a) Monocultures of trees originally grown in higher altitudes with high water demands make it easy for the bark beetles to thrive (esp. in this warming climate).
b) Additionally, these monocultures usually lack multiple levels of vegetation, allowing wind to pass through (it should go over) and further drying the land, harming the trees and creating a favorable environment for the beetles.
c) We've deforested the countryside so that only small forest areas remain, with large clearings, enabling the wind in again. Thanks to this the forests are losing their ability to hold water and produce new rains, worsening the drought conditions.
d) The removal of dead wood and litter further exacerbates the drying and destroys biodiversity, making the conditions even more suitable for the bark beetles to infest.
e) Furthermore, we tend to prioritize the felling of the strongest and biggest trees, with deep roots, weakening the overall resilience of the forest.
f) Instead of letting the trees mature with deep roots, we cut down the plantations when they're only 40 years old (youngsters).
g) The spruce and pine monocultures are the most susceptible to destruction by beetles, and when they're felled and sold as round wood abroad, the cycle continues with the replanting of the same type of forest.
I found this to be true of many "forests" in parks in Germany while living there. Felt absolutely bizarre.
The old airport in Munich got turned into a park, some parts are very cool, but there's this one area where they planted a bunch of trees...in an extremely precise grid structure. It's just so weird to see, like why would you do that? Like a stereotype of German culture brought to life.
If you want old forests, you have to go to the mountains. Anyplace steep enough, to hinder easy woodcutting. In those places you find the remains of real forest.
But things are changing, there is actually a new diverse forest growing, where those monoculture tree plantations have been. It will just take some time and hopefully the forests gets that time, before monocultures come into fashion again..
It's the same here in British Columbia. Most people here have no idea that a vast bulk of our forests are in fact second or third generation since we began managing forests. They're not especially vibrant with life, and their diversity is remarkably low. If you live near it, it's virtually guaranteed that it's not a natural forest.
I own a small acreage in north GA, which is part of a former timber plantation. About 10 acres are nothing but densely packed southern pine monoculture. My neighbor has another 15 or so acres of pure pine adjacent to it, also rows and rows of the darned things.
Next to it I have another 20 or so of mixed hardwoods and pines. Hickory, oak etc. Native plants.
Nature is slowly but steadily reclaiming _almost_ everything - I see tons of whitetail, plenty of birds of prey, a family of black bears, the occasional flock of turkey, a very healthy population of various bugs, including ecologically sensitive dragonflies, butterflies, etc, and blissfully few wild hogs. There hasn’t been a week where I don’t see anything on the trail cam.
However… those 10 acres grow nothing, and I mean nothing, but southern pines. Unless I have it professionally managed (and hence, harvested), it will probably grow nothing but. I see the financial incentive, but it’s grim. I never spend any time there, whereas spending time in the mixed growth (still pine heavy!) is pleasant - hunting, camping, photography, riding ATVs, hiking (I have maybe a mile of trails, so maybe we’ll call it “walking” :-) ) - all feels natural. I’m not a professional, so maybe it’s not actually natural and healthy, but the amount of animals and plants I see and hear, it certainly feels like it is.
We don’t have bark bettle problems there, and whenever we do, the state and county would very happily help you to get rid of it - these things are the rural equivalent of a “national security” risk. The county foresters are a call away.
I’ve seen the devastation these beetles do in Germany just this year (vacation, but I also grew up there - saw it in the Harz and Sauerland), and it’s _incredible_.
I feel like our pine plantations have it coming if we (American timberland owners, that is) continue like this. But unfortunately, my 30something acres have nothing against the thousand of acres that actual, professional timber companies own. That’s billionaire territory.
The exact same pattern has covered enormous areas of Sweden, where industrial-scale timber production, often for nothing more than wood-chips, has replaced diverse old-woodland area.
