The forests of the West are in big trouble

The narrative of the day says the West’s forests are in trouble because of climate change, but there’s way more to the story.

Talking to tourists throughout the West, the first thing they’ll talk about is how beautiful the mountains are. Then, they will tell you where they want to live and it’s always in places like Breckenridge, Flagstaff, Park City, or any of the other mountain towns. I always laugh (and die) a little when I hear this, because it immediately tells me something about them: They don’t know a single thing about this place, and have absolutely no vision or experience to see beyond the surface-level beauty they think they’re seeing.

If you talk to someone who has been here for a little longer, or even tried to learn something about the place before they came, they will often notice that the trees are dying – pretty much all of them. Some know it’s due to “beetle kill,” and some of them will tell you that it’s “climate change.” Bravo, class, bravo… we know just slightly more than the doe-eyed tourists.

Then, you bounce over to any media source writing about the West’s forests, and they will say the same thing. Some of the forest agencies and scientists will, too – much of the research points to drier and warming conditions giving rise to multiple generations of pine beetles in a single year, insufficient sustained low temperatures needed to kill the beetles, and that beetle kill is exacerbated by climate change.

This image was taken over a decade ago near Granby, Colorado. The piles in the foreground are beetle-killed trees being cut and cleared to make room for new vacation housing. Notice that the kill-rate is 100% within the photo, and that the ridge in the background is entirely tinted by the color of dead and dying pine needles.

After studying all of the above in undergrad and grad school, and taking a deep personal interest in what’s killing our forests, the common answers are only a small fragment of what’s really happening – and that partial truth is a big problem. 

The partial truth stems from identification of the problem as having a monolithic cause. The singular cause of our dying forests always seems to be attributed to climate change by novice observers, the media, and even some scientists. But is the problem monolithic? Is it a single variable driving all of it? Is drier air, only mildly declining annual precipitation in the catchments, and warmer winters really the singular cause of our forests dying? 

Climate change has some clear markers on the West, which are measurable – all that I’ve mentioned above are measured, and are clearly occurring. We have a general trend of mildly declining precipitation the drainages at the headwaters in the West, albeit a small trend spanning a hundred years of measurements. Yep, we aren’t getting the super cold temperatures needed to kill beetles in infected trees. And, yep, we are seeing some increasing temperature trends, year-around. The West is a mid-continental environment, of course, so is less regulated by water temperature than the coasts, so we are definitely going to see some amplification here that won’t be seen at the coasts. 

The rest of the story is where this gets interesting and where the monolithic thinkers are revealed, which is where my sense of trust starts to break down.

When I look at the forests of the West, what I see is a density of trees that doesn’t even remotely resemble the density observed prior to modern fire suppression regimes. On a rough estimate, I see 10-15 times as many trees as are supposed to be there. Since a tree’s hydration is a key function of its ability to ward off pine beetles, and each tree consumes water, I notice there is a likely relationship between the per capita water needs of a tree and the availability of water to meet increased consumption of a larger tree population. When the density of forests increases to the point that normal water supply available to each tree in the soil is challenged, what happens to each tree’s defenses against pine beetles? 

Forests of the West are far too densely packed and overgrown. This photo was taken about a decade ago in a spot at the edge of where intensive fire suppression is happening. The forest here is sparsely populated compared to most forests in the Rocky Mountains, yet it’s a fuel loaded nightmare if we care about forests being healthy and maintained by evolved ecologcal processes, such as wildfire. When this forest burns, it will be a crown fire and will kill every tree in the area that is not already dead on count of beetles.

If some of that sounds reasonable, then climate change is only a contributing variable to the equation – not a leading variable. 

Another oddity in the mix is that forests of the West have been almost uniformly prevented from burning over the last (approx) 150 years or so. When talking about the dying forests of the West, we almost never hear about the role of fire suppression as a variable in what’s causing the forests to die. Even better, if you ask the tourist from the intro above, they’ll tell you that forest fires cause “destruction” – of which anyone who understands these forests will very vehemently disagree.

Most of the deeply rooted locals know one thing about our forests – they’re not just built to burn – their entire ecology and lifecycle is built around fire. The forests of the West are entirely dependent on fire for maintenance, reproduction, and overall ecosystem health. 

NPR did a story last year about one of the fires in Colorado last summer, and one of the interviewees said (to the effect of), ‘Seeing the destruction is devastating and sad.’ To the trained eye, the only thing that’s sad about wildfires in the West today is that they’re all soil-sterilizing crown fires thanks to fire suppression causing fuel loads to build up to cause intense fires we can no longer fight. These fires now kill every tree, every plant, and every living thing that can’t escape fast enough. In forest ecology, that’s supposed to be a rare event because fires happening regularly help prevent that.

The entire environment and ecosystem within about 100 miles west of the Mississippi River is fire-dependent. The further West you go, the more fire-adapted the place is – especially in the interior western states. 

