In a story headlined "Pine Beetle Battle Turns Desperate", the
Denver Post recounted a story that is slowly being told across our continent.
"People have their own images of what this change might be, but I think that, almost without fail, people are surprised at how much bigger this thing is than what they expect," Cadenhead said. "We're talking about a dramatically changed landscape."
Like a rash spreading across the mountains, beetles are reaching spots previously immune to the outbreak, crossing the Continental Divide to the Front Range, reaching high-elevation forests and even infiltrating remote areas such as the Black Forest northeast of Colorado Springs.
"We're still seeing the expansion of the mountain pine beetle," said Joe Duda, forest-management supervisor for the Colorado State Forest Service.
"The areas that last year had only partial mortality, we're seeing a lot of those fairly completely hit," Duda said.
Millions of trees are dying across Colorado. Summit County may lose around 90% of its conifers, but that is a small thing compared to the devestation that already stretches from Canada down to Mexico.
The bugs crawled out of British Columbia, into Alberta and started heading South. They have a complexly ordered way of destroying forests. I am not very scientific, but my understanding of it, from this study, is that the females find a tree and send out a pherome that draws beetles from all over in a mass egg laying attack. When enough males have responded, the pheromes the males release send everybody off to find the next tree.
The destruction has a natural beauty to it, as you can see from this photo from talented photographer mhchipmunk.
Pine Beetles are nothing new. for years they helped thin forest areas where the trees were too dense by attacking older trees whose sap lacked the vigor to push them out, and by hitting the areas where the trees were weakened by drought. A good stretch of cold weather and the beetles would be knocked out for the year.
But now our climate is changing, and the beetles exponential growth has substantially more time to reach farther and with greater density than ever before. We are facing a horrific spiral downward.
La Times
Slope after slope will turn the rusty-orange hue of a cheap hair dye. Then the needles will fall from the towering lodgepole pines in Idaho and Colorado and from the ancient white-bark pines in Montana and Wyoming. The trees may stand, skeletal, for a year or two, but eventually they will topple. Millions of acres in treasured national lands, including vast swaths of wilderness in and around Yellowstone National Park, will be affected.
"You're going to see a lot of gray sticks out there," said Cary Green, a timber manager with the U.S. Forest Service.
The deaths of so many millions of trees will create an enormous fire risk across the West. Wildlife habitats will shift, as deer, elk and bear may find it hard to survive on the barren mountains...
As the dead trees crash down, hundreds of miles of biking and hiking trails will likely become impassable...
The dark-brown mountain pine beetle, about the size of a grain of rice, is a natural part of the alpine forest ecosystem. They tend to make their mark in cycles; every 20 years or so, the beetle population will surge and large numbers of trees will fall.
But this current cycle has broken all the rules.
The beetle population has exploded way beyond expectations in the last few years. Instead of sticking to their traditional favorites -- big, old trees at medium elevations -- the pests are flying as high as 10,500 feet and burrowing into trees as small as 5 inches in diameter.
Hills full of firewood lead to the obvious problem of fires. Deforestation leads to soil erosion, and that leads to daught and that leads to more beetles. Add to that the usual increase in global warming due to replacing a green canopy with a moonscape, and we are rapidly headed for grief.
We could have signed Kyoto and taken aggresive action before the beetles were able to survive the trip through the high passes into Alberta, but we didn't. We saw it coming and we did not act. Senator Dianne Feinstein has been among those trying to raise the alarm.
The mountain pine beetle is a voracious predator of lodgepole pine trees. Beetle populations, controlled in the past by die-offs during cold spells, are exploding as the result of warmer winters. The beetles have infested an area of Canadian forest three times the size of Maryland, and are killing more trees in Canada than logging or wildfires. If this infestation crosses the Rockies, it could be a catastrophe for much of the western United States.
Now the worst case of what 'could' happen is happening.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The beetles have killed lodgepole pine trees over an area the size of Iceland. They've moved east, infecting trees across the Continental Divide in Alberta.
"The danger is the beetles will cross over into jack pine habitat, and then head toward the East Coast," said James Agee, University of Washington forest ecology professor.
Or, in the words of retired U.S. Forest Service scientist Jesse Logan, "There is a continental-scale event waiting to happen."
The infestation has spread out of the western Chilcotin Plateau, where bitter winter temperatures previously kept the beetle population in check. "The winters are no longer cold enough," said David Suzuki, scientist host of CBC-TV's "The Nature of Things."
In the United States, similar conditions threaten the white bark pine at higher elevations in the Rocky Mountains. White bark pine seeds are a vital food source for grizzly bears.
"Typically, the climate up high is too harsh for the pine bark beetle, but we've seen a continuous warming trend in the last 30 years. White bark pine is a sitting duck for the beetle," said Logan.
When faced with overwhelming evidence, and a growing scientific consensus of human as cause in climate change, the Bush administration has insisted on more evidence.
Obviously the Bush administration is quite literally hellbent on ignoring Global Warming, but even so there were things we could have been doing to protect our forests.
Thining out the denser areas with selective cuttings could have lowered the risk of both fires and insects, but the Colorado delegation was unable to get any support from this Congress.
Summit Daily News
Sen. Wayne Allard has worked for years to secure more money for forest thinning and other measures to stem the spread of the beetle.
"The fire hazard created by bark beetles will impact our communities soon, and for years to come," Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar said in a statement. "Appropriate funding for forest management is vital to prevent a disaster, but unfortunately Congress has shortchanged our forests. The involvement of local organizations is critical as we look to fix this problem."
And when Congress has turned to the Executive Branch for help, they have been rebuffed.
The best treatment, he said, is proper forest management, including thinning.
"With thousands of acres in the forest system, they're not going to be thinned anytime soon," he said, "so we're not going to see these bugs disappear overnight."
The Government Accountability Office, which investigates issues on behalf of Congress, has urged the Forest Service and Interior Department for at least seven years to develop a national plan showing how they will accomplish their thinning task, how long it will take and how much it will cost.
Instead Bush just continues to push one of his many horrific programs that goes by a happy name, "The Healthy Forests Initiative" a project that is explained in this story by the Sierra Club, which opposes it. Opposition also includes the National Resources Defense Council and the Wilderness Society, but it is supported by logging interests such as the Society of American Foresters.
If there is a gold lining in all of this, it is the profits going to those very logging interests. The crisis is making it easier for them to get the roads into the areas that they have long wanted, and the contracts to cut down and dispose of what should have been healthy trees.
I would like to end this with a "What you can do" section, but really I am at something of a loss. There are good organizations like EarthJustice you can get involved in, you can work to draft Al Gore or support some of our many good environmentalist candidates, but at this point I don't know what it will take to wake up the people who are still in denial about how interconnected our whole ecosystem is, and how we are tipped dangerously out of balance.
Flickr member Lucky E snapped this tragically great photo outside of Steamboat Springs, CO.
I think it looks beautiful right now, but that purple will turn into brown and then a burning orange and then a charred black scar. The rains that should be feeding a forest will bring the sooty black mud down the hill.
I can't say that I find it comforting to know that the same is probably happening to Dick Cheney's back yard, but if the damage can't be stopped before it reaches there, I hope that before he goes his fading old eyes will get a chance to see what a waste he has made of the world, and that the wet black ash floods under his door.
|
RSS Feed
