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As an owner of some Ponderosa Pine forest, I take a serious interest in this topic. I have been told that there is no aerial spraying that works for the ips beetles. Individual trees can be protected at a high cost, but there is nothing effective for anything more than a few favored shade trees.

The problem in a nutshell is Mother Nature reasserting her authority over the ponderosa forest. A natural pine forest contains a few large, widely separated mother trees, and a healthy mix of smaller trees of varying ages growing in between them. In a healthy ponderosa forest, you ought to be able to see clearly in any direction for a hundred yards.

However, the forests of the American West were mostly clear-cut between 1850 and 1920. The dominant mother trees were the first ones targeted. What grew up to replace them was a thickly forested monoculture, all of the trees of about the same age, and without any larger trees to compete with them for light and water. More trees were able to grow much larger and more closely spaced than ever before.

But the story does not end there, of course. The Forest Service and the timber companies were happy to see a denser forest, but they soon found that it was more susceptible to fire. Therefore, we have had eighty years of suppression of fires that ought to have been allowed to burn naturally, and if the forest had been healthy in the first place, they would have done no lasting harm. In fact, a healthy forest requires periodic fires to clear out underbrush on the forest floor, and if this does not happen, it increases the risk of crown fires making it to the treetops later on. The thick bark of the pines protects them from the low temperature ground fires.

Now we have the worst of all possible worlds: a thick forest of large mature trees of eighty to a hundred fifty years old. They have reached the saturation point, crowding each other out for resources. The pine trees fight the ips beetles by producing abundant sticky sap to trap them and drown them, but it requires plenty of water and sunlight to do so. Now they are all unhealthy and susceptible both to fire and beetles.

The situation was summed up by a forest ranger I once heard, who said: "Fire, bugs or logging, pick your favorite." We decided on logging and have taken over five hundred trees out of our land. The National Forest immediately adjacent has also been heavily logged, but not clear-cut, leaving a few large healthy trees to be the mothers of the next generation. Twenty years ago I would have been aghast, but now I applaud them. Yes, it looks bad for a couple of years afterwards, but I have seen tracts that were selectively logged ten years ago and you cannot tell they were ever touched. It's a little like getting a haircut.

Perversely, the areas that are closest to civilization are the most likely to have been clear-cut in bygone days, and thus the unhealthiest now. That is why the urban-wildland interface has been the scene of such terrible fire damage in recent years. The really wild, inaccessible forests that never were logged are still in pretty good shape.

This country needs the Forest Service to approve selective logging over huge swathes of the West, and soon, or there will be ever more horrible forest fires. The construction industry could use cheaper lumber prices too. When the logging is done, naturally-occurring fires ought to be allowed to burn themselves out for the health of the forest, unless they threaten structures. If this is done, the beetle problem will take care of itself.

We have lost a lot of our trees down here in Arizona, but in our part of the forest the beetles have pretty much run their course. The sickliest trees are long since dead, while the rest have successfully fought them off and are a nice looking green with the recent rains. Some spots lost 90% of their trees, but in most places it was on the order of 20-40%, and the forest is healthier for it. The orange needles on the dead trees look like hell for a couple of years, but you don't notice them so bad when the needles finally fall off.

Bring on the logging trucks!

-ccm