Pinecone Project

Our Forests are Dying

Monday, December 20th, 2010

The most dangerous predator in the forest isn’t a Bear, or a Wolf, or even a Mountain Lion. It’s a little tiny beetle, and right now it has killed an overwhelming majority of the forests along the Continental Divide in the United States and Canada.

Cutting a swath across the North American Rocky Mountains these great forests are now dead or dying. From Canada to Mexico the pine trees have been decimated by the effects of the Mountain Pine Beetle.

The Continental Divide is a large area stretching the length of the Rockies from Canada to Mexico, and actual mortality figures will vary greatly…. the dead tree’s in most of these forests range from 60% to 90%! As you can see the devastation to our national forests is overwhelming.

And most government agencies are overwhelmed by the immensity of the damage; when epidemics of this proportion occur, even where there has been past management to combat it, it is difficult to keep up with the pace of new dead trees each year. Instead, many government agencies are working on a variety of projects to remove the dead and dying trees through salvaging, removing hazard trees from campgrounds, removing dead trees in areas which pose a fire hazard, spraying healthy trees in high use areas to prevent bark beetle attack, and ultimately planting new trees in a process called reforestation.

“this is a natural ecological event that is happening,

it has happened before, though perhaps not on this level,

or with this much potential far-reaching damage,

the forest will eventually grow back,

it just won’t be in our lifetime.”