OVER the past 14 years, a tiny insect no bigger than a grain of rice has laid waste a swathe of British Columbia’s forests so vast that the rust-red wasteland is visible from space. The mountain pine beetle has infested and killed over half the lodgepole pine forest in the centre of the province—an area larger than England.
OVER the past 14 years, a tiny insect no bigger than a grain of rice has laid waste a swathe of British Columbia’s forests so vast that the rust-red wasteland is visible from space. The mountain pine beetle has infested and killed over half the lodgepole pine forest in the centre of the province—an area larger than England. It has rampaged eastwards into northern Alberta for the first time. (It has also made localised attacks on forests in all 11 western American states.) Scientists now fear the voracious beetle is about to invade the jack pines of the boreal forest, which could see the plague sweep across northern Canada to the Atlantic coast. It is an unprecedented infestation that could become a catastrophe.
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The pine beetle is a well-known pest, not an exotic import, but no effective means has been found to stop it. The beetles swarm up trees in large numbers, killing them by boring through the bark, sapping their nutrients and emitting a damaging blue fungus. Cold winters and forest fires normally keep the beetle populations in check. Some forest scientists trace the current outbreak to 1994, when provincial-government foresters, fearing the ire of greens, failed to eradicate a small infestation in a provincial park by cutting and burning. In any event, recent British Columbian winters have not been cold enough to kill the beetles.
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