The ancient forests have historically contained bark beetles - but crucially also their natural predators in the abundant biodiversity of their environment, including predatory insects and birds that feed on both the larva and the beetles.
The new monoculture plantations are arid deserts where bark beetles thrive without competition or natural checks. Not to speak of the tinder these dry and wind-swept forests provide, when fires start.
They are very profitable for their corporate owners though.
Mention should also be made of a restrained habitat for birds that could have eaten those bugs.
The large clearings could have worked in the existing forests’ advantage, if they would have been left alone (so to speak) and had wild grasses/plants been allowed to grow there.
As things stand right now most of the Western European “wild” habitat is manicured to hell and back, it feels like one is visiting a giant orangerie instead of nature itself. Things are a little better in that regard over here in Eastern Europe, but rapid societal development (lots more paved roads, people having money for vacation houses out in the “wilderness”, increased tourism) are putting all that in danger.
Its not really an issue, or only problem for humans. Bugs will kill the trees, consume the dead wood and fertilize the soil. Bio diversity will come back
No, the dead wood will get sold, the land will be cleared (they have special machinery now which destroys even large stumps that makes forest ground look like a crop field), burn or take away the dead wood and leave only the bare land.
Then they'll plant the same monoculture again.
It may be different in (some) reservations, but this is the common approach.
There are two bits of information that the article omits. Large chunks of the Harz forest are a nature reserve and only limited action will be taken, for example planting seedlings. Pesticides won’t be used in those zones - the only action that will be taken is a safety corridor around those zones. The spruce forests that grow there are not the original forest - they were planted to get access to cheap lumber for mining operations, sometimes on terrain unsuitable to spruce. Most of them were planted after WW2.
An interesting case study about this is the Bavarian Forest National Park.
In the 80s, several major storms caused a huge amount of trees to die, and there was a decision made to not intervene in the forest ecosystem and leave the dead trees instead of removing them.
Then in the 90s because of this and other reasons that created a favorable environment for the bark beetles, there was a massive spread of them and large parts of the forest died.
The national park management continued the policy of not intervening in the forest ecosystem, which was met by pretty heavy criticism from parts of the population.
However it seems to have worked out in the end, as the forest is now starting to regenerate.
It's interesting to note that these are not natural forests, but essentially man-made tree plantations, reforested since the 18th century after the natural forests had been eliminated in the centuries before mainly because of ore mining. Same story further to the south-east in the Ore Mountains.
Getting rid of the spruce tree mono culture and letting a mixed forest regrow will be a good thing even if it will take a century or more (that's at least what the strategy seems to be in Ore Mountains).
This seems remarkable from someone who grew up in Toronto, where chunks of ancient forests (since the ice sheet retreated ~12kya ) are scattered everywhere.
The Swiss National Park was mostly untouched since 1914: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_National_Park However, that probably does not qualify as old growth. The list you linked to does not list any forest in Switzerland.
Apparently parts of Ruegen island are "old forest" and some patches here in there in nature reserves, but I guess one could argue that even the old Slavic and Germanic tribes already "cultivated" their forests.
I recently visited Harz and subsequently Saxon Switzerland (which is in Germany and Czechia, not Switzerland) and both had issues with these beetles. I was just a tourist, so I'd love to hear a local chime in for any corrections.
I was initially shocked that a country could log their own national parks, but eventually came to understand the situation. They log to avoid the beetles spreading, but also because the trees the beetles have infested become risks of starting fires. A fire had occurred on the Czech side of Saxon not too long before I visited.
Harz looks specifically bad until you get near the summit (Brocken) because they've explicitly decided to naturally re-forest the park. This reforestation policy isn't new though; it's been applied since miners over-extracted the mountain and destroyed much of the park around the dig-sites, the park brought in new species, and then ultimately decided those new species weren't going to restore their old habitat.
Yes it's definitely noticeable in my home region (Ore Mountains near the Czech border). Not as large scale as in the photos of that article, more like isolated spots. The forst is definitely getting thinner, at first caused by the massive damage from storms like Kyrill, and then the dry summers in recent years.
