Empire of the Beetle

July 4, 2011
With equal attention to the destructive actions of insects and humans alike, Canadian journalist Nikiforuk (Tar Sands) describes the decimation of expanses of conifers by bark beetles on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. Quoting entomologist Stephen L. Wood, who wrote the bible on bark beetles, Nikiforuk explains that in a healthy forest, the beetles act as managers, killing off stagnant trees, recycling them as forest nutrients, and making way for younger, more vigorous trees. But because the beetles' function "competes with human interests" the beetles have been transformed into a dangerously destructive element. Ineffective and forest- and community-destroying policies to fight the beetles, such as poisoning and clear-cutting, and forestry tactics like monoculture, which lower the forests' resilience, combined with global warmingâwhich causes an increase in beetle reproductive cycles and weakens forests with droughtsâseem to have turned what was once an essential part of the forest life cycle into an ecological disaster. Nikiforuk leavens this tragic, instructive history with curious facts about the complex, intelligent insect and intriguing experiments using sounds to "defeat scolytids and temper their forest-eating behavior." Nikiforuk's florid language, affection for the beetles, and scorn for the humans in his story are sometimes extravagant, but lighten the tone of what in other hands could be an overwhelmingly depressing topic.

October 1, 2011

Bark beetles: they are as tiny as a match head, individually fragile, and yet as a swarm more destructive than any forest fire. Nikiforuk (Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent) follows bark beetle outbreaks from the last three decades in Alaska and the western United States. Despite its grim title, the book paints a complex picture of bark beetles that showcases their incredible qualities as well as their potentially harmful ones. Nikiforuