Myth-spouting deniers of global warming should witness the dying red-colored whitebark pines, and the dead grey-colored trees, at high elevations from Yellowstone National Park to the Colorado Rockies to Oregon’s Crater Lake.
With warming temperatures in North America’s coldest places, the mountain pine beetle has dramatically increased in numbers and is devastating a “foundation species” on which other forms of life depend.
The Natural Resources Defense Council on Tuesday petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the frees under the federal Endangered Species Act.
In many parts of the whitebark’s range, argues the NRDC petition, close to half the trees are already dead, and between 80 and 100 percent of those remaining are infested by beetles or hit with blister rust.
Why care about an often gnarled tree that grows to elevations higher than 10,000 feet?
Well, first, it has been there for thousands of years, surviving high winds and droughts and periodic beetle infestations.
Global warming has allowed the beetles, no larger than a grain of rice, to reproduce more frequently and move up to higher, more remote areas. This is NOT just another infestation, but fundamental climate change.
The whitebark anchors soils in high, dry places of the Inland West. Its presence helps slow snowmelt, assuring stream flows.
As well, the whitebark is vital to survival of grizzly bears, especially in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
“If these trees go, they could take Yellowstone’s grizzlies and a lot of America’s western forests with them,” said Louisa Willcox, senior wildlife advocate with NRDC, who has spent more than three decades campaigning for grizzly survival in the “lower 48” states.
Grizzlies, especially females, depend of whitebark pine nuts as essential food — especially as they are preparing to hibernate.
The pine nuts offer a high calorie, fatty food source at a time when little other food is available. Grizzlies are omnivores. They may eat elk or young deer, but also cones and berries.
In two recent summers, 2006 and 2008, this writer has visited Yellowstone and witnessed the rapid death of high-elevation forests.
On slopes of 10,300-foot Mount Washburn, we looked into a meadow below where a sow grizzly and two cubs were feeding, but around us red-colored whitebarks were in the process of dying.
We camped near 10,000 feet in Wyoming’s Wind River Range last summer, as scientists dug into dead and dying trees.
An airplane flight drove home the message: We lifted off out of Dubois, Wyoming. The great peaks of the Teton Range loomed in the distance. Below us, however, was a panorama of dead and dying forests.
Whitebark pines can be helped by protecting critical habitat, perhaps by changing federal forest fire suppression policies, perhaps by replanting, and definitely by controlling and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
At the Jackson, Wyo., airport last summer sat Air Force II: Dick Cheney spent much of August vacationing there, and often fly fishing.
He has, however, thwarted enforcement of environmental laws and produced (with oil company executives) a dig it-drill it energy policy.
“Change we can Believe in” will mean changing that policy, hopefully before all the whitebarks are gone along with many if not most of Greater Yellowstone’s grizzly population.
Good luck to the NRDC’s petition. Save these trees!!!!