Same long-term strategy as in the Harz mountains though: natural reforestation, which should eventually lead to a more robust forest (maybe at the cost of profitability).
They're also a big problem here in New Mexico. I live on a heavily wooded lot of mixed pinyon and juniper. About half of my pinyon have died, and I've spent much of my free time in the last two years removing them. But the surrounding lots and the adjacent vast public lands have scary amounts of dead fuel on the ground. I'm preparing for a major fire as if it's inevitable and imminent, rather than just another risk. My previous home insurance company doubled my rates so I moved to another ... which my agent tells me, has already withdrawn insurance underwriting from much of the area.
The pinyon that are left tend to be the ones that grow closely with the juniper, which is somehow protective. Removing dead trees seems to slow down the disease in nearby trees, so it acts like a spreading infection. I'm told that the bark beetles are usually controlled by die-offs in winter cold snaps, and we just haven't had the necessary cold snaps in recent winters.
> But the tiny insects have been causing outsized devastation to the forests in recent years, with officials grappling to get the pests under control before the spruce population is entirely decimated. Two-thirds of the spruce in the region have already been destroyed, said Alexander Ahrenhold from the Lower Saxony state forestry office, and as human-caused climate change makes the region drier and the trees more favorable homes for the beetles’ larvae, forest conservationists are preparing for the worst.
It seems this is not exactly new:
> Around 1800, large swathes of the Harz were deforested. The less resistant spruce monoculture, that arose as a consequence of the mining industry in the Upper Harz, was largely destroyed by a bark beetle outbreak and a storm of hurricane proportions in November 1800. This largest known bark beetle infestation in the Harz was known as the Große Wurmtrocknis, and destroyed about 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of spruce forest and lasted about for 20 years. The woods were largely reforested with spruce. Continuous problems with bark beetle and storms were the negative side effects of mining in the Harz Mountains.
> In the longer term, mixing other tree species into the forest could be a solution, Ahrenhold said. “It makes sense to plant other conifers that can cope better with these conditions, especially on south-facing slopes and on very dry soil,” he said.
The AP article fails to mention the massive amount of deforestation and animal depopulation that's occurred for centuries now, but which is well-documented in the Wikipedia article. This gives the misleading impression that what's happening now is somehow unprecedented.
The issue, it seems, is that trying to "manage" the land doesn't work. It may even be more the root of the problem than the solution.
These were some of the most common trees around until this damn bugs got here. The emerald ash borer (EAB) (Agrilus planipennis) is an invasive beetle from Asia that infests and kills North American ash species (Fraxinus sp.) including green, white, black and blue ash. All of New York's native ash trees are susceptible to EAB.
Same thing happened where I'm from, Illinois, a decade ago or so. They were basically all wiped out.
However the past few times I've visited I've actually noticed both young ash trees and old "dead" trees that had been cut down to the stump with new growth.
It makes me wonder if there'll be new a balance struck where there will be ash trees, and there will be ash borer, just fewer of each.
They're also rampant around the SF bay area; they mostly leave the native trees alone, but I'm staring at a massive dead pine tree that was healthy a few years ago.
The damage in the article looks different though. Our beetles seem to focus on a ring of bark near the ground, so they don't have to eat nearly as much to kill the tree.
I remember that when I was in school good parts of the Harz mountains were destroyed by the Bark Beetle, but at that time it was acid rain that made matters worse. It was a poster example of the Waldsterben (dying of forests) at that time. This phenomenon has been politically abused at least since the 80s.
