B.C.'s pine beetles could infest forests all across Canada, MLA warns
DAWN WALTON | GLOBE AND MAIL
WILLIAMS LAKE, B.C. -- John Rustad said he didn't want to sound "all doom and gloom," but as he preached in an airplane hangar filled with officials from Alberta, the British Columbia MLA warned of an apocalypse.
An unusual blip showed up on provincial radar systems a few years ago, he said. It was a cloud of mountain pine beetles -- pests that have chewed through much of his province's interior forests and lopped at least $6-billion from the economy.
"If this wall gets to Alberta, this thing can go right across the country. You won't be able to stop it," said Mr. Rustad, who worked in the forest industry for 20 years around Prince George, the area he now represents in the legislature.
"It's not every day you get to see a natural disaster in slow motion. That's what we have here," he told the group.
British Columbia's beetle problem became an epidemic in short order.
In 1999, almost 165,000 hectares of forest were infested. By 2005, the number jumped to 8.7 million hectares.
Alberta is hoping to avoid a similar fate in its battle against the beetle. The bug has flown across the Rocky Mountains and has popped up along the eastern slopes from the southwest corner of Alberta all the way to an area north of Jasper National Park.
Industry and government officials, who met in Calgary over the weekend to find ways to protect 2 million hectares of Alberta's forests from the blight, had flown to Williams Lake, which is at the heart of B.C.'s pine beetle outbreak, to see the devastation first-hand.
From the air, forests of trees were a sea of red, orange and grey. The palette was broken by the occasional green tree and swaths of stumps where stands had been cut in a bid to prevent the spread of beetles to other timber stands.
Pine beetles, which are about half a centimetre long and feed largely on mature lodgepole and limber pines, had burrowed under the bark to build tunnel-like egg galleries. When the larvae hatched, they bored holes out through the bark and, in the summer, went on to attack other trees. Lethal is the blue-stain fungus that the beetle carried; it disrupted the water flow within the trees and eventually turned them blood-red. As the trees die, their colour fades to orange, then grey.
The infestation in B.C. is unprecedented and the beetles are moving to Alberta and the United States, said Allan Carroll, a scientist with the federal Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria.
Although the pine beetle is indigenous to the area, a perfect storm of factors set the stage for the catastrophe.
"We've inadvertently grown a mountain pine beetle smorgasbord," Dr. Carroll said.
Officials have been successful at forest-fire suppression, he said. The forestry industry in B.C. had bypassed lodgepole pine stands, allowing more trees to become the mature, preferred hosts for the beetles.
Since 1910, the total area of mature pine has tripled in the province.
And in the last century, the B.C. Interior has experienced an average minimum winter temperature jump of between 2.2 C and 2.6 C. Cold snaps are the best natural enemy of the pine beetle.
Now, global warming seems to be making the beetle a permanent fixture in places the pest was never previously seen, Dr. Carroll said.
Pine beetles tend to swarm Alberta in 20-year cycles. Traditionally, during those times, the few affected trees have been cut and burned.
But the threat is more ominous now.
In 1998, 10 infested lodgepole pine trees were found in Banff National Park. Two years later, 25 infested trees were spotted north of Jasper National Park. Two years after that, the pests were detected in 25 trees in Canmore, east of Banff.
In the past year, about 19,000 trees have been attacked across Alberta.
The province is cutting and burning every infected tree and those that could be susceptible to the pest.
"We have taken the most aggressive approach we can to limit the mountain pine beetle in our province and beyond," David Coutts, Alberta's Minister of Sustainable Resource Development, told reporters over the weekend.
Some researchers warn that the pine beetle could jump to jack pines and spread through Canada's boreal forest and into the northern territories and through to the Maritimes.
That's why Alberta and British Columbia have just jointly announced $17-million in funding to tackle the scourge along their shared boundary before the beetle spreads farther.
Alberta will also set up a new advisory committee. The announcements come on the heels of the federal budget, which pledged $400-million in funding related to the pine beetle.
Back in Williams Lake, Mr. Rustad said the funding will be a big help, but he added that the magnitude of the crisis could have been avoided if aggressive action was taken sooner. Instead, environmentalists criticized the notion of cutting and burning forests while government officials kept waiting for cold weather that would kill the bugs, he said.
Nate Bello, who is the mayor of Quesnel just to the north, said he remembers seeing little pockets of red trees to the west of his community 10 or 15 years ago.
Now, the forestry sector in his area is looking at losing about half its allowable cut because of the pine beetle.
"I'm glad people from Alberta are getting a head start. It's something we didn't have," he said. "The signs were there. People said we should have moved quicker."(+)
