don't see myself being a researcher unless I could have found my way to making it matter in that sense.

So that It's important culturally or socially to me, it impacts positively people I really care about, traditions I care about; to me that's what it's about for me as a researcher.

(narrator) John Daigle is also Penobscot and professor and social scientist in the UMaine School of Forest Resources.

His contributions to the SSI team are methods for understanding and evaluating people's uses of natural resources.

It's been a long-term interest that Darren and I shared, but it really goes back pretty deep with just my upbringing, growing up in the Old Town area.

My grandparents were basketmakers and I helped make baskets with them.

The back rooms would be just full of these brown ash baskets that they would sell.

(narrator) With their shared tribal affiliation and academic backgrounds, Daigle and Ranco met with Native basketmakers to discuss their concerns.

(Darren Ranco) It was really about could we come up with some sort of cross-cultural assessment tool in forestry that would use indigenous knowledge and be respectful of indigenous knowledge but also serve the interests of mostly tribal foresters who could protect the resource.

(narrator) Number one on the list of tribal concerns, the emerald ash borer and the potential threat to Maine's basket trees, the brown ash.

When you look at the tree, it is very unique biologically.

It's found in this wet habitat where many times other trees can't grow.

And then also it has these wood properties that then the basket tree harvesters and weavers find so ideal for their baskets.

Now, this is prime time-- That is perfect.

That's exactly what they want.

See how it's white?

They don't have to do anything to it.

This is ready to go right now.

(narrator) Darren Ranco's SSI team follows the established SSI protocol of bringing together researchers and partners who pool their knowledge and expertise to help solve sustainability problems.

In order to address how to protect the ash tree we need people who have policy backgrounds, say in anthropology like myself, but also in economics because that's a real driver of how policy is made in forestry.

But also we need someone who knows the forest very well and how to map it how to understand where the resources are.

(Bill Livingston) That is our main objective; we want to study the tree and be able to show on a map where are the critical habitats where you're most likely to find basket-quality trees.

We randomly go through the state, randomly select townships and then we go there and look for the ash trees.

What we do next is to measure all the environmental variables we can find there.

What are the other trees that are present; how close is it to the stream; how much water; is it a swamp or not?

Today, with the computer mapping that's available, on the computer we can map it out in different colors.

Basketry harvesters say swamp ash is no good, that there's rarely any good trees there, but we find the small streams and seepages are where we most likely can find the trees and can overlay where we find the hardwoods, where we find the small streams and seepages, and that will then start to pinpoint specific locations where we can find these basket quality trees.

(narrator) According to a recent survey by the Maine Department of Forestry, only 2% of Maine's forests are ash, with brown ash making up only about 1/3rd of the 3 ash species found in Maine.

(Dave Struble) This is a fairly typical situation for a Maine hardwood stand.

You look at it and you don't think it's an ash forest; there's maple and others, but you look and there's an ash tree here, there's an ash tree there, there's one over there, one there.

There's some maples scattered in, various sizes.

This is fairly typical of how we see ash here in the state, scattered in amongst the hardwood forest.

(narrator) White ash is commonly used for wood products, like canoe paddles or as in furniture, while green ash is often found shading main streets.

I think the largest impact is going to be on communities with the loss of residential and street trees.

Ash is usually within the top 3 trees we plant along streets, and if we were to see significant mortality in those trees the removal and replacement costs would be very expensive, $300, $400 a tree, so you could easily see small communities overwhelmed.

(narrator) Since the range of the emerald ash borer is limited if left on its own, and human activity is the biggest cause of its spread, Ranco's team joined others testifying in support of a ban on imported firewood, but instituting a ban doesn't always change human behavior.

(Dave Struble) So, what's the big deal about moving firewood?

Sometimes we move things we don't want, like emerald ash borer.

You're dealing with changing really mom and pop behavior.

The closest analogy would be the situation with seat belts, so when you get in the car you don't put in the wood, just like you do snap your seat belt.

For many people lugging firewood is not yet seen that way.

It's still kind of like jaywalking, perfectly acceptable little piece of social misbehavior.

[laughs] We have to change that.

We're in the process of developing a survey that will get to all of the campground users that come to Maine in the summertime, and hopefully to be able to understand if they've received any messages regarding the emerald ash borer, or even other invasive species, just so we can understand that they know that the transportation of firewood is not acceptable into the state of Maine and that we want to make sure they buy their wood where they are camping.

(Darren Ranco) Nothing we've thrown at it yet has really slowed it down all that much.

Our best bet, in the policy context, is the firewood ban.

The reason why it's spread so quickly from Michigan out here to the east is very clearly because of people moving it unwittingly through things like firewood.

(narrator) Before they can control it, they have to detect it.

With no guarantees that an invasion can be prevented, it's important to develop systems for detecting the EAB if it does arrive in Maine.

A key step is making people aware of the potential threat.

Colleen Teerling is an entomologist with the State Forest Service, partnering with SSI.

(Colleen Teerling) If you see this insect, I'd like you to stick it in the freezer, and there's a phone number on there and you can phone that number and see if you caught an emerald ash borer.

(child) So it's not in Maine?

(Colleen) Not in Maine yet.

We have these costumes for the emerald ash borer and the Asian longhorn beetle, which are the 2 invasive insects that we're most concerned about here in Maine.

We dress up as these insects and just talk to the kids and give them a little bit of information about it and it's a great way of breaking the ice and giving them a little bit of information about invasives that's less preachy and teachy and more fun.

(narrator) In addition to raising awareness, agencies and researchers have developed state-of-the-art systems to detect the emerald ash borer.

One method uses pheromone traps.