The classic 1980's "Waldsterben" meme photo was a strip of dead forest along the Czech border near the Fichtelberg though, this was most likely caused by dirty coal power station emissions from across the border, at times the air would reek of cat piss which we used to call "Bohemian Air".. or maybe better translated as "Bohemian Wind" :)
That acid rain certainly had an effect in some regions, but people at that time were very fast to attribute every single dying tree to that cause, just like today they do it with climate change. However, Bark Beetles don't need any helpers like acid rain or climate change, they can destroy a forest perfectly by themselves if they are in the right mood.
I agree that the topic was 'exploited' mainly by the Green Party in the 80s, but in the area I grew up (south east Germany near the Czech border) the forest is definitely in a much worse state now than at any time during the last 40 years, even including the heavy environmental pollution caused by the GDR industry.
Since the last 5 years or so there's so many grey, brown and empty patches in the forests that it's getting downright scary.
So what do locals think is the reason for this? The past few summers have been exceptionally dry and hot here (north of your place), but is this the only reason? If so, let's hope natures uses this cooler and rather wet year to recover a bit.
Btw, Inidentially my teenage son just came back from "Boofen" there :)
> Michael Müller, the Chair of Forest Protection at the Technical University in Dresden, said there are “very strict requirements for the use of pesticides” which can be very effective in getting rid of the bugs, although the chemicals are sometimes frowned upon for their potentially harmful environmental side effects.
but an actually harmful side effect is that the forest is now (more than) half dead.
if you're going to try to "manage" a forest (as if that's really possible), you should actually manage it. Otherwise, let it grow on its own with the widest variety of trees that would normally be there.
The later is whats happening now. They let the nature do its thing.
The bugs are only part of the problem. They are so widespread because it’s gotten to dry there which makes the trees vulnerable.
That is weird. If you visit the Harz National park it will say the opposite:
Harz was a commercial forest, turned national park. The beetle is a danger for the monoculture required by the former commercial forest. By letting the beetle kill off the mono culture, more varied vegetation, trees and nature will spruce up from the decaying dead trees. These varied and original species are resistant to the beetle and the problem will solve it self. In some areas they man has planted indigenous plants to help speed up the process.
It isn't just in Germany, its getting warmer around Alps and the conditions for pines are deteriorating... our whole forest of pines was destroyed by bark beetles a few years ago, now it is regrowing as a mixed forrest because pines just aren't viable anymore.
If you listen carefully to an infected tree, for example with a stethoscope applied directly to the trunk, then you can hear the mandible chatter generated by thousands of tiny mouths feeding.
I would attribute bark beetle issues to rising winter temperatures. As others have stated, monocultures are nothing new and haven't been much of an issue in temperate climates for centuries. Low winter temperatures (frosts) for extended periods of time are what keep bark beetle in check. Germany has been missing those for some time, hence the bark beetle issue.
Aside from that, Deutscher Wald looks great, which is nothing new. Pinecones are stacked in neat piles, underbrush cleared, trees are in tidy rows.
Take a lesson from the American Rockies, where forests are being decimated by a similar beetle blight:
issue prescribed fires, institute managed but aggressive proactive logging on public lands, institute maintenance of fire roads, and spring cleanup of deadfall... _now_.
Unfortunately, 'environmentalists' thumbed their nose to a lot of these practices and the result was half of Rocky Mountain National Park burning down.
This really pissed me off. Half of the trees in RMNP were/are dead standing since the Park Service had put out all natural fires for a century and did not allow logging of the dead wood. We hit the point where the fuel situation is so bad that fires are no longer controllable, and the fires burn so much hotter that it permanently scars the land by burning seeds that usually would make it through just fine.
This comment got downvoted but I think it's an important question.
Answer is: probably not, for the other reason stated. But it is sort of the wrong question too. Is underbrush removal the problem? Not really. There are a lot of things fire removes, besides underbrush, and restores to a natural state.
What we need to wrap our heads around is _fire is natural_; it's been here eons before humans walked the earth, and the native trees and forest have long evolved to take advantage of it.
