#safranyik

[vanessaeltonenvironmental-blog]

Beetle in a Haystack

I remember driving to my friend’s cabin in the Chilcotins in the early 2000’s.  A sea of rusted pines drowned the landscape.  As a naive island girl I remarked:  “Holy Cow!  A forest fire really rocked this area eh?”  “That’s the mountain pine beetle” her mother replied.  That was the first time I heard about this remarkable “pest” that parasitizes lodge pole pines.  Years later, while studying entomology, I would be amazed by the evolution, delicate intricacies, and symbiosis between a blue fungus, small beetle, and this tree.  Complex in its own right, the thresholds and boundaries that suppress beetle epidemics become even more complicated when you insert industry, failed management practices, and complex human relationships into the system.

Powerful things come in tiny packages.  This pine beetle is 5mm long. (photo credit: Natural Resources Canada )

I feel like the ecological thresholds that were crossed to spike this epidemic are easier to describe.  They are tangible, measurable boundaries.  The social threshold is harder to pinpoint- perhaps because there have not been as many discussions about it, perhaps because we’re reluctant to change.

The larvae itself, cannot survive quick-onset and sustained freezing temperatures over winter.  With winter climates changing, this temperature barrier was permeated by generations of beetle offspring igniting the explosive population.  Another factor that compounded the epidemic was the practice of fire-retention in forestry practices.  We didn’t realize that intermittent wild fires created natural boundaries to keep beetle populations in check- not because the fires killed beetles, but instead “a large cohort” of lodgepole pine reached an age/size susceptible to mountain pine beetle (Safranyik, 2006). The beetles love older trees- and we provided hundreds of hectares of uniform nurseries that all met their criteria. The environmental consequences of a mass beetle kill at once can “increase fuel loading, alter successional trajectories, affect watershed quality, wildlife composition, and recreational values”(Safranyik, 2006).  It behooves us to consider other strategies when viewing our relationships to our forests.

This catastrophic event was, to use C.S Holling’s term, a “surprise”. The outbreak was “sharply different” than we projected, and “opposite to that intended” (Holling, 1986).  We are in uncharted territory now; reaping the consequences of years of resource management experiments. However, in the ashes we find an opening for a much needed, and now seemingly urgent, dialogue about how we view forest management. 

Anthropogenic climate change and fire retardation are both human constructs that are the result of particular world views and values.  A view that forests are resources that should be managed by us; to maximize fiber yield while at the same time exporting those logs out of our communities to other countries to maximize profits for the few.  A value for short term gains for the present generation while compromising the quality of life for future generations.  The disconnect that we have with our place in nature, and our shortsightedness, lead our Interior forests right into this imbalance.  I would identify our traditional western world view then as a boundary to a more balanced approach to working in and benefiting from our forests.  

References:

Social contracts: (O’Brien et al., 2009)Holling, C. S. (1986). The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: local surprise and global change. Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, 291–321. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1007/s10021-001-0101-5

Safranyik, L. (2006). Detection, Mapping, and Monitoring of the Mountain Pine Beetle. The mountain pine beetle : a synthesis of biology, management, and impacts on lodgepole pine / by Les Safranyik and Bill Wilson. Retrieved from https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/library/documents/bib96122.pdf