What now? Debate over beetle-kill pine burns as bugs move to Front Range

By Jefferson Dodge They’re tiny, but they leave a lot of damage and debate in their wake. And their next stop appears to be the northern Front Range. There is fresh debate about what to do with the millions of acres of pine trees in the West that have been destroyed by the mountain pine beetle. And it is a debate that is bleeding over into a battle about how to best protect Colorado’s roadless areas. Aerial maps showing the mountain pine beetle epidemic since it started in 1996 reveal that it has spread like a cancer through the northern central mountains of Colorado. And officials say the beetles appear to be moving north and east, meaning that parts of Boulder County may be in their sights. They recently invaded Larimer County, where the number of acres of affected lodgepole pine more than doubled last year, compared to 2008. Officials say as many as 100,000 beetle-kill pine trees fall every day in a 3.5 million acre area along the Colorado-Wyoming border. It’s too late to do much to stop them, and once they’ve turned a pine forest from a lovely green to that ugly reddish brown, the question becomes, “What we should do with all of those dead trees?” One response has been to log or at least thin the dead forests, in the name of reducing the risk of forest fires. Surely all of those dead trees are a tinderbox just waiting for a spark, right? Recently a group of scientists blew the whistle and said not so fast. In a report titled Insects and Roadless Forests: A Scientific Review of Causes, Consequences and Management Alternatives, four researchers concluded that the fire danger in beetlekill pine forests has been greatly exaggerated. According to the report, released earlier this spring, the chances of widespread fire among those dead trees is the same as — or, as only a few studies indicate, slightly higher than — in live, green pine forests. The report also found that logging or thinning in secluded roadless areas neither controls future beetle outbreaks nor helps protect communities and homes from forest fires. The key to protecting inhabited areas from fire damage, the scientists say, is to clear the immediate area — about 120 feet — around homes and other structures. And the environmental damage that is done by building roads into the backcountry wilderness to log or thin beetle-kill pine far outweighs any fire-prevention benefits, they say in their report. …