As we continue to suppress wildfire in the West, we do a couple really bad things. The first of which is allowing the fuel loads to build up on forest floors, allowing fires to start with abundant fuel to burn bigger and longer. These plants are dropping dry needles so they will burn, and when we prevent that, they just keep dropping needles to burn more and hotter. The second of which is; We cause forest densities to increase, thereby decreasing already scarcely available water to be in even shorter supply for each tree. As each tree gets drier, it is more able to burn, and its natural protections are insufficient to protect the tree from dying. 

The next variable in the mix that we don’t hear about in this context is what happens when you put humans and human structures permanently in the arid environments of the West. The answer would surprise our archetyped tourist, but perhaps not our locals; Fire suppression increases as does the strength of the suppression efforts as the value of the structures increase. 

Translated: Nice homes in the fire-dependent ecosystems of the West cause more fire suppression efforts, which stops critical ecosystem functions from happening that keep our forests healthy. 

Zooming out a little from the first image in this post, we find that the piles of beetled killed trees are being cleared to make way for defensible space for this “cabin,” which had a footprint that appeared to be sized for a modest 6,000 square foot space (estimated). The installation of this structure will prevent the forest from returning to its natural fire return interval of about every five years.

Does anyone think the State of Colorado and the federal government will allow a town like Vail, Colorado, to burn? I hope not, because they won’t. There’s too much at stake, and too many people with economic and political power with a horse in the race (or a house in the forest, if you will). 

Given that this is just a blog post, I’m not going to analyze every variable, but I hope one thing is compelling – and that is that the story on what’s killing western forests is far more complicated than our media outlets and semi-science-oriented sources are telling us. Actually, I hope there might be some question as to whether climate change is a leading variable in the equation at all, or if it’s merely a contributing variable.

If you want to shine some light on some of the darker annals of what I’m suggesting in this post, go take a look at some photos from the interior West from the 1800s, then the 1900s, then the 2000s. 

I can pretty much guess what you’ll see with uncanny accuracy: Very sparsely populated trees on a mostly short-grass covered landscape with visibly rocky terrain in the earliest years. Then, you’ll see more trees, then more as time goes on … and then you’ll see beetle kill take over. Is that climate change? Or is that a bunch of changes creating a symphony of variables with only one being climate change? 

Forests in places that have not yet caught the eye of tourists or second-homesteaders seem to be healthier. This image was taken on a mountain range in Colorado that has a somewhat in-tact fire regime, due to a lack of structures in the area. Since this photo was taken, numerous acres of land have sold off and homes have been built in the area, thereby ceasing vital ecosystem processes to keep the forest and grassland healthy.

The reason I care, and think anyone else should care is that we are all being exposed to information that is mostly wrong, and there’s a huge clue sitting right in front of all of us that has been there since day one; The prognosis is being centered on only one variable, meanwhile ignoring numerous other variables in motion that may have a far greater influence on the outcomes. 

When I look at our forests and landscapes of the West, I see an ecosystem that is going through a substantial and sudden succession, brought on by multiple variables acting together, not just one or two. When I see others prognosticating the cause as climate change, and they mention no other variables, I immediately realize they either have a motive, are talking to a lay audience that cannot process more complexity, or they are simply unable to process that complexity themselves. 

Breaking all of this down into something more tangible; Whenever I see houses being built in the mountains, or neighborhoods going up against the foothills, or a ski resort, or any other development in areas where wildfire is the beating heart of the ecosystem, I realize I am looking at someone who has chosen to stud the landscape with yet another structure that will justify fire suppression in the West… which will directly contribute to increased fuel loads, increased tree density, and the ensuing crown fire that will be impossible to stop. 

With every structure we build in and around western ecosystems that are fire-dependent for their maintenance and health creates a cascade of changes that drives disruption of these systems. The oddity in my local-yocal view, is that the changes we are seeing might have a contributing variable that is climate change, but it’s not one of the leading variables. 

Here’s a new home build somewhere near Silverthorne, Colorado. This property is being built at the boundary of an already overly-dense forest stand, on a slope overlooking town. This structure will help to increase fire suppression in the area, and will further disrupt the fire return intervals the forest depends on for its overall health.

The leading variables are population growth in the interior West in fire-dependent ecosystems, and fire suppression regimes in our forests that have allowed dozens of fire maintenance cycles to be shut down. And the overgrowth of forests in the already arid environment, causing each tree to not get enough water to be able to defend itself from fire or pests, leading to more complete stand-killing impacts. And, of course, climate change is likely amplifying all of this, but the question is – Why is the currently accepted cause of dying western forests climate change, when that’s not even a leading variable in what’s going on? 

Next time you drive through the interior West, look at the density of the forests - you’ll notice that the forests are overgrown. Look at the amount of beetle kill. Look at the numbers of structures built against or in these environments. And think about how all of these things are working together to completely offset the way these forests are evolved to function. And, if you’re not familiar with the past here, go find some pictures of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, California, or even Arizona’s mountains circa the 1800s – you’ll notice that not a single one of those images looks like what it looks like today. Maybe then you’ll find some modicum of reason in my suggestion that the forests of the West are dying because of a symphony of other variables with greater effect than climate change alone.

The Fleeting West is written by a rooted westerner lensing all of this through local knowledge accumulated over generations, and in recovering from a long bout with environmental science and cultural studies in academia.