Roger Johnson inspects trees killed by bark beetles. (Melanie Stetson Freeman / Staff)
As beetle invasion rages, a debate over logs
Home builders want the dead trees, but activists and regulations stand in the way.
By Ben Arnoldy | Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ January 7, 2009 edition
Reporter Ben Arnoldy discusses how one Montana log home builder is responding to both the economy and an infestation of bark beetles that are devastating pine trees.
Seeley Lake, Mont.
Tromping through a snowy thicket of lodgepole pine, forester Tim Love identifies the telltale signs that the trees are, in his words, “dead already but don’t know it.”
He points to a trunk riddled with pitch-outs – ejections of sap sent out by the tree trying desperately to dislodge the bark beetles that are killing it. The branches are covered in rust-colored needles that have faded from their original healthy green as the beetle attack cuts off the tree’s food and water. These are the visible scars of massive beetle destruction that now stretches from Colorado to British Columbia.
Soon, wind will likely finish off the pockmarked lodgepoles, sending them crashing to the forest floor, says Mr. Love, a district ranger in the Lolo National Forest in Montana. That’s a fire hazard headache for the forest service – and, some say, a missed opportunity.
In the nearby Bitterroot Valley, a nationally renowned cluster of log-cabin builders ply their trade. Dead, standing lodgepole pines killed off by beetles make ideal logs for cabins. But instead of using the nearby trees to boost the economy and mitigate fire risks, these companies are hauling timber in from Canada instead.
The reasons why the dead trees remain untouched reveal how difficult it is for the US Forest Service to offer timber sales to loggers, say agency officials. Even seemingly straight-forward operations, such as allowing the helicopter-cutting of dead trees following a massive die-off, present difficulties due to bureaucracy and resistance from environmentalists who point out the value of such trees to wildlife.
“There’s an overabundance of [dead] material out there that could be removed and done in a very benign way,” says Love. “That’s hard to do because there’s a lot of people out there that challenge our decisions both with appeals and through litigation.”
An estimated 2.4 million acres across five northern US states show visible signs of trees killed by the beetles, according to data from Gregg DeNitto with the US Forest Service in Missoula.
The attack on a tree starts with adult female beetles, which bore through the bark and deposit eggs underneath. The hatched offspring feed on the tree’s food-bearing tissue. The beetles also introduce fungi that cut off the tree’s water supply. In roughly a year, the tree is dead.
The beetles are nothing new to the region, and every few decades their population explodes. This current outbreak is being fueled by drought conditions, the fact that earlier logging homogenized the age of the trees, and the lack of long winter cold spells that kill the beetles, says Mr. DeNitto.
“If it’s miles from occupied areas, we wouldn’t concern ourselves with it,” says DeNitto. “If we wait three years or longer, we’ll be paying for any [fire fuels reduction] treatment and we’ll have a cost to the taxpayers.”
He notes that leaving dead trees does provide a habitat for forest animals – a point emphasized by Sara Johnson, who runs an environmental group called the Native Ecosystem Council. Among the animals using the dead trees: pine martins, snowshoe hares, forest owls, woodpeckers, chickadees, and voles.
“Beetles are just a natural part of the forest, and loggers and the Forest Service [are looking for] any excuse to log,” says Ms. Johnson. Her group has several active lawsuits aimed at halting logging on National Forest lands. “You have this huge ecosystem out there that evolves with the beetle. With logging, you not only take that away, they take the whole forest away.”
Such lawsuits are slowing the process of making parts of the forest available to loggers, says Love. A few decades ago the Seeley Lake ranger station averaged sales of 25 million board feet a year. Today the figure is closer to 4 million.
As a result, every one of Missoula County’s dozen sawmills have closed save one: Roger Johnson’s Pyramid Lumber. The beetle-killed lodgepoles make perfect cabin logs, Mr. Johnson says. But they can’t sit too long before other critters disfigure the wood: “The longer the tree stays dead out in the forest, the more degrade [in value] we have,” Johnson says.
Part of the delay includes inefficiencies in the environmental review process that’s required before holding a timber sale, says Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Sales now require lots of individual specialists to sign off on reviews, rather than relying on individual foresters who work more quickly.
Mr. Stahl recently sent a letter to President-elect Obama’s transition team making this point. In the letter, he asked, “How many [Forest Service] employees does it take to cut a small tree?”
An excerpt: “One to tell you no effect upon fish; one to tell you no effect upon historic artifacts; one to tell you no effect upon streams; one to tell you which small tree to cut; one to tell you how much the tree is worth.”