The question we might ask instead is: why are so we so opposed to a natural process? Fire is definitely bad inside things like cities. However, a prescribed burn has enormous benefits that have been detailed in science literature ever since we noticed a decline in forests.
tragic opportunism to throw partisanship in with the upset
"do something now" is fine to say but the Devil is in the details, as they say. Actions have re-actions and ripple effects. Wise management is what got "us" here today ?
humble yourself then work with all your might, seems appropriate now
I just want to say that I live in the northwest and disagree with your analysis.
The problem today is mis-blaming the wrong cause. This is like victim blaming. So the real culprit here is a century of forest mismanagement and clearcutting which led to massive fires. Combined with global warming (warm winters which don't kill beetles) and free trade which allows pests free passage everywhere. But you blame environmentalists.
Because of that, your prescription for more logging and thinning will likely have the opposite effect of what's intended. You'll apply a tech and market solution to a problem of natural collapse and human culture. Which will have unintended consequences and cause a further domino effect of negative impacts to the natural world. Note that this is why we will likely not solve global warming through technology, nor any of the 100+ other catastrophes comprising this Anthropocene extinction.
The real answer is along the lines of changing our culture so that logging is no longer required. We could grow hemp or any number of better natural fibers. We could stop interfering with the food chain, for example by not endlessly fighting the reintroduction of wolves. But these types of answers are a lot of work and take decades and don't appeal to ego.
We have to ask ourselves: if we're serious about preventing the loss of our forests, are we willing to leave the trees where they fall for no financial gain? Are we willing to leave oil in the ground to prevent global warming? Will we aid countries being assaulted who have nothing to pay us with? Will we help children to eat whose parents are on drugs? And so on. Or will we rationalize and whatabout and fail to do what's right for people we disagree with, and do just exactly the wrong thing. Our failure to act outside of ego is what will ultimately destroy the planet.
For what it's worth, I don't entirely disagree with you, as I was just on a trip to Yellowstone for the first time in 25 years after the fires tore through in the 90s. The new 6 inch diameter trees are beautiful but packed too closely together and will need to be thinned. It will be interesting to see how that plays out (nature vs nurture), and it could provide a sustainable model for other forests.
I would suggest following the science then, if you think interrupting evolutionary natural events, such as fires, is a "good thing".
> We have to ask ourselves: if we're serious about preventing the loss of our forests, are we willing to leave the trees where they fall for no financial gain?
You need to ask yourself: Are you willing to let the forest burn, so natural events can take place?
Let me give you a story so we aren't talking past one another.
The Snake River plain where I live in Idaho used to be covered by a 10 foot tall sagebrush forest and edible plants like camas. A network of streams allowed one to walk and rarely be far from water. There were large herds of deer, antelope, sage grouse, mountain lions, fish, you name it.
Then the cattle ranchers came a century and a half ago after the Civil War. Within 3 years, they had grazed off all of the land near the town where I grew up. Sheep herders also caused massive loss of vegetation. The land went from lush and sustainable to a cheatgrass desert that never recovered.
So what happened? Well, midwest grasslands form a deep network of roots that grows back, even when the grass is stripped to the ground by animals or fire. But high desert grass is bunchgrass, where grass forms clumps in order to survive periods of draught. Once a clump is gone, it takes decades to regrow. Deer are browsers and eat leaves, while antelope may graze but have formed a symbiotic relationship where the herd only survives if it doesn't overgraze. But cows are grazers that completely strip whatever grass they're eating, while also damaging the delicate desert soil due to their weight. Cows simply aren't compatible with a bunchgrass ecosystem.
Once the grass was gone, the streams quickly eroded and the water table fell 6 feet, drying out the entire landscape. And that was that.
Without knowing anything about Germany's situation, I can look at the destruction caused by the introduction of a single pest and know that the forest was not healthy to begin with. Maybe it was cut centuries ago so is not an old-growth forest. Maybe the natural predators have all been killed. More likely, there are deep structural problems in the soil, like the forest is lacking an immune system, and the temperature is not what the forest evolved to survive in. Pests are like mold growing on an old piece of bread, a symptom not a cause.
