If you've hiked high in the mountains of Yellowstone, Glacier, or the Sierra Nevada, you may have seen stands of whitebark pines. These trees are nature's ultimate survivors, living a thousand years through blizzards and droughts, growing at the treeline, gnarled and massive despite heavy winds and deep chills. They've flourished under tough conditions...until meeting homo sapiens.
Now their loss threatens high altitude ecosystems -- from bird to bear --of the West's best loved national parks.
And the Fish & Wildlife Service is ignoring the problem, perhaps crafting a "whitebark pine rule" to accompany the "polar bear rule" and defend a Natural Resources Defense Council lawsuit.
A healthy stand of whitebark pine, pinus albicaulis engelm, is a beautiful sight in the eyes of humans, birds, and bears. About 98% of the range of whitebark pine in the United States is on public lands, including national parks, wilderness areas, and national forests, including all western high elevation national parks except for Rocky Mountain National Park. In those public lands, the whitebark pine colonizes the highest elevations in the most inhospitable sites where it forms treeline ecosystems.
The whitebark pine is infested with pine beetles. That's nothing new. The trees and beetles had achieved an uneasy truce in which pine beetles nibbled during warmer months, then were killed by hard freezes during harsh alpine winters, the same extremely cold weather that made Vancouver seem like an ideal place to host the Winter Olympics.
Whoops.
NRDC scientists report (64 pg pdf) that the mountain West is warming faster than the rest of the planet while snowmelt is decreasing. Without hard freezes to kill the pine beetle, the insect is reproducing and munching its way through high altitude forests of the West. The beetle is hitting the whitebark pine particularly hard. Surveys from last year show the tree's mortality rate as high as 70 percent, leaving rust-red dead trees clustered in groves like battlefield gravestones. (Photo credit: NRDC)
Why should we care about the loss of a single species of tree?
The whitebark pine isn't just "seen one tree, seen 'em all"; it's a foundation species, meaning that it creates the conditions necessary for other plants and animals to get established in harsh alpine ecosystems.
The tree produces a calorie-rich nut that feeds everything from red squirrels to Clark's nuthatchers to grizzly bears. Nursing grizzlies particularly benefit from the rich food. When the nuts are in short supply, grizzly bears have lower birth rates. (Photo with Grand Tetons in background; photo credit: Kurt Repanshek, National Parks Traveler)
And the tree helps maintain Western watersheds. A stand of healthy whitebark pine trees acts as a picket fence: the trees help shield snowbanks from the sun, thus allowing for a relatively slow and even snowmelt. Its roots also prevent soil erosion.
What can be done?
From the Fish & Wildlife Service's point of view, nothing. It's taking the ostrich approach. NRDC petitioned F&WS to list the whitebark pine as threatened/endangered in December 2008, requiring a response within 90 days. None came, so the NRDC has filed a lawsuit. The pine is at least the third species directly threatened by climate; the F&WS created a "polar bear rule" for the first and denied protection to the pika on what seems to be purely political result-oriented grounds. I wouldn't be surprised to hear a similar manufactured reason for denying protection to the whitebark pine.
On the other hand, if the Obama administration is truly interested in generating jobs, cutting down dead trees on public lands is a win-win-win. Dead trees give off carbon, while living trees sequester (absorb) carbon; they're a fire hazard and a falling hazard. Removing infected trees may help curtail the spread of pine beetle infestation. And, of course, it's a labor-intensive task, meaning that it creates jobs. Consider it part of a modern-day Civilian Conservation Corps.
The rest of us can support the NRDC in its excellent work on this and many other issues.
Last, if you're the city of Vancouver looking to host a green Olympics, you make lemonade from lemons, and the roof of a new Richmond Oval speedskating rink from trees already killed by the pine beetle infestation. (Photo credit: Treehugger.)
I only hope that the political leadership realizes that creative uses for dead trees are not a permanent solution for an ecosystem in crisis.