The Beetle that Devoured the Kenai Peninsula
Managing the Last Frontier
This article was originally published in the Winter 2003 Kitchen Sink magazine
Alaska likes to call itself the “Last Frontier,” which, apologies to Captain Kirk, is no exaggeration. At the same time that folks in the lower 48 were building nuclear bombs, homesteaders here were struggling to survive alone, without benefit of electricity or neighbors, an unforgiving and grizzly-infested wilderness. Like Little House on the Prairie, but really dark and cold.
This relatively recent settlement offered an increasingly enlightened US government and unprecedented opportunity: To preserve land as-yet untouched by industrialization using modern land management techniques, from fire suppression and logging limitations to declaring vast tracts untouchable, as national parks.
Today, almost three quarters of Alaska is protected by state and federal agencies, some of which exercise unusual powers enforcing much stricter regulations than elsewhere in the United States. Many public lands are, for instance, kept completely trail-free, or are limited to only a few hundred visitors each summer. Logging, hunting and fishing can be shut down at a moment’s notice. Here, nature comes first, not people.
Visitors to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, the easily accessible and relatively warm earthen appendage just south of Anchorage, are no longer met with the endless and uninhabited tracts of green pine forest still pictured on the postcards. Instead, they find some 4 million ghostly gray acres of dead spruce trees, victims of a brutal holocaust even our finest land-management programs have proven powerless to stop.
The Best Laid Plans of Moose and Men
The unassuming spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus rufipinus) has been a part of the Alaskan ecosystem for all of recorded history. Every spring since humans have arrived, the adult beetles leave their cozy nests within the spruce trees they have devoured from inside out, and take to the air on one gloriously alive day of the year. There, free for just a few hours, they find love in the endless Alaskan summer sunshine then retire, exhausted, to an untouched spruce tree to lay more eggs.
Healthy trees, those with plenty of water, can flood the new nests with sap, forcing the mother beetle and her eggs to the surface – and certain death. Trees weakened by drought, age or disease, however, are unable to resist the onslaught, and are destroyed when the voracious larvae hatch and hungrily begin the cycle all over again, leaving the withered tree to die where it stands.
It’s all a part of the Great Cycle of Life: The old and weak must fall, their denuded branches allowing light to pass unobstructed to the temporarily thawed Earth, where it can reach straining saplings hoping for that single chance to renew Alaska’s evergreen forests.
But in the late 1980s, something went terribly out of balance in the far southwestern corner of the Kenai Peninsula. Perhaps encouraged by the unusually warm, dry weather of recent years – while global warming has increased temperatures at lower latitudes by only about 1 degree Fahrenheit since the 1950s, Alaska’s temperatures have climbed almost two – the spruce bark beetle population exploded. The forests, parched by drought, couldn’t resist the onslaught.
Spruce bark beetles have gone on a similar rampage once before in recorded history: In the 1920s, an infestation killed almost 30% of the spruce trees in the McCarthy region. But this is far, far worse.
“The beetles only leave the trees one day per year each Spring,” explains Jonathan Lee of the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska. “That day has been getting earlier every year. The longer warm season allows beetles to mature in only one year, instead of the usual three years that we used to expect – the population explosion has been unbelievable. Only a severe cold snap can stop them at this point, and we haven’t had one of those in almost a decade.”
Estimates from 2000 suggest that almost 4 million acres of trees have been infected, suffering an incredible 85% to 95% mortality rate, as these beetles spread like wildfire.
When US forest rangers first realized what was happening, they proposed containing the epidemic by clear-cutting a mile-wide swath through the national forests – a spruce-bark-beetle break, if you will. Some groups misinterpreted this last-ditch solution as an excuse to sell off the protected woodlands as lumber.
“National environmental groups – not Alaskan – protested cutting trees on federal land,” says USFS ranger Jim Fischer. “They didn’t come up here to see it for themselves, but…they successfully lobbied Congress to stop our best option.” There was, of course, no evidence that the infestation was unnatural, and many environmentalists believed – and still do believe – that it should be allowed to run its course.
Their hands tied, forest service officials attempted “greener” ways of dealing with the problem. Environmental activists suggested baiting “fall trees”: By lacing already weakened trees in each stand with attractive-to-beetles pheromones, they hoped to attract all the hopeful moms to a single spruce, sparing the others around it. But there were simply too many beetles.
Other sanctioned solutions, such as providing water to millions of acres of dry forest – not exactly like watering your front lawn – or introducing native predators such as woodpeckers, proved impossible. (And where do you get a million woodpeckers, anyway? And what would you do with them once the job was done?)
Today, 15 years in to the infestation, these souped-up spruce bark beetles have reduced the dryer western half of the Kenai Peninsula to kindling, and have spread as far north as Denali National Park. These millions of acres are an incredible fire hazard.
Landowners are clearing the forests that first brought them to Alaska, even as twitchy firefighters watch over the eerie landscape day and night. In 2002, President Bush finally approved clear-cut logging on federal land, but it was far too late to pretend that humans could do anything at that point, except perhaps make money on the tragedy’s obvious loopholes.
Nature vs. Nurture
One of the biggest challenges to effectively managing the infestation has been determining its cause. Scientists can only agree that the beetles thrive when temperatures climb.
The official line remains that the infestation is a natural occurrence, completely unrelated to human activities. This diagnosis has prevented authorities from treating this outbreak as a symptom of global warming and pollution, which could have justified taking more drastic action.
Here in Alaska, however, evidence of global climate change seems undeniable, despite what oil-company-funded experts tell the residents of the lower 48 states. A recent University of Alaska Fairbanks study shows that Alaska’s glaciers are thinning at between 40 and 60 inches per year, more than twice what was expected even by believers in global warming.
Moreover, the meltdown is apparently accelerating: Columbia Glacier shrank by almost 1000 feet from 1955 to 1996, then another 490 feet from 1996 to 2001. Higher tides, severe storms and heaving permafrost cause real and measurable damage every year, magnified as you approach the Arctic Circle.
Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) has finally requested millions of dollars in federal aid to cope with the effects of rising temperatures – even as he denies that there might be some human component to global warming. It’s apparently just some kind of wacky coincidence that increasing temperatures parallel increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. Of course, Alaska’s economy depends on oil production, so it wouldn’t be politically expedient to concede to any evidence that might inspire stricter regulations on the industry.
But when the trees fall or the fire comes, and Alaskans begin to rebuild atop the remains of one of nature’s last remaining strongholds, perhaps the true cost of such denials will become clear. Until we can admit that pollution can be more subtle and invasive than a few beer cans chucked into the woods, we will tie our own hands in this Garden of Eden that we still have every opportunity to protect.
[Author’s Note: Since this article was published, pine bark beetles (they now attack several other evergreen species in addition to spruce) have become an enormous problem throughout western Canada and the USA, particularly in the Rocky Mountains, with reports of overblown infestations almost as far south as Mexico City.]