A story came out this week talking about mountain pine beetle spreading across Canada and devastating our forests (there seems to be one every week).
In the article they say“One of the problems with mountain pine beetle and this particular outbreak, was that lodgepole pine forest in B.C. was managed so all the stands were even-aged… This created basically a buffet for mountain pine beetle”.
There’s a few things that bother me about the above quote:
1) I love buffets. I’m a buffet slayer through and through. Why do I love buffets so much? The VARIETY! So saying we managed all the trees so that they were the same and that made a “buffet” for pine beetles is a disservice to buffets everywhere.
Buffets = variety
Buffets do not= everything being the same.
If she would have said “even even aged management created an all you can eat rib restaurant for pine beetles”, I would have been much happier.
2) The second problem I have is with “even-aged management”. Lodgepole pine trees (what pine beetles eat) live in areas where there are fires. Have you ever noticed how pine cones are really hard (called serotinous)? When cones heat up from a fire and the moisture is removed from these cones, they release seeds and regrow the burned forest. 97% of burned areas are burned with HUGE fires. That means huge areas that are naturally the same age. That’s the NATURAL way of things, not the MANAGED way of things, and not the reason the native pine beetle enjoyed a “buffet”. Multi-age pine cutblocks don’t really work. If you cut down a few pine trees but leave most of the big tall ones, sun can’t get to the regrowth. That means they can’t photosynthesize and won’t grow.
3) The real problem is that there were too many old trees because we’ve been suppressing fire for so long. See below the highly scientific graphs I just made in paint. It is generally accepted that if we weren’t here our pine forest would like the graph on the left. It is generally accepted that the one on the right is how our pine forest actually looks. 
Young trees are better at getting rid of insects and disease and are also really good at cycling carbon and reducing GHG. What are old trees good at? Providing habitat for certain species, giving me shade for outdoor naps, and falling down. We absolute have to have some old forest for habitat (and napping), but it’s starting to get out of hand because we’re not cutting that much down and we’re not letting it burn. The winters have also been really warm and the beetles (complete with a sort of anti-freeze in their bodies) haven’t been killed because of the cold temperatures (another vote for younger forests to reduce the impacts of climate change kill beetles).
Also, I don’t know why this is newsworthy (this is basically what the SRD guy says at the bottom). According to my Trees of the Boreal book, jack pine and lodgepole pine are different variations of the same species (Pinus contorta). The Alberta Government and industry have taken a strong stance against pine beetle in hopes they can stop it from spreading across the boreal forest. The surveying effort is absolutely unreal. It basically consists of flying over every pine tree in the province, gps marking the dead ones, and going to check to make sure it wasn’t a pine beetle death. If it was a pine beetle death, every infested tree in the area gets cut and burned.
Maybe we should introduce some sort of foreign mega-hornet or super woodpecker to kill off the beetles…