Spending so much time on reviews make it difficult for timber sales to be profitable for the Forest Service, says Stahl, especially when fire fighting already makes up a large portion of the Forest Service budget.
Love says the specialization was developed due to the “lack of trust” in Forest Service decisions. Outside groups felt “we weren’t giving consideration to research values that we should have.” Neither Love nor Stahl disputes the need for an environmental review. But, says Love, “an appeal could cost you another year. If there are litigation and stays then there’s not any [timber] values left.”
This instability is why Steve Peckinpaugh, owner of Custom Log Homes, Inc., is hauling logs 1,200 miles from Canada. But getting logs locally would be cheaper, and greener, he argues.
If the logs were local, says Mr. Peckinpaugh, “We would be spending far fewer resources – fuel – to get the timber to the site.”
( More stories )
Comments
2. Chuck Moody | 01.08.09
I wonder how much of that area around Seeley Lake Sara Johnson has ever seen. I wonder if she’s ever been caught having to fight a fire because all those dead trees make perfect fuel. I wonder how much of the fire fighting budget her taxes pay. If she wants all those dead trees, there is an answer. The beetles need a certain proximity between trees to move to the next batch. If loggers could take a corridor around the diseased trees, they could prevent the beetles from infesting more live trees.
3. R Thomson | 01.08.09
The beetles affect timber industries in Europe too. Forests in England are affected. West and northern Scotland are still free of bark beetles so timber growers are able to supply sawmills in Ireland that will not take timber from affected areas. Preventing the spread of the beetles means that the UK has imposed a “cordon sanitaire” around the affected areas.
4. Matthew Koehler | 01.08.09
This article leaves a lot to be desired, contains a number of false or misleading statements and basically is just a re-do of a similar article in the NY Times a few months ago. The CSM can do better in my mind.
What Mr. Love failed to you is that right now on the Lolo NF there is not one single appeal of a timber sale and there are no active lawsuits. How Mr. Love can blame appeals and litigation is a real mystery.
The truth of the matter is that our nation is experiencing the worst housing market since the Great Depression and the steepest decline in wood consumption ever. Fact is, timber company’s cannot even sell many of their lumber products right now and are not even bidding on national forest timber sales that are offered.
Why this article ignores this reality is a real mystery.
Also, for a more comprehensive look at the beetle issue check out a report titled, “Recent Forest Insect Outbreaks and Fire Risk in Colorado Forests: A Brief Synthesis of Relevant Research.”
It’s available at: http://www.cfri.colostate.edu/docs/cfri_insect.pdf
The report, from some of the leading independent researchers on the topic, answers many common questions such as:
Do outbreaks of mountain pine beetles and other forest insects increase the risk of severe wildfires? Does a large insect outbreak constitute an emergency? Are forests with large amounts of insects and dead trees unhealthy?
Some of the answers may surprise people.
5. George Wuerthner | 01.08.09
These quotes by District Ranger Tim Love sure demonstrate that he is a timber beast at heart. He spreads timber industry propaganda about fire risk. Dead trees do not increase fire risk, it is the regrowth of young trees that released from competition which sprout in the understory that creates increased fire risk–but not for several decades, and then it fades again. Love is greatly exaggerating the fire risk.
Secondly, so what is there are more fires. Fires and bugs are the major source for dead trees and dead trees are the foundation of forest soils. His view that there is an “overabundance” of dead trees demonstrates his ecological ignorance. Too bad he is drawing a salary from the taxpayers instead of the local timber company who apparently he feels he works for.
6. Ada Montague | 01.08.09
I was under the impression that the only way to get rid of the bugs was to burn the wood while they are dormant. Will building with the infected logs solve the issue or perpetuate it?
What about using the dead trees as biofuel? I’ve heard there’s an anaerobic process that will convert the pine-beetle infected trees into fuel. I’d love more info on this if anyone has it. Maybe the logging industry could convert to produce both wood for building, paper, etc., and for biofuel.
Thanks.
7. Dave Skinner | 01.08.09
Sara Jane was a FS bird biologist who apparently would sign off on nothing. So her boss managed to pry her loose from the civil service.
Now she’s bunkered up in a KOA she owns at Three Forks and her hobby is filing litigation.
And litigation HAS in fact killed the Forest Service. Timber harvest has declined 70 percent in R 1 and 80 percent in R6, while the trees continue to grow and die and fall over and burn. Or burn and fall over, take your pick.
