Red trees, dead trees
people hug them
breathe the smoke
eco's love them

burning, blazing
streams a-boiling
forests are dying
but no one is toiling

black trees, black nests
wildlife dying
beetles keep eating
beetles keep flying

too many trees
not enough rain
entire ecosystems
down the drain

hug the snags
hug the brush
hug the judges
who won't stop the crush

hug the courts
who block the solution
hug the system
hug the gruesome

SAVE the beetles!
screw THE MAN
we don't care
if if it hurts the land

Dear Fotoware: don't quit your day job.
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers here.
We're seeing a climate change-driven epidemic of pine beetles that is doing a wholesale job of changing ecosystems and there's no clear picture of what will emerge when the current forest is dead, regardless of spraying or cutting or converting some tiny portion into ethanol.
And records from earlier eruptions of beetle kill show that after you get past the explosive fire potential of red, dead, dry needles, there's no extra fire danger until ladder fuels grow, that can carry the flame up into the dead branches. Even then, wildfires keep the nutrients in play for future growth, rather than pulling all those nutrients out of the forest.
Even if you turned the entire beetle-killed forest over to the timber industry, there's a limited window on harvest before the wood goes bad, and there's nowhere near enough working mills in the western US to process all that timber. Finally, where's the market when everyone's waiting for the housing market to recover?
You have no solutions. You're just grumbling in your beard.

well put Brodie. There are no clear answers on the best way to deal with this situation, unfortunately people on both sides continue to point fingers. One minor point is that unfortunately with too hot of a wildfire which MAY occur with enough fuel buildup there is a possibility of less nutrients left in the soil for reforestation. However I agree wholeheartedly with your overview.

apparently I cannot type today, it's flyfishdude, no April's fools day pun here about lying!

Once again, no mention of tree densities or species composition from the "preservationists" who embrace dead forests and raging firestorms. No mention that fuels CAN be reduced in beneficial ways, including power generation. Yes, lodgepoles don't make good boards but, can be utilized in other ways. No mention that those lodgepoles do NOT decay into soil components through "natural decomposition". Those trees will fall over and burn, sooner than later, along with any natural regeneration, (like flyfishdude says) causing great soils damage, as well as catastrophic erosion. High fire temperatures do deplete soils of nutrients, adding them to our atmosphere as GHG's. Just because the needles fall off, that doesn't mean they won't burn. It IS inevitable that they burn in future fires.

One partial solution is to push away the lodgepole invasions into formerly pure ponderosa pine stands, resulting in a drought, fire and bug-resistent forest. Ditto for the true fir invasions, due to fire suppression. These weedy trees provide perfect ladder fuels to destroy endangered species habitats. The high elevation lodgepole stands are, basically, on their own, as they have been for 1000's of years. While we may be able to intervene, and do some good up there, the priorities are elsewhere, as they should be.

The fire triangle says the fires need fuel, heat and air to burn. While we cannot do anything about heat and air, we CAN do something about the fuels.

Forest science tells us that high-elevation lodgepole, spruce, and fir forests are subject to natural disturbances like wildfire, insect infestation, and windthrow (as well as human-caused disturbance in the form of 19th-20th century logging) at very large scales. In fact, these events almost define these forest types, and create the fuel-heavy, even-aged stands that are frequently seen. So anyone who wants to talk “dead forests and raging firestorms” should at least tell us what he or she thinks Yellowstone looks like now, 22 years after it burned.

But this is beside the point, because even though the scale of the MPB outbreak is frightening and historically unprecedented (and it’s much larger in Canada than in the US), the entire forest has not been destroyed. Yes, millions of trees are dead, but millions more are still alive. There will be future lodgepole pine forests in the Rockies. See http://www.frontiersinecology.org/letters/WriteBack_March03.pdf.

Actually, because some lodgepole is serotinous – a fire adaptation in which the cones only release their seed after exposure to high heat – if you wanted to jump-start the regeneration process, you could (in remote areas under moderate weather conditions) burn some of the red-needled stands, sit back, and watch millions of new seedlings come up. Yes, I realize this is extremely unlikely to happen for political and social reasons.

