Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America's Great Forests (David Suzuki Foundation Series)
Andrew Nikiforuk
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 1553655109
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The beetle didn't act alone. Misguided science, out-of-control logging, bad public policy, and a hundred years of fire suppression created a volatile geography that released the world's oldest forest manager from all natural constraints. Like most human empires, the beetles exploded wildly and then crashed, leaving in their wake grieving landowners, humbled scientists, hungry animals, and altered watersheds. Although climate change triggered this complex event, human arrogance assuredly set the table. With little warning, an ancient insect pointedly exposed the frailty of seemingly stable manmade landscapes. And despite the billions of public dollars spent on control efforts, the beetles burn away like a fire that can't be put out.
Drawing on first-hand accounts from entomologists, botanists, foresters, and rural residents, award-winning journalist Andrew Nikiforuk investigates this unprecedented beetle plague, its startling implications, and the lessons it holds.
1927, the great animal ecologist Charles Elton, while studying the curious rise and fall of mouse plagues, took a moment to count all the passengers on a field mouse near his lab at Oxford University. He found a wild bunch of characters: “The ear had a tick larva and some mites; the fur had at least a dozen sorts of mites, a beetle, eleven kinds of flea, and a louse; the skin had most of these as blood-suckers; and also a more persistently attached adult tick and a kind of mite causing scabs on
beetles that carry the notorious Dutch elm disease. (A Dutch pathologist first identified the Asian fungus that clogs the water transport of elm trees and then wilts the leaves and branches.) The nasty fungus, which appeared in Europe around 1918 and migrated to North America in 1930, has killed millions of elm trees. It has transformed traditions, societies, and landscapes on two continents. Given that it takes about a thousand fungal spores to wilt an elm tree, scientists originally assumed
spruce-seeking species. Hodgkinson battled the beetle in his own Prince George backyard, where three majestic lodgepoles then stood. He attached verbenone pouches on two trees, but after ten days the trees EmpireBeetleInteriorFinal.indd 68 21/04/11 2:32 PM T he Lodgepole Tsunami · 69 sported telltale pitch tubes. “There were so many beetles flying around that verbenone didn’t have much effect at all.” Next he put on protective gear and sprayed the trees with Dursban, an organophosphate that
established the Beetle Kill Trade Association to advocate for the “recycling” of dead or dying lodgepole pines: “Otherwise Colorado will be known as ‘the state with the dead trees.’ ” Beetle-wood memorabilia sells briskly in communities that have lost their pines. In Prince George, visitors and locals can pick up blue-stained bowls, jewelry boxes, and wooden trucks at several local art galleries. “It’s nice to see something beautiful from such a disaster. The tea lights fly off the shelves,” says
populi and Procryphalus mucronatus) so rare that most aspen experts had never heard of them. (Stephen L. Wood, however, had duly recorded their existence as attackers of the weak, stressed, and dying.) Most forest pathologists suspect that the aspens are going under because of acute drought. Scientists say the die-off is unlike anything they have ever seen. Small groves of 150-year-old aspen routinely die out, but now entire landscapes are succumbing. Like the mountain-loving whitebark, the aspen