Bark-beetle larvae are responsible for the rustred trees in Colorado forests. Photos courtesy Colorado State Forest Service, Colorado State University
Befitting a politician of national stripes, Ken Salazar has a way of creating big pictures with a few words. In 2007, after taking in the immensity of the trees then dead or dying as a result of a bark-beetle epidemic in northern Colorado and adjoining Wyoming, he described the forest situation as the “Katrina of the West.”
Salazar—then a senator from Colorado and now the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior—hit a nerve with that description. Colorado has seen many bark-beetle epidemics, but during its 150 years of recorded history, there has never been one this severe. Forestry officials estimate 95 percent of all lodgepole pine in the region will be dead within four years. Entire mountainsides west of Denver have turned rusty red, the result of beetles boring into tree trunks and spreading the circulation-blocking fungus that prevents transport of water and nutrients from the roots. In other places, the needles have dropped, and the forests are gray. A driver can travel for hours without losing sight of these two million acres of affected forests.
This is big. Though there are larger epidemics in the West, they are in sparsely settled areas. In Colorado, human settlement reaches deep into the forests, from the knotty-pine cabins near Rocky Mountain National Park to 40,000-square-foot mansions at Aspen, Beaver Creek and other resort areas. Nowhere outside of the Swiss Alps is there a larger concentration of ski areas. Power lines from hydroelectric dams and coal-fired power plants straddle the topography of the high peaks. Mountain creeks harnessed by dams, pipelines and tunnels deliver water to more than 4 million people in Denver and other cities at the eastern foot of the mountains. If the bark beetles have produced a budding Katrina-sized catastrophe, as Salazar’s portrayal suggests, this human infrastructure could become New Orleans.
But just as the nation is still assimilating the lessons from Hurricane Katrina, Colorado is grappling with how to respond to the bark-beetle epidemic. The society that sprang up in the Colorado mountains assumed that the forest backdrop was immutable. The bark beetle has scuttled that notion. The essential question now facing both the people who live there and the officials who set policy at the local, state and federal levels is what it means to live sustainably in the midst of disturbance-prone ecosystems.
For decades, Colorado’s forests have provided an unchanging backdrop to an economy increasingly based on recreation and leisure. Twenty years ago, ski towns were instinctively suspicious of all timber sales and of any attempts to manage forests. In 1997, when the Forest Service proposed a prescribed burn in the adjacent White River National Forest, the reaction of one homeowner in the resort town of Vail is telling. Having come from California, she protested, she could not abide the loss of the trees seen from her back window.
In the mid-1990s, intervals between fires had been long, possibly due to the fact that most of the twentieth century was a wet period. But then climate dynamics changed, creating conditions favorable to the bark beetle. Extreme cold, necessary to block proliferation of beetles, became a distant memory. Winters shortened and the rate of precipitation slowed. The driest year in several centuries was 2002, weakening trees and making them more vulnerable to beetles.
This new face of the forest has been upsetting, even bewildering, to those living in the vicinity. Perspectives have been turned upside down. “It’s no longer viewed as a friendly forest,” says Jim Lamont, executive director of the Vail Village Homeowners Association. An element of solace has been lost and replaced by anxiety, he says. Quietly, people worry about forest fires. Instructively, town governments that once resisted timber sales have sent delegations to Washington, D.C., to lobby for money to thin forests along their periphery.
Other initiatives have been crafted with a new appreciation for the vulnerability of human communities situated close to forests. Vail has finally banned untreated wood-shake shingles on new construction. Many communities have drawn up evacuation plans in case of fire. Local governments across the region are mandating moats of defensible space between homes and forests.
This new tension has brought environmental groups, local communities and state and federal forestry agencies to degrees of consensus that would have been surprising fifteen years ago. Overall, there is greater acceptance, even among many environmental groups, of the need for logging. Clint Khyl, the U.S. Forest Service’s incident commander for the three national forests most heavily impacted by the beetle epidemic, says he perceives “a little more of a social license to do management to make forests more resilient to infectious diseases and future fires.”
But there’s a delicacy in these new relationships. Accepting change intellectually is one thing. Accepting it emotionally is another. The response to the appearance of dead trees early in the epidemic was what Tom Fry, national fire program lead for the Wilderness Society, describes as a “near hysteria.” That naïve belief that forest processes could be blocked has been replaced by a consensus among stakeholders that the greatest effort must be put into mitigating effects: thinning trees in the wildland-urban interface areas, widening power line corridors to prevent dead trees from falling into electrical lines and protecting key watersheds from the potential of fire.
On a more intellectual level, the connection between fire and dead trees is disputed. Tom Veblen, a geographer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, argues that weather and climate are much more important determinants of fire than is fuel condition. “Weather conditions are the overriding factor in terms of fire risk and fire hazard,” he says.
In Veblen’s view, climate cycles were more important than the effects of fire suppression during the twentieth century in making forests vulnerable to fire. He argues that fire cycles can be traced to periods of extreme drought that are influenced by sea-surface temperatures in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Overlaying this innate climate variability, he says, is the newer, human-caused climate change resulting from the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases.
