Hillsides of dead trees may become inspiration

THE OLYMPIAN | • Published July 01, 2009

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Seated in a silver tube of airplane 30,000 feet above the ground, I return to Olympia from Jackson Hole, Wyo., a town nestled in the shadows of the Great Teton Mountains. I had presented a public lecture on my forest ecology research in Costa Rica.

My descriptions of the ecology of tropical rainforests, however, seemed of less interest to my audiences than the pine forests of their own landscape. And small wonder.

Unlike our own deep green hillsides of Douglas fir and hemlock, their landscape is an alarming patchwork of dead gray and mordant crimson, interspersed with only tiny bits of living green. Acres of standing dead trees cover the land, rendering the landscape a tinderbox ready to burn.

What has caused this shift from green to gray?

Bark beetles, each individual no larger than a dime’s diameter, can bore through the defense system of conifer trees. When trees are healthy and have access to sufficient water, they can easily expel attacks by pumping resin into the beetles’ bore holes.

But when trees experience drought, rising competition for water from development, and increased temperatures, their living cambium becomes riddled with a hieroglyphy of tunnels that serve as cradles for the next generation of insects. The result? A forest of dying stems that quickly fade to silent snags. Recent massive beetle outbreaks have reached unprecedented levels.

In 2008, 8.6 million acres of forest had been killed compared to 1.4 million acres in 1997.

Forest Service scientists have carefully documented the trends and concluded that climate change due to increased carbon dioxide levels in the air is the major force behind these changes. Warmer temperatures have shortened the life cycle of the beetles from two years to one year, and populations have expanded into areas that had previously been too cold for them. Excessive energy use by humans — with its accompanying carbon dioxide load — is a major driver for this shift from green to gray.

I asked my listeners about their responses to these changes in their arboreal landscape. Their emotions were sadness and anger, responses that inevitably lead to despair and inaction. We discussed how they might channel those emotions into positive directions.

Although they cannot bring dead trees back to life, they might, for example, develop a town carpooling system to reduce carbon emissions in their community, or expand their nascent and patchy municipal recycling activities into a more comprehensive effort. Thus, the daily view of their gray hillsides — rather than driving them to despair — might become an inspiration for positive actions.

The inhabitants of Jackson Hole are not unique in their need to make both large and small changes to protect their environment from the complex combinations of natural and human-exacerbated environmental damage.

We Olympians can look to our own bioregion. The landslides and floods that have overwhelmed the soils, riverbeds, and regrowing watersheds of Thurston and surrounding counties in the past few years are manifestations of how human activities such as poor land use practices can exacerbate natural forces to bring economic and environmental damage to our communities.

Perhaps we can use the views of slumped soils and bared mountain slopes to evoke not just sadness and anger, but also to instigate positive environmental actions in our own communities.

Dr. Nalini M. Nadkarni studies trees and forest canopies as a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College and president of the International Canopy Network. A member of The Olympian’s Board of Contributors, she can be reached at nadkarnn@evergreen.edu.