I am on one of those trips where I love the drive, I delivered in Salt Lake City Utah yesterday and headed up Interstate 84 to Rupert Idaho and reloaded potatoes. The valley in eastern Utah where Interstate 84 runs from I-80 to I-15 is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever driven. There are cattle and horse ranches surrounded by mountains all along that route making the view there nothing short of spectacular. I didn’t notice a bunch of dead evergreen trees through there but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any there. Where I do notice them is all across Wyoming, it seems that lobby groups like the Sierra Club have kept the forest service from spraying the trees to kill the Japanese Bark Beetle. This insect has invaded our country seemingly starting on the west coast and has killed hundreds of thousands of evergreens all across the country. The highest concentration of infested trees are throughout Colorado and southern Wyoming where 4 million acres have been infested.
The only interdiction of this pest that I can find is that the forest service and other management agencies are clearing infested trees hopefully allowing new growth to occur. This infestation has been booming out of control since 1996 and I think that it is time to start spraying these pests before we allow all of the evergreens across this country to die. If you run across I-80 in Wyoming you will see what I mean, Trees in the Medicine Bow National Forest just west of Cheyenne are dying by the thousands and we are just going to sit back and let it happen. This is not a natural occurrence in the forests of the United States, not at this magnitude. Normally the bark Beatle is found in the forest in small numbers, maybe in groups of five trees, but nothing like we are seeing now. This has gotten out of hand and needs to be stopped. You can watch the trees dying as you travel east throughout the country as these insects are hitching rides east on log trucks, oil well maintenance vehicles, campers and automobiles.
The Sierra club among other groups claim that spraying for this infestation will kill the good insect that occur naturally in the countries forests. Can we not re introduce the normal insects after we kill the bad ones? Have bugs become more important than the trees? This infestation has moved into the black hills of South Dakota where 384,000 acres have been infested so far. All efforts that are being done are in the regeneration of the tree growth and not much is being done about the problem in general. There have been other problems that plagued trees in the U.S. and two of the most famous have been the advent of “Dutch Elm” disease and the American chestnut blight. The forests of the eastern United States used to be highly populated by the American chestnut, a tree that grew upwards to a hundred feet tall and had massive trunks that were deeply furrowed earning them the nickname of the “Eastern Redwood”. Natural chestnut trees along the street in front of the Bronx zoo in New York City were infected with a chestnut blight sometime around 1904. this disease was apparently brought in on European imported chestnuts that were imported for landscape purposes. From there the disease spread throughout the country nearly killing the American chestnut to extinction.
To this day we are still trying to rebuild the family of the American chestnut tree and the Dutch Elm trees that were lost to the disease carrying the same name. So if are still trying to rebuild those two tree families how long will we be trying to re-grow the evergreens in this country? We as human beings have caused these problems and it is we as humans that need to fix the problem we caused. We can start by contacting our U.S. Senators and Congressmen about the lobbying efforts of groups that just want to let this run it’s course. There is an underlying problem with all these dead trees; they are very dry and subject to burst into flames with the first lightning strike. The Sierra Club would just leave them there to burn not caring that people live near them and their families and property are at great risk if these forests start burning. As drives across this country go, Interstate 80 out west has always been one of my favorites. It still is, its just now dotted and blotted with dead trees.
Stay safe out there.
TW
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