Veblen’s research also has found that tree deaths in old-growth forests across the West—not just those of lodgepole pine—have more than doubled in recent decades. The likely cause is regional warming and related drought conditions. In study plots, the establishment of replacement trees is not keeping pace with the climbing morality.
“Climate variation has been the critical control of fires and insect outbreaks historically in northern Colorado,” he insists.
Veblen distrusts forest thinning on a broad scale, saying it has little value in preventing fires. What can make a difference, he says, are preventative measures such as creating defensible spaces to protect homes from burning. It can matter in other places, too, such as near campgrounds and along power lines and roads. But fire itself cannot be stopped if weather conditions align. The major value of the beetle epidemic, Veblen says, is to remind people who live in fire-prone ecosystems of their vulnerability to natural processes.
Mike Long, the fire chief in Grand Lake at the western entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, has drawn a similar conclusion. The town is located at the end of a road, which has been cleared of adjacent trees that might prevent evacuation. Homeowners in outlying areas of the 105-square-mile district have been told that they may not get help in event of a fire if they haven’t created defensible spaces around their homes. Instead, there will be what Long calls a “triage process.” In fact, he says, forests of green trees, if perhaps not as easily ignited as those with red needles, can burn even more hotly.
Still, there are compelling reasons to take some action to reduce risk of major, catastrophic fire. Along the Continental Divide from Grand Lake to Aspen lie bountiful headwater streams, particularly on the western side. During the past century, farmers and then urban residents along the High Plains have dug ditches and bored tunnels to extract this water from the Colorado River and its tributaries. A major worry for Denver and other cities is the cost to the water supply in the case of fire.
Rick Cables, regional forester in the Rocky Mountain Region, points to this fact as a key reason for needed intervention.Similar to Salazar’s “Katrina of the West,” Cables sees an impending fire or series of fires that will produce “social, economic and environmental costs that could be very, very significant.”
A succession of fires during the past fifteen years, including the 138,000-acre Hayman Fire in 2002, has clogged reservoirs in the foothills west of Denver with runoff sediment. Already, Denver has spent $8 million to dredge those reservoirs, and the city intends to spend another $20 million. Cables contends that fires in beetle-killed forests could cause even more massive—and expensive—problems. He wants more federal appropriations for forest work. “Logging is only one tool. We need to get fire back on the landscape,” he explains without a note of irony. “We need to let fire create some age-class diversity in these forests. With fire restored and some selective logging, he says, “forty years from now, in theory, we will have verdant, green forests.”
Logging companies also want to be part of a solution. For several years, Colorado had only one large sawmill in operation, located hundreds of miles away from beetle-killed areas. A second sawmill, closer to the beetle epidemic, has now opened. A factory that produces pellets for wood-burning consumption opened last summer, and others are in the works.
One hope is that federal stimulus money will open the door to cogeneration plants, in which beetle-killed trees can be used to produce heat and electricity. Federal cap-and-trade legislation could also improve the market. But there are barriers, one of them being the recession, says Tom Long, who represents Norwegian investors in a company called Eagle Mountain Renewable Energy. Another is concern about the long-term supplies of wood. Federal officials hope for increased lengths of forest stewardship contracts to help ease financing.
Also uncertain is how deep into the forests logging should be permitted. The environmental community insists that logging must be linked to objectified risks, meaning a landscape or forest must be actually at risk to qualify for thinning, rather than be thinned due to some vague notion of “forest health.”
“The conservation community [has] tried to reframe the debate,” Fry says. “Rather than ‘we have a problem and active management, whatever that means, is the panacea,’ we have tried to say time and again that we live in a disturbance-driven ecosystem. The focus is not on creating resilient landscapes, but on creating resilient communities. I think history is our best guide in demonstrating the futility of trying to bend landscapes to our will.”
Fry says that thinking about forests and disturbance regimes has changed dramatically since the Yellowstone fires of 1988. Still, he perceives a fundamental bias—and it may not be unique to the Forest Service, he says. That bias continues to see the business of the Forest Service as fighting fires, and the idea that the best fires are those that are small and ultimately controllable.
The true costs for living in fire-prone exurban locations are still unknown. Recent legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein, a Democrat from California, would offer grants to communities to create defensible space around homes, reduce hazardous fuels and replace flammable construction materials.
Others favor a stick. A proposal considered last year by a state legislator from San Diego would have put the costs of firefighting more directly on rural residents. That sort of arrangement in Colorado would sit well with Charles Bedford, director of the Nature Conservancy in Colorado. “Then we would have land-use decisions based on true cost of development, rather than land-use decisions that are piggybacked on some kind of weird state welfare system,” he fumes.
In a sense, all of these are old arguments, reframed in a contemporary context of bark beetles in proximity to populated areas. Unless cold winters return, those beetles surely will work their way into the foothills above the Front Range cities. That is sure to pose these same questions about the relationship of people and their landscapes even more bluntly. Colorado, now 150 years into permanent, large-scale settlements, is still trying to decide what it means to live within its forested landscapes.