For the time being, fire hazard reduction efforts in the wildland-urban interface beetle kill areas are crucial, but unfortunately, aside from firewood, the outlook for using all that biomass is not so good. It’s just not economically feasible to do much with it, let alone start salvage logging more remote areas. A couple years ago a Longmont, CO company opened a cellulosic ethanol plant with great fanfare – in Georgia. Why Georgia? Because the loblolly pine plantations there offer a guaranteed, unlimited source of raw material for the plant – i.e. it was economically feasible in Georgia – and unfortunately that’s not the case in Colorado. Same for large-scale cogeneration. And blue-stain wood for furniture, although beautiful, is only a niche market.

The forests will come back… they’ll just look different for a while.

Chuck sees more of the big picture but, didn't I state much of the same things with these sentences??

"The high elevation lodgepole stands are, basically, on their own, as they have been for 1000's of years. While we may be able to intervene, and do some good up there, the priorities are elsewhere, as they should be."

Wood-fired power generation has been used successfully and economically in a great many places, including Montana. The log home industry has been begging for the raw materials for years. We could be making tons of stuff out of wood that is currently being made with plastics. Despite the bad economy, a lot of products could be made out of wood, with some clever research (which has been ongoing for years).

You talk about torching off dead lodgepole stands not being very likely but, the Forest Service already has areas of up to 100,000 acres (156 square miles!) set aside for fires to rage. The firefighter's bravado causes them to think they can control such fires but, their track records are full of mistakes and tragedies.

A friend of mine recently went to Yellowstone and was a Forward Observer when the fires were burning. He was not impressed by the results. However, with Yellowstone being a National Park, that is how it must be. Not so with our National Forests, which have other responsibilities, guidelines and laws to follow regarding Multiple Use and public safety. I'd bet a week's pay that the overstory diversity in Yellowstone has fallen off the table, with other species not coming back well and lodgepole thickets dominating, as they naturally do. I'd bet a year's pay that endangered species also took a big hit in the firestorms. That doesn't bode well for our National Forests. The mere threat of litigation is plenty enough incentive for biomass and wood products industries to look elsewhere for supplies.

No, Brodie,
There was a chance to recover some value here, moderate the damage, pay the bill of running the agency rather than let it go.
Foresters knew 20 years ago that these even-aged pine stands were going to reach maturity and decadence at the same time, and could well have directed efforts into shaping the forest so when the inevitable happened, the fires would burn in reasonable chunks without the need for massive standaroundandwatch cadre AND with a possibility of again, salvaging what could be salvaged and kick-starting the NEXT forest with the proceeds. But no....the hyperlitigants wouldn't allow it, because some human might make money "exploiting" nature.
As for the plantation in Georgia....guess what? That's PRIVATE ground down there where the rules of engagement aren't dominated by miswritten environmental law. Down there, the folks who own the forests actually have rights. On federal ground, the vast majority of us, who only want our forests well managed and healthy, have no rights whatsoever.
Gonna reap the whirlwind this summer. Won't be any poesy after.

Well yeah, the big forests are in trouble. How about the private ones in the forest urban interface? I saw the problem just starting last year in the Potomac valley. We had just bought the property when we noticed the pitch outs. I have spent the last year researching and taking the stewardship courses offered by the MSU extension office.

It may be a hopeless task but it seems worth the fight. The plan is to thin those overstocked stands on the land that are stressed by crowding. In doing so I notice that the firs are working their way up in the understory. When the affected pines are removed there is a few healthy ones and many firs. Thin the firs so that they have the best possible chance to resist the spruce bud worm. Burn or chip the slash so that the Ips beetle doesn't have a chance to weaken the remaining pines.

We seem to be having some success stacking and wrapping the logs left from cutting. There are few mills left and they don't usually take the blue stained pines. So we stack the logs and cover them in black plastic for the summer. There are few exit holes in the bark by the next year from cooking the little maggots in the sun.

The next step would be to use the slash to amend the soil over time and plant a variety of species both conifer and deciduous to create a diverse forest more able to resist the variety of bugs and diseases that can affect mono cultures.

It may be a long shot given the speed and relentless march of the pine beetles across our forests but, damn it, I am not willing to see it all go down without trying.