Trees provide a clue to global warming adaptation, but will it work?

‘Stricken trees provide clues about how America will adapt to global warming—but little hope that it can be averted’

The fire was bad, but it was the dead
animals that really upset fire fighters.

IT WAS the dead animals his team found upsetting, says Steve Lydick, surveying, from a high ridge in the western Cascade range, the burnt, blackened valley below. Dotted with charred boles, like used matchsticks protruding from the cracked, depleted soil, its sides drop to a stream from which the Stouts Creek fire, which consumed 25,000 acres of mixed conifer forest in southern Oregon last August, took its name. As the inferno roared through the valley, coyotes, bears, deer and rodents of all kinds rushed for the water. It fell to Mr Lydick’s colleagues in the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency that manages almost a quarter of a billion acres in America’s 12 western states, to dispose of their remains. “Some found it pretty distressing,” he says.

It is a grisly image: ash-black water running through singed carcasses. It also seems paradoxically suggestive of how much harder it is to be moved, in any comparable way, by the vaster devastation taking place in America’s forests, owing to fire, pestilence and drought. All are indicators of a warming climate, to which decades of human intervention have made the forests—the fourth most expansive of any country—especially susceptible. These blights are therefore growing, especially in the semi-arid West.

Read The Economist story - “Ravaged woodlands.”