Beetlemania

Susan Hollis | Image: Nik West | Published: June 01, 2008

Dendroctonus ponderosae. A very big title for such a small insect, but, given its effect on B.C.’s forests and economy, it befits the owner. At only four to 7½ millimetres long – on par with a grain of rice – the mountain pine beetle has established itself as the Attila of our coniferous forest. According to a March 2008 report released by the Ministry of Forests and Range and the Council of Forest Industries, the mountain pine beetle has now affected an estimated 710 million cubic metres of timber – up from 582 million cubic metres the previous year; if infestation continues at the same rate, around 76 per cent of the province’s 1.35 billion cubic metres of marketable pine will be dead by 2015. Based on those figures, $43 billion of lumber products are at risk, and the province is looking at losses in the ballpark of $10 billion in stumpage fees – all thanks to a tiny, rapacious insect.

The beetle’s presence in B.C. has been documented since 1910, though it has been part of the region’s ecosystems for millennia. While population levels have historically been kept in check by natural forest fires and cold snaps, fire suppression and warmer winters have allowed the beetle’s numbers to expand exponentially in recent decades, leaving behind huge tracts of highly visible dead, rust-coloured trees – a telltale sign of the insect’s presence. To salvage the pine that’s still usable, the provincial government has been increasing the level of allowable annual cuts in areas affected by the pest – though government and industry officials alike continue to pray for that now-mythical cold snap to stop the beetle’s spread.

In the meantime, an increasing number of people who make their living from wood have begun to shift their focus.The infected pine, tinged blue from fungus deposited by the beetle, has long been blacklisted by operations that value uniformity; consumers often mistake the stain for mould, meaning wood suppliers and builders tend to favour its blond, unblemished counterpart. However, if a beetle-infested tree is harvested before it starts to rot, the integrity of the wood is intact and only the indigo striations differentiate it from uninfected trees.

With the surge of bluestain now in circulation, creative new thinking has kept the beetle-kill wood – also known as bluestain or denim pine – from being a dead seller. “I first began using beetle-kill because it

is so important to use a resource that is on the brink of such a disaster,” says Lacey O’Neill, one of a growing number of local designers and woodworkers finding beauty in B.C.’s pine beetle catastrophe. The Prince George woodworker, who uses the azure-stained product in her custom art, worries that a lot of good wood will go to waste if people aren’t shown the value of it. “I believe it is very important to send the message that the wood itself is not ruined. It is a perfectly viable material and, in my opinion, more beautiful than it was originally.”

Vancouver-based woodworker Peter Rainier, who teaches furniture design at the Art Institute of Vancouver, agrees. “I really feel that the government has an opportunity here to promote a very unique wood and they haven’t stepped up to the plate,” says Rainier. “B.C. is still in that ‘hewers of wood, carriers of water’ mentality. . . therefore, when this problem came up, all they thought about was logging all of it quickly instead of logging it and thinking about what else can we do with this unique wood. There are always silver linings to every problem, and they kind of stumbled on this one.”

While there have been a number of government-funded initiatives focused on recovering maximum economic value from beetle-affected wood, Rainier, who speaks on behalf of a number of small, B.C.-based woodworkers, says their collective impact has been negligible. Even though his first design piece – a seven-foot floor lamp carved from a cerulean-drenched slab of pine – ended up in the premier’s office, he says the lack of political advocacy toward improving public understanding of the product has fallen far short of the mark. “It’s hard for us to promote this stuff because, frankly, we just don’t have the marketing money. This wood is going to be around for a long time; we need to think about the long term.”

In places such as the coniferous Rubicon of Prince George, where the forests surrounding the city are red, dead and impossible to ignore, it makes sense to examine alternative industries. Twenty-six-year-old Kyle Roberts did, joining forces with his “Business: The Next Generation” class at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George to create a company called Blue Pine Products. When he finished the program in 2003, Roberts bought his classmates’ shares and became sole proprietor of the company, which makes a variety of home accessories such as picture frames, furniture and clocks from beetle-killed wood.

“It’s an easy product to sell. Once people see the wood and hear the story, they approve of the product,” says Roberts, who has been building supply contacts in Asia. He says the bluestain pine is welcome in Beijing’s interior-design market. “This wood is pushing people to be more creative, and I think there is going to be a lot of positives to come out of it. When people actually see it, you can tell that they think it’s pretty cool.”

Due to the enormity of the pine beetle situation, it confounds woodworkers that the commodity isn’t separated from unaffected wood to improve accessibility. Bluestain is still mixed in with regular pine at hardware stores and lumberyards, where artists and customers pick through it. Those in the know go straight for the pigmented material, looking for unique patterns the same way they would look at grain in a high-end hardwood. As there is no price differential for the blue lumber, which is sold as a visual grade product, it falls to the buyer to select the pieces with the bluest character.