And Will, I guess if you don’t want to take care of what you own, that’s fine, but when it comes to joint property, I want a divorce. You can have the existing designated wilderness, give the rest of us the rest.
8. dorothy Petrich | 01.09.09
To cut a barrier around the effected trees sounds as logical as a fire barrier which has proven successful in containment. I agree that after these dead trees have been thus contained they should be removed in the most economical manner with planned engineering. Why can’t men accept the logical way women think?
9. Dorothy Petrich | 01.09.09
The suggestion to surround the dead trees with an open barrier as firemen do with wild fires sounds like a most logical approach. But to harvest the dead trees needs an engineering plan for environmental control
10. Ruth Busch | 01.09.09
I am having my small tree farm thinned at this time. I find the loggers here in Alabama will not harvest a dead tree for fear the top will fall and damage their valuable equipment. Or so my forester tells me.
11. Matthew Koehler | 01.09.09
These two articles I will paste below are interesting to read in the context the Forest Service’s Mr. Love saying that appeals and litigation are the reason logging has been curtailed.
For example, the Western Wood Products Association this week revised its downward lumber forecast even lower and stated, “Western mills are experiencing the largest downturn in lumber demand ever recorded.” Read the whole thing here:
http://www2.wwpa.org/ABOUTWWPA/Newsroom/tabid/817/Default.aspx
And the Kalispell (MT) Daily Interlake reports today that Plum Creek Timber Company has shut down and reduced production at their Montana timber mills because of what their CEO said was, ” eroding demand for our wood products.”
Furthermore, Plum Creek is actually telling loggers to stop working in the woods because their log yards are full and they’ve got a lot of inventory both in logs and lumber because of the housing crisis. Get that whole story here:
http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/01/09/news/local_montana/news_8768521326_03.txt
Again, why the CSM’s reporter chose to ignore the profoundly dire economic reality by constructing some “strawman” about “appeals and litigation” stopping logging is a mystery. I expect much better reporting in the CSM!
12. Karl | 01.10.09
Harvesting dead trees is also an excellent method of carbon sequestration.
Burning them or leaving them to decay returns all the captured CO2 to the atmosphere.
13. John | 01.10.09
There is no pine beetle epidemic in the uk R Thomson. It was not introduced from Europe and has allways been native to N America. It is mild winters and a failure to allow natural controls of the forest ie fire that have allowed the beetle to reach epidemic numbers.
14. GW | 01.10.09
I’m from the province of British Columbia in Canada.
The mountain pine beetle has caused widespread damage to forests here and in the neighbouring province of Alberta. Researchers at the University of Northern B.C. have discovered that the beetle can fly to heights of up to 2600 feet above the ground. Under their own power the beetles can fly only one to two miles but if carried by the wind they can travel more than 60 miles if they can stay at higher altitudes for five or six hours. As far as containment of the beetle I think Mother Nature is in control here!
15. Paul | 01.12.09
One of the biggest problems has been that logging companies have replanted pine behind them, turning the landscape into a homogenous environment.
In Alberta, there is not much of a concern in letting mother nature take her toll on the pine stands. In fact, two-thrids of a forest will remain after the pine beetle does its damage.
Logging companies have for years gone into areas with a wonderful mix of spruce, firs and pine and replanted only pine. The lack of foresight has created this problem.
16. Suzanne | 01.12.09
John (#13) - the nematode that causes pine wilt disease is native to North America but it has already spread to Asia, and recently turned up in Portugal. Pine beetles are the “vector” for spreading the nematodes. It’s possible that you and R. Thompson (#3) are talking about related but separate diseases. Either way, the timber industry in the UK is likely to take strong measures to contain any threat that is spread by, with, or through beetles (regardless of where the beetles originated).
17. peter | 01.13.09
“Wildlife” is emotional and easy and is used interchangeably as an excuse for NOT managing a forest and FOR managing a forest. It is also simplistic, though
the interactions of organisms within an ecosystem are anything but a study in simplicity. Truly,though,is wildlife in need of 20,000 dead trees in just one of many areas devastated by this beetle?
18. April | 01.13.09
There are obviously several things at work that are contributing to the beetle outbreaks and the lack of the ability of good folks to utilyze the material.
For those of you that sit around in your wood framed offices telling us to go read some research and that dead trees don’t contribute to fire hazard, I’d say you are smoking too much of the green stuff. I fight fires, and the largest fire we had in our community occured in a dead lodgepole forest that was beetle killed in the 80’s. Our forest floors are now riddled with this dead fuel and what does it take to make fire? Fuel + Heat + Oxygen = Fire! Mr. George Wuerthner, you better go back to boyscouts and learn the basics.
