Pine Beetles and Stewardship

I just got back from a weekend in the Grand Valley of Colorado, otherwise known as Winter Park. And I am mad. The beautiful green forests are no longer green but an ugly reddish brown, no longer the color of life but instead the color of death. Literally thousands of square miles of pine forest are dead, or dying. An epidemic of tiny beetles and their fungal parasitic host have nearly completed the process of destroying Colorado's pine forests.

Let me repeat that I am mad. What I see in those dead trees is a failure in stewardship on the part of those we trusted with our public lands. Stewardship is a very important word to me. I grew up on a working farm. My father is a farmer, and as far back as my family is traced, we were farmers. Stewardship is a farmer's virtue. It is a realization that you might own the land today, but it was there before you and will be there after you. It is keeping faith with those who came before you. They held the land in their time and provided stewardship over it such that you can enjoy its bounty today. It is keeping faith with those whom you will pass it onto in the future. As did those who came before you, you want to leave it better than you found it. That is stewardship.

Getting back to my anger, why? Those little pine beetles and fungus spores are simply nature. Contrary to Walt Disney, nature is violent and brutal, with wholesale extinction of entire species almost an anyday affair. Some of my most vivid memories of life on the farm are of late afternoon hail storms that obliterated our crops. I can remember walking out after a late afternoon storm and seeing the ground covered with white ice. The green plants that had been there just minutes before were now no more than a tossed salad. Months of hard work and all the money spent on seed, fertilizer and fuel, gone in just minutes, destroyed by the blind hand of nature.

But I also know that getting angry at nature is silly. Nature does what nature does; it is simply water running downhill. To be angry at what nature does is a useless exercise that only hurts you. Nature certainly is not out to get us. But that does not mean that we must accept what nature does without recourse. Nature can be negotiated with. That is what engineers do. That is what the profession of engineering is about. Water flows downhill, that is nature. But water can be dammed up and used to generate electricity as it flows downhill. That is an engineer's negotiation with nature. I have always seen that as an essential part of stewardship.

But why the anger about pine beetles and dead pine forests? I am angry because it didn't have to be this way. Because the forests have been artificially protected, they are dense, with little diversity and they are old. Forest fires have always been stopped. Logging has not been allowed. Nothing has been allowed. Pine beetles are always around, killing off the weak trees in the forest. But it takes special circumstances to create the near universal kill off we are seeing. Those special circumstances took human intervention. It took human action; or more accurately, human inaction, to create the circumstances that have ruined our pine forests.

Our public lands, our public forests, are being managed by caretakers. Caretakers do not practice stewardship. Caretakers are simply passive managers who erect fences to keep out the world. Caretakers simply deny that time passes and circumstances change. Behind those fences things fall apart and crumble. One of the most powerful forces of nature is entropy, the inexorable process of decay.

Stewards try to make things better, because they are keeping faith with those that came before and those that will come after. Sometimes risks must be taken in the attempt to be better. Caretakers simply keep it from being used and take no risks, ensuring that disaster will eventually happen.