The bug that ate B.C.

If they were 20 feet tall, their rampage would be straight out of a cheesy ’50s horror flick.

They’ve already gutted the forests of B.C.’s interior, leaving vast seas of dead red trees in their wake. They’ve leapt over the Rockies, which scientists thought would contain them. Now they are poised to chomp their way through the pine forests that stretch across Canada. If they do that, the economic and social costs could be staggering.

But they’re not 20 feet tall; they’re the size of a mosquito. And what suddenly gave these insects superpowers wasn’t some weird atom ray or chemical leak, as in all those B movies. They’re “a local manifestation of global warming, there’s no doubt about that,” says Dave Neads, vice-chair of the Cariboo-Chilcotin Beetle Action Coalition.

Slideshow: How to kill a pine tree
Slideshow: Hungry, hungry bug

“They,” of course, are mountain pine beetles, and the beetle epidemic – the largest recorded in North America – may be B.C.’s first serious test of whether we can withstand the sizable curve balls climate change will chuck at us.

For most Vancouverites, the pine beetle crisis seems as personally problematic as an earthquake in Peru; it’s unfortunate, but it’s not affecting our day-to-day lives. That will change: the aftershocks of the economic turmoil in the Interior will eventually be felt on the Lower Mainland. There will be other effects as well: for example, the Fraser River may start flash-flooding as the land upstream – filled with dead trees or clearcut – increasingly loses the ability to regulate water flows.

But those effects are negligible compared to the epidemic’s effects on B.C. Interior residents.
“All the land claims that are being settled aren’t worth shit now,” says Stan Nikal Jr., Wet’suwet’en Nation Beaver Clan president. “The logging is gone, all the moose and everything are gone. It’s not just killing off a [tree] species, it’s killing off nations, killing a whole culture.” The Wet’suwet’en are just one of over 100 First Nations who see the long-term economic and cultural value of their traditional territories evaporating in the wake of the epidemic.

And it’s not just First Nations that are seriously affected. The pine beetle epidemic “is impacting over 180 communities and it has the potential to have

Although any reference to climate change was conspicuously absent from Lunn’s speech, the devastating infestation of B.C.’s Interior forests has been clearly linked to the warming of the planet. The Canadian Forest Service predicts that Canada’s mean annual temperature will increase between five and 10 degrees Celsius this century, and the federal government’s forestry research arm points out in a 2003 report that the mountain pine beetle has
already been one of the first species to adapt, aggressively spreading north and east as its habitat expands.

Native and non-native Interior communities alike are battling valiantly to preserve their futures. But they’re up against a Hydra-like foe. How did a tiny beetle turn into a crisis of near-mythic proportions?

For most of the past century, the mountain pine beetle received little attention from non-entomologists. The beetle’s preferred host is lodgepole pine, a natural part of the forest ecosystem and the lynchpin of B.C.’s Interior forest industry. The beetle population normally waxes and wanes, but overall the beetle used to exist in relatively low levels, preying mostly on weaker or damaged trees. Over the past couple of decades, however, beetle numbers have gone off the charts, and the insect has colonized an estimated 14,000 hectares of B.C. forest – an area equal in size to all of Greece.

Government scientists believe several factors combined in B.C. to create the perfect pine-beetle storm. The stage was set by aggressive fire suppression, which created vast stands of mature pine – the beetle’s favourite food. At the same time, the climate warmed. B.C. hasn’t been getting the prolonged fall and winter cold snaps that used to periodically kill off large numbers of the beetles, while hotter, dryer summers helped beetle larvae mature faster and colonize new trees more effectively.

So each year there have been more beetles around to feast on abundant food, and their numbers started increasing exponentially. The deal was sealed by the beetle’s low-profile approach: because there’s a delay of several years between when a tree is infected and when the tree’s needles actually start to turn red, the extent of the problem wasn’t recognized until it was too late to take evasive action.