Also, for Mr. Koehler, I’ve seen plenty of appeals come across my desk with your name on it for our projects so don’t try to deny your involvement. The Lolo, may not have any current litigations right now but they have had plenty not so very long ago and more are to come. I remember you being very involved when the Lolo wanted to harvest timber from the 2000 fires. And just remember, the housing crisis didn’t happen over night it happened over a period of several years and that is exactly where the F.S. is. Environmentalist are NOT recieiving funds by sitting back and working with the Forest Service on projects. Environmentalist receive their money by litigating and they certainly don’t mind utilzying the wood fiber resource to write their appeals up on either!
19. the enironmentalist delimma | 01.13.09
It does seem that these arguments are fueling a new money hungry industry - the envrionmental industry…How much money do these groups who challenge just about any type of forest management that involves product removal bring in from city donors? And would these donations that give them desks, jobs and purpose continue to flow if there wasn’t “controversy”? I highly doubt it. The once mighty timber industry and its lobbying force has been replaced by these so called “environmental” groups that have the kind of politics and ideology the environmental movement was created, in part, to stop…IE sacrificing the health our our National Forests for monetary gain!
20. Brian Russell | 01.15.09
I would just like to make a comment for the argument of active forest management. Some people think we should take a hands off approach and let the beetles kill everything and let fires burn. Well I would have to disagree with that. Wood produced by trees is one of the few truly renewable resources we have and letting it go to waste is a sin. The forest when properly managed will provide fare better timber, better habitat for wildlife and fish, and a better quility of water supply.
When not managed, timber stands become homogenous and lack diversity. This in turn leads to catastrophic fires and insect outbreaks. Which also leads to destruction of fish and wildlife habitat at a fare greater expense than actively managing a forest for the benefits of timber production, water quility, and for wildlife and fish.
Anybody that is skeptical, go out in the woods with a forester and take a tour of managed stand of timber and un-managed stands (take a look at the differences in the health of the forests). Look at areas that have burned and take a look at where stands have been treated before a fire and compare them to the stands that were not treated. Then draw your opinions and conclusions.
21. Mickey Bellman | 01.16.09
Ever try walking through a dead lodgepole forest five years after a fire? The lodgepole reproduction is so thick that it is like walking though a thicket of bamboo. Snags have fallen over but seldom lie flat on the ground. Many are about waist high and overgrown with the lodgpole saplings to the point you cannot even see them or force your way through the debris. Elk and deer avoid the area because they cannot even walk there, and there is nothing to eat anyhow under the dense shade. When another fire sweeps through the area, the dense saplings, down trees and snags will burn so hot that the soil will be sterilized for years.
The house log cabin sector is a very small part of the timber industry and could never utilize all the trees killed by the beetles. There will always be millions of acres in wilderness areas where the beetles can get a free lunch, too. Timber sales often go unbid because the FS prepares a 200-page contract allowing loggers to work every third Thursday in the months with a blue moon–not exactly an economic incentive or profitable. The entire housing market is in the tank, so why would any sawmill in the United States want to spend mony to cut lumber that sits unsold in its yard? Would any consumer go out and buy a year’s supply of lettuce to sit in his refrigerator hoping he can eat it in 12 months?
While enviros wring their hands, appeal every decision and litigate every action, our forests are falling apart. But if they stop now, they will lose their funding and their jobs and their publicity. Why can’t they just declare victory and strike their tents. Perhaps then professional foresters can return the forests to a healthy condition.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Leave a Comment
We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. The comments feature is a forum to discuss the ideas in our stories. Constructive debate - even pointed disagreement - is welcome, but personal attacks on other commenters are not, and will not be published.
Tip: Do not write a novel. Keep it short. We will not publish lengthy comments. Come up with your own statements. This is not a place to cut and paste an email you received. If we recognize it as such, we won't post it.
Please do not post any comments that are commercial in nature or that violate copyrights.
Finally, we will not publish any comments that we regard as obscene, defamatory, or intended to incite violence.
1. Will Snider | 01.07.09
The myth that lawsuits have decreased timber sales in Montana has been debunked over and over again. Excessive cutting on private lands, consideration of resources besides timber, and changing priorities have caused the decrease. Cutting trees on federal lands is not benign. Roads crisscross our forests leaving permanent scars. Scars that you and I pay for in money losing timber sales. Scars that decrease security of wildlife including grizzly bears, lynx, and other endangered species.