Left: Travis Mitzel, Tree of Heaven and Spotted Lanternfly relationship sprawl across time, Pennsylvania, and beyond, 2024. Right: Erin Mallea, found, stomped Spotted Lanternfly, 2023.

Tree News No. 5 is launching at the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair at the Carnegie Museum of Art in late September! Subscribe or pre-order here.

Issue 5 features contributions from scientists, historians and anthropologists to consider the larger context of Spotted Lanternfly's (SLF) arrival to Pennsylvania and spread in North America. We examine the media buzz and invasion rhetoric of the viral “STOMP!” campaigns, the history of the insect’s preferred plant, Tree of Heaven, in Pennsylvania, and novel coexistence on a planet ravaged by human industry and climate change. What does it mean to be “invasive” to already transformed and evolving ecosystems?

The issue was organized, designed, and produced by Erin Mallea and Travis Mitzel. Issue No. 5 features an excerpt from an Interdisciplinary Roundtable about the SLF at the American Ethnological Society’s Spring 2024 Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. The panel included presentations by Nicole Heller, Ecologist and Associate Curator of Anthropocene Studies at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Kelli Hoover, Professor of Entomology at Pennsylvania State University, Travis Mitzel, Artist and Instructor at Seton Hill University, Noah Theriault, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, and Emily Wanderer, Associate Professor of Anthropology, at the University of Pittsburgh. The panel was organized by Noah Theriault, Nicole Heller and Emily Wanderer.

The issue concludes with an essay by Maria Ryabova, PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, focused on the development and implications of a Spotted Lanternfly-killing robot within the context of robotics research ecosystems.