The result? Eighty per cent of B.C.’s mature pine forest is expected to be dead by 2013. An estimated $43 billion of lumber products are at risk, and the province could lose $10.2 billion in stumpage fees.

Ironically, however, the pine beetle boom has also meant a boom in the Interior forest economy, at least in the short term. While the beetle kills the trees it infects, the trees remain standing, and the wood can still be milled – for a time. Beetle-killed wood deteriorates differently than normal wood; it dries out more quickly and is more prone to cracking. Nobody’s sure of the “shelf-life” of a standing beetle-killed tree; original estimates of around 15 years have been downgraded to as little as two years.

That’s why, with the provincial government’s blessing, the forest industry is currently operating at “full tilt boogie,” as Dave Neads describes it, clearcutting to extract as much good-quality wood as possible. When that wood runs out, the Interior forest industry will have to completely overhaul how it operates, developing new products and markets while working with lower-grade wood – or no wood at all, if those enormous areas of dead standing trees catch fire in one of our ever-hotter summers.

And that’s not unlikely. Studies suggest that even under the most optimistic climate-change scenarios, wildfires will be two to three times larger than they are currently. A paper produced by University of Washington scientists regarding the effects of mountain pine beetle and climate change on that state’s eastern forests (which are very comparable to B.C.’s Interior forests) noted that “dead and dry timber greatly exacerbated the effect of the extremely hot summer conditions, rendering the fires largely uncontrollable.” The vast stands of ready fuel produced by the mountain pine beetle epidemic make the probability of huge, uncontainable fires terrifyingly high.

So communities already body-slammed by the loss of a key industry will also be menaced by monstrous forest fires.

But that’s not all. In a relentlessly escalating feedback loop, both clearcutting and forest fires release the carbon stored in trees into the air, thereby further accelerating climate change. In 2006, fires consumed approximately 160 hectares of eastern Washington state forest, releasing carbon estimated to equal the annual emissions of a million SUVs. With 14,000 hectares of beetle-infected wood in B.C. prime for burning, the resulting forest fires could make B.C.’s carbon output astronomical – certainly not something that can be offset with a little carpooling.

Governments have largely given up hope of stopping the beetle in B.C.; now they are just waiting for the epidemic to burn itself out west of the Rockies as the beetles run out of forest to chew on, while trying to prevent their spread in Alberta and throughout Canada’s pine forests. Climate change has made containment more difficult, as areas previously inhospitable to beetles become balmier. According to Alan Carroll of B.C.’s Pacific Forestry Centre, current “plausible” projections call for the beetle to continue expanding north and east.

The federal and provincial governments are pouring funding into beetle containment, while also trying to avert massive forest fires, finding uses for beetle-killed wood, and encouraging mineral exploration and other industries. The feds have committed hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of that funding goes to groups such as the First Nations Mountain Pine Beetle Initiative, and the Cariboo-Chilcotin Beetle Action Coalition, which includes representatives of communities heavily affected by the pine beetle epidemic such as ­Quesnel, 100 Mile House and Williams Lake. It also has probably the most developed regional response to the beetle crisis.

“Normally if a mine closes or if a fishery collapses, people don’t have time to prepare for
it, but with this we can,” says the Beetle Action Coalition’s Dave Neads. “We can’t solve the problem; we just have to adapt. So we’re asking, what can we do to diversify the economy?”
The coalition is developing strategies for 15 sectors, including mining, log-home building, agriculture and tourism, which Neads thinks can grow despite the well-publicized visuals of endless red and grey beetle-killed trees. “There’s enough green understory that tourism should do fine,” says Neads cheerfully.

Neads’s can-do attitude in the face of the beetle crisis is impressive. But the complex challenges posed by the mountain-pine beetle epidemic illustrate one of the most worrisome aspects of climate change: its “multiplier effect” of unforeseen, snowballing consequences.
It is indeed reminiscent of a cheesy ’50s horror flick, but one without any tidy finale in sight.

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