Comments like yours that blame the people working to heal the trauma, rather than the people who inflicted the trauma, raise the level of ignorance in the world. I don't think that was your intention, so my intention here is not to criticize you. You are just looking for practical solutions to an impractical problem. That is why your solutions simply will not work in the manner you expect.
But you triggered me, so let me explain why. The people who came to Idaho in the 1800s were escaping persecution after they lost the Civil War. They brought a southern colonial culture which ignored brutality against the other if it was for a greater good, like providing a high quality of life to kin. That was the cultural driving force behind the extermination of Native Americans. If the land was damaged in the process, so be it.
Today we still live with the aftermath of that. It's the part that can't be said. It's critical race theory. It's why everything is broken. Its why America is falling apart. It's what our next election is about.
But I can't possibly explain the context of my environmentalist understanding in a single quip. So I play the loser in my community, even when I am not wrong. I was bullied by children of ranchers, whose families were the pillars of the community. They will never, ever, admit that they desertified southern Idaho. They will always project their image as "stewards of the land". Never mind that they destroyed our heritage and forced us into a narrow provincial way of life. That's crumbling anyway, as their unsustainable philosophy destroyed the natural resources which used to sustain our state's economy.
Nobody's going to read this, but if the few who do come away with a different perspective, then maybe it was worth it. I find myself on the losing end of so many conversations on HN and elsewhere that I'm not sure it's worth it anymore to try here. We all need to try harder. We all need to dig deeper and do better. It can't just be a handful of environmentalists.
I hate to see a forest burn as much as the next person. But please understand that I simply cannot give you a simple answer to your question of whether we should let forests burn so that natural events can take place. We're so far past that, that simple solutions are in fact the problem.
I wonder when people will wake up and stop following that stupid
never ending economy growth pattern. Its just impossible.. Nothing in nature grows for ever.. ok.. except blackholes but thats special case...
We either can have 200M happy ppl living decent lives or 10B poor ppl, struggling for basic things.
> We either can have 200M happy ppl living decent lives or 10B poor ppl
False dichotomy. We can have both (and probably do - and you are likely one of the 200M winners since you write English, have access to HN and you have the free time to comment on HN).
Oh, thats not that simple. Curves in nature are never linear or exponental.
They are mixed, depending on several factors. But always you will hit plateau.
Not understanding it means you are poor at math.
Just take a look at human population graph past last 2000 years. And why growth was such small? Answer is simple, energy density. Once humans started to use coal and later oil (high density energy sources) they could utilize machines to do all the hard work and so, we could grow futher. (I skip other importand achivements, but they are directly linked to energy density anyway).
As for the winner, oh well.. Yeah, im lucky one that I born in western world, I can have nice job and live in pretty fine conditions. But also, I am not person that will deny such live to other people, like all those fanatics saying we can have 10B ppl living. Yeah, we can.. in shitty conditions. But why those saying that usually are very rich having serveral huge houses and acres of land for themselfs, leaving others in small flats and working hard.
200M is not enough to maintain the current level of technology. There simply won't be enough people to develop new cpus, build rockets, maintain enough communication cables and satellites, research new treatments.
How can one live a decent life, if his loved ones die from illnesses that would have been treatable if there were more people, and if one knows that all of his descendants eventually will die from a fall of an asteroid because there is not enough people to ever develop measures against that.
In fact we live much better lives than what any of our ancestors did. And earth can sustain much more than 10B. We'll use gene drive to eliminate species like bark beetles, and when we double the population we'll be able to control the weather, solving by that climate change issue, and allowing population to double again.
> Nothing in nature grows for ever
maybe, but there are no signs that we are at a point that we can't grow anymore, because there is so much unused space around us. 30% of land are empty deserts that can be used with new technologies, 3x more is sea surface that can be used when we have enough people to develop seasteading, and after that there is virtually infinite amount of empty planets in our galaxy, so we are not even near the limit.
