Dear Editor,
When someone tells you to be worried, it pays to check what business they are in. Fear of insects and fear of fire are two time-tested public relations strategies employed by people who profit from logging, in order to weaken controls on logging and improve their profits.
The truth is, mountain pine beetle poses no threat at all to Jasper National Park. It’s an economic threat to the forest industry outside the park because their business model is built around monocultural forests of old pine trees. But in a national park managed for ecological integrity, it is simply a natural disturbance process that creates change and increases diversity. With a climate change trend-line towards less soil moisture and more frequent drought stress, and extensive stands of crowded, old pines, we are going to see a lot of tree mortality. When beetles cause it, the result is an explosion in woodpecker, olive-sided flycatcher and raptor populations followed by a burst of understory growth. The scattered spruce, fir or douglas fir (depending on the stand) among the pines are freed of competition for light and soil moisture and thrive in a more open, more diverse forest. The more open forest, full of dead wood that feeds fungi, beetles, ants and other life, combined with a lush shrub and herbaceous understory layer, provides habitat for a much greater variety and number of bird and mammal species.
This is exactly what happened in Waterton Lakes National Park, where I spent several years as the park’s conservation biologist, after a 1980s mountain pine beetle infestation that killed up to 90% of the trees in many stands. The forest industry warned of Armageddon that time too. Fortunately, Parks Canada didn’t listen and by the time I got there, some of the highest biodiversity, watershed values and sheer beauty were in those forest stands. The Alberta government, unfortunately, did listen to the Chicken Little alarums.
Their response was to set aside a number of the usual ground rules for logging in order to allow emergency salvage of the pine beetle infested forests outside the park. Today those stands are full of knapweed and other invasive weeds, riddled with eroding haul roads and replanted to another monoculture of lodgepole pine. You don’t hear a lot of birdsong in the stands the loggers “saved”.
The politics of fear are always in play when vested interests want to get a bigger piece of the action. The best thing Jasper National Park, and those who love it, can do in the face of mountain pine beetles is to go for a hike and watch nature do what it has always done: respond to environmental change with natural disturbance processes that renew the health, diversity and beauty of the wild places protected in our national parks from the wielders of chainsaws and raisers of self-serving alarms.
Kevin Van Tighem
Canmore, Alta.
