SAVING HEMLOCKS
DOCUMENTARY SHEDS LIGHT ON DISEASES THAT THREATEN TREE LIVELIHOOD
A locally made film that aims to help save the ancient hemlock trees of Cook Forest will premiere amid them.
“Cathedral: The Fight to Save the Ancient Hemlocks of Cook Forest” will be shown for the first time at 8 p.m. July 28 and 29 at the Sawmill Center for the Arts in Cooksburg. Admission is $15 per person, and all money goes to the Pennsylvania Parks and Forest Foundation, which will use it to fight the invasive insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid, that has decimated the trees in other places.
The nearly ½-hour film documenting what’s being done in Cook Forest State Park north of Pittsburgh was made and funded by Wild Excellence Films. That’s a project of David and Melissa Rohm of Scott, who want to bring attention to wildlife and wild places and the conservation issues that affect them through their storytelling.
He’s a longtime graphic designer, and she’s a writer and an editor. They started working on this film just by going to Cook Forest, where their friend and environmental education specialist Dale J. Luthringer showed them how these tiny bugs were attacking the trees, and the ways park and state Bureau of Forestry officials were fighting back. That was three years ago, just after the insect was discovered there, and about the time the couple were starting Wild Excellence Films.
As the film depicts, “The treatments are working,” says Mr. Rohm. The film shows how officials are going after the insects with everything from sprays to predatory beetles, which appear to be taking hold in this