Those of us who have ventured into the mountains west of Denver in recent years have been startled to see the busy work of bark beetles.
The infestation has left expanses of dead lodgepole pines. Neighbors and visitors alike have been dismayed to see the color of high-country forests turn reddish brown before their eyes.
Researchers from several universities, including University of Colorado and Colorado State University, recently wrote an article about the bark beetle situation that’s sure to raise a few eyebrows. The piece describes the beetle epidemic as a natural phenomenon that neither constitutes an emergency nor an increased forest fire risk.
The beetles, they say, are conducting a large-scale forest thinning that government could never afford to undertake. The article was, in essence, an argument for no management. Let Mother Nature deploy beetles to deal with stands of old and weak trees, some the product of old policies of fire suppression and others damaged by long-term drought.
That may have been the right perspective when things were really natural and there were large, connected ecosystems unaffected by humans. Under those circumstances there’s no doubt that nature has efficient ways of dealing with its own problems.
But people have influenced forests in myriad ways, including taking water away to serve urban communities, generating pollution damage, intervening to prevent forest fires (and creating vast stands of old trees) and even burning huge swaths of forest a century ago that resulted in regrowth that shares the same age and vulnerabilities.
Many scientists believe such conditions have promoted the explosion of bark beetle populations – not just the cycles of nature.
The bugs, which bore into the trees and lay eggs so that their larvae can feed off tree pulp, have been the subject of considerable research and government action. The U.S. Forest Service and other agencies are thinning dead and dying trees from 3,000 acres of Colorado land to reduce fuel in the event of a fire. And there have been numerous attempts at trapping the insects, killing beetle populations with insecticides and even culling healthy but vulnerable trees from forests in advance of infestation.
It’s unclear which, if any, of these interventions will be viable in slowing the spread of beetle infestation. Noting that bark beetles are a force of nature may not account for changes in the timing and impact of their infestation. A prudent and nuanced management policy – divined from today’s forestry experience – may yet be an appropriate course of action.
