“We didn’t anticipate this mortality rate, with tens, hundreds of thousands of dead trees,” Wettstein said.
“It’s outrun our planning process.”
See Michael Crichton's book "State of Fear" for an explanation of how the political and social climate got us to this point, particularly in Yellowstone.
The biggest threat to the forests are the environmentalists who block good forest management policies.
“It’s not if, but when,” Wettstein said.
For anyone who's seen what these beetles do to a pine forest, as I have here in east Tennessee, this is the absolute truth. The main difference between here and the far west is we have a lot more rain and, hence, a far lower risk of massive forest fires. My only disagreement is that, from what I've personally seen, the dead trees usually fall in about a year or less, not over two decades.
Click on Carry Okie's page and read about the book he wrote which deals with this very topic. It's a good read on how this nonsense started, and how to correct it.
Is there research to develop a beetle-resistent pine or import one? I know we lost all our chestnuts decades ago but scientists using some of the few genetically resistant American trees left in the wild and foreign trees have come up with a resistant tree that is now being planted.
Death of a forest ( more large fires soon across the West )
This is a misleading headline. Fire is a part of the lifecycle in a forest. This was proven in the Yellowstone fire. Small fires, which burn the excess deadfall, are extinguished. This causes a build-up of detritus on the forest floor, increasing the severity of a big fire.
It's the fault of the enviro-whackjobs who want the forests untouched by human hands until Bambi gets roasted, then they want to stop natural selection.
These idiots really believe the environment is supposed to be static, and any change is evil and had to be caused by man.
A forest should never change...
The global climate should never change...
The environment has been changing constantly for 5 billion years.
Get used to it.
The same dire predictions of fire were made for South-central US after sequential Ice Storms 5 or 6 years ago. The local people cut up the deadwood, hauled it out of the trees, and bulldozed it into neat piles instead. Amazing.
If a tree is healthy they can survive the bugs but when the environmentalists started managing the forests by suing the government good husbandmanship went by the wayside.
When these beetles eat all those trees, do they have secondary things they eat or will they die?
We could always replant years after they die out so it is whole again many decades from now if the beetles die out.
Couldn't be because idiot Forest Service Bureaucrats wouldn't let them be cut, could it? The fools are doing their best to make sure our forests burn. Because it's "natural"
stop importing poverty stricken third world people illegally, and give the ecosystem a chance.