You are underestimating amount of energy waste for bullshit jobs.
Its huge. Only a fraction of population handles those importand hi-tec jobs.
Majority of jobs are for services. And a lot of jobs are bullshit jobs, like:
lawyers, judges, our inflated financial jobs, politics, various govs jobs.
While those are needed for our complex society, they are very inflated these days.
You are right, even small greedy population can destroy world. And that the primary problem, greed. Thats why we have ever growing economy, because we need grow to have more and more. Thats dead end. Much better is to have stable environment that ups and downs.
Also, stop dreaming about weather control, its extremally complex system that is not yet understood (will ever be? I hope so). There are a lot of examples on earth where people wanted to control ecosystem and it ended badly. This is another problem. Someone popups with an idea or tech and everyone jumps on it, lets use it, not doing research about possible side effects and how to mitigate it. Great example: plastics.
As for empty space, its not really empty. Its importand ecosystems for this planets that sustain live there. In reality, there is no empty space on earth, if you take a look on whatever spot, there is life there, small or tiny and we are struggling to understand what role in ecosystem it have.
Black holes don't actually grow forever, at least if you accept hawking radiation and the heat death of the universe. Eventually the evaporation due to hawking radiation will outpace the inflow of matter and light, causing the black hole to shrink until it is gone.
But the biggest one, given the resistance it evokes and how much damage our current practices cause (esp. biodiversity loss, deforestation, soil erosion, eutrophication, excessive water, use ... all driven by animal ag).
> All those needs energy
Agree, and understand. We're too dependent on fossil fuels, and the EROI keeps falling down.
I hope we'll manage to switch to renewables before the time runs out. Some hope is necessary :)
It seems like signing up for globalization means having to accept consequences like this. You can’t bemoan when invasive species affects local ecosystems when you also allow unabated global transport with absolutely no security or inspection for diseases or insects etc.
You can’t be lazy with inspection and then be shocked when an extremely global eceonomy introduces Bark Beetles and decimate your trees. Either accept this outcome or spend more money at entry points or stop globalization with countries that don’t inspect their exports to avoid the situation completely.
The bark beetle is not an invasive species in Central Europe though. The main reason is climate change (the last decade was increasingly hotter, drier and 'stormier') combined with a man-made tree mono culture (which goes back a few hundred years).
The same thing happened in California also due to climate change. The beetles here thrived far more than they used to due to shorter/warmer winters with less/no snow in the mountains, and beetle population exploded and they killed probably a million or more trees. Up in the mountains in California you can't drive anywhere without seeing thousands of dead trees all around you - and it's everywhere in the mountains here, probably millions of trees dead - I obviously don't know an exact count, but it's quite a lot.
a) Monocultures of trees originally grown in higher altitudes with high water demands make it easy for the bark beetles to thrive (esp. in this warming climate).
b) Additionally, these monocultures usually lack multiple levels of vegetation, allowing wind to pass through (it should go over) and further drying the land, harming the trees and creating a favorable environment for the beetles.
c) We've deforested the countryside so that only small forest areas remain, with large clearings, enabling the wind in again. Thanks to this the forests are losing their ability to hold water and produce new rains, worsening the drought conditions.
d) The removal of dead wood and litter further exacerbates the drying and destroys biodiversity, making the conditions even more suitable for the bark beetles to infest.
e) Furthermore, we tend to prioritize the felling of the strongest and biggest trees, with deep roots, weakening the overall resilience of the forest.
f) Instead of letting the trees mature with deep roots, we cut down the plantations when they're only 40 years old (youngsters).
g) The spruce and pine monocultures are the most susceptible to destruction by beetles, and when they're felled and sold as round wood abroad, the cycle continues with the replanting of the same type of forest.