Yesterday (July 6th) the New York Times ran a fascinating article on western bark beetles that bucked the traditional wisdom.

Some See Beetle Attacks on Western Forests as a Natural Event

According to most in the Forest Service and the logging industry, a bark beetle outbreak is a natural disaster, akin to an earthquake or volcano.  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been cited as the source of the sound bite that "beetle outbreaks are the hurricane Katrina of the West."

But the sound bite and the science don't quite mesh.

The article quotes Dr. Gregg DeNitto, a forest health specialist and dissenting voice within the Forest Service, who  states:

“This is a native insect in a native host, and these are normal biological processes that have happened for millennia."

 The reality check goes on:

Nothing can or should be done to halt the spread of the beetle, experts say. After they kill the mature trees, the soil becomes more fertile as nitrogen levels increase, sometimes tripling. The growth rate of surviving trees increases when the infestation ends. After dead trees fall over or burn, grass grows and provides elk habitat, and slightly more diverse forests rise up.

...

Both Dr. DeNitto and Dr. Six allow that the current outbreak is not entirely natural. Human intervention in the form of fire suppression and large-scale clear cuts mean that many forests are simultaneously vulnerable.

Under natural conditions a forest is a patchwork of different-age trees, which means the beetles also create a patchwork of dead trees. “If they come up against a young patch, they’ll quit,” Dr. Six said. “If it’s old, they keep on going. But we’ve lost that mosaic, so they keep on going.”

Global warming may be another factor in the scale of current outbreaks.  Unfortunately, the Forest Service is slow to take the hint.  Here in Oregon, they are planning large-scale clear cutting projects as the "answer" to beetle problems, including the horrendous D Bug project near Crater Lake National Park.

It seems silly to think that a problem which has been exacerbated by fire suppression, clear cutting, and carbon emissions will be solved by more fire suppression and clear cutting (which releases the carbon captured and stored in a forest).  But that is exactly what the Forest Service is proposing to do with the D Bug project.