Should humans deploy insecticides? Should they log or burn beetle-killed forests?
It depends. Insecticides can help save trees around a person’s home or on other small scales. But they can’t stop beetle outbreaks on the scale of forests, the authors say. Logging or burning sections of forests is “unlikely” to prevent insect outbreaks. First, “It will never be feasible to intensively manage all of the forests of Colorado,” they contend. Second, insect outbreaks are largely driven by climate—drought and warm temperatures. Research shows that the area of land burned by wildfire between 1987 and 2003 was six times greater than that which had burned in the previous 16 years. That research shows that the same time period was characterized by increased spring and summer temperatures, longer fire seasons and earlier snowmelt. “The new paradigm is accepting the effects of global warming,” Veblen observes, adding that the Healthy Forests Initiative and its companion policies “basically ignored warming.” As with insecticides, it makes sense to remove dead trees and other fuels