(Colleen Teerling) They're big kite-shaped 3-dimensional traps, quite big, purple, and they've got sticky stuff on the outside of them, and we use a little scent lure as well, so the insects are attracted to both the scent and to the color purple, and if there is an emerald ash borer fairly nearby, the idea is they will fly to that and stick to it, and at the end of the summer we'll take it down and look to see if there are any emerald ash borers there.

(narrator) And so far, so good; no emerald ash borers have shown up in the pheromone traps here in Maine.

Another way of attracting and trapping the insects is girdling ash trees.

The trap tree idea is quite a bit different.

Instead, there what we're doing is asking landowners to go out and girdle small trees, and what that does is stress the tree, and the ash borers are attracted to stressed trees.

Then what we're planning to do is have the landowners that are participating in the program cut those trees down, bring in sections, and we're going to with the Maine Forest Service go through and inspect sections of the tree to see if there's any evidence of the ash borer.

(John Daigle) One thing that I've been impressed with so far is just the receptivity of our various stakeholders: the Maine Forest Service, the university community, other nonprofit groups coming to our meetings and respecting the input of native folks in terms of the knowledge that they have, and I think that's been very positive and motivating to the whole group, where everybody's respecting the knowledge that they have and they can contribute to the problem.

(narrator) That exchange of knowledge is what these researchers refer to as knowledge-to-action.

Knowledge-to-action is as much about listening to people and where they're at and what they're concerned about as anything.

I think it's very fitting in Maine that we're actually mutual learners here.

It is really an investment in the place of Maine and the people of Maine that is reflected in our approach to research, that we're saying we have some knowledge and expertise but everyone does as well, and how do we together address a problem and make that solution.

To me, the action part is engaging in a solution.

(narrator) The SSI team is creating the first partnership in the nation to bring together universities, tribes, and the state and federal governments to develop an emergency response plan well before an invasive insect like the EAB arrives.

Emergency response planning is really the key, and that's the idea that what you want to do is have in place a plan that's going to put together all the different resources and actors that are going to have to respond to an infestation.

We want Maine to be one of those states that has a response plan at the state level, and hopefully at various other levels, the tribal level, maybe the municipal level, before emerald ash borer actually gets here.

(Rob Lillieholm) I think really what it boils down to is, we want to slow this down.

It's moved so quickly that it's overwhelmed a lot of other states before ours.

We want to slow it down and give really, nature time to figure out how to deal with it.

(narrator) According to surveys from the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, the emerald ash borer has killed over 25 million ash trees in southeastern Michigan alone.

Hearing about the devastation in Michigan, SSI sent a group of Maine's Indian basketmakers to see the situation firsthand.

(Darren Ranco) Building upon the relationship that the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance already had with Native basketmakers in Michigan, as our team we funded a trip for 4 of our basketmakers from Maine to actually go to Michigan, so we saw different stages of different stands of ash trees, where some of them are just starting to get infected, some of them have been infected for a while, and some of them have been completely destroyed.

It's going to be sad, the day we find something like this in Maine when we're out looking for ash and we know that the devastation has come in.

Hopefully it'll be some time, and hopefully we'll find a way to control the EAB before it does get there.

(narrator) One of the SSI team recommendations for preserving brown ash is collecting and saving seeds for future generations.

My name is Tami Connolly, I am the emerald ash borer program coordinator for Penobscot Nation.

While I'm out looking at ash trees I also look for brown ash, also known as black ash trees.

The reason I focus on black ash is because it's culturally significant to Native people, and to most foresters or anyone else it's considered a weed species.

If we do get hit with the emerald ash borer and it wipes out the entire ash species here, we need to be able to regenerate.

I see a little seed right there, so I try to position it so I don't damage a lot of the branch.

And here was the seed.

(narrator) Once collected and sorted, the seeds are sent off for safekeeping to the National Seed Bank in Colorado.

(Tami Connolly) Right inside here is where you could see the seed is, so it looks like it's viable seed.

What I'll do is dry this out so you get rid of most of the moisture, send it to the seed bank, and they'll save it.

It should stay good for a great many number of years, and when we request it to replant they'll send it to us.

So they're saving this for us.

[pounding] (John Neptune) It's not a 9-to-5 thing, it's a lifestyle.

It's how you live, it's what you do.

For me that's important to pass on to my kids, plus the kids I work with.

I think it's important to pass on the traditions of the culture because our ancestors did it.

Because of our ancestors and our people from way back it's why we have what we have today, so I mean, we have to recognize that and respect that.

[men sing in their native language; drum beats a steady rhythm] (narrator) From saving seeds to educating the public, to mapping and identifying critical stands of ash to protect, Ranco's SSI team is helping to develop a coordinated statewide response plan should the emerald ash borer reach Maine.

Ultimately, their work will help protect Maine's ash trees and inform public policy, and they're only part of a much bigger picture.

The larger Sustainability Solutions Initiative was established in 2009 under a major National Science Foundation grant to Maine EPSCoR, a National Science Foundation experimental program to stimulate competitive research in Maine.

Given that mandate, this team's research will also establish effective methods to bring together diverse groups to address threats from this and other invasive species.

(Darren Ranco) I know pure science is very attractive and it should be funded and all that, but I feel like we're making ourselves even more indispensable by engaging people.

We're maybe doing it a little bit slower, but I think having better outputs at the end.

I think it's the right thing to do.

♪ ♪ CC--Armour Captioning & MPBN (narrator) Support for this MPBN produced program is provided by a National Science Foundation award to Maine EPSCor at the University of Maine.

Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative is a statewide research project based at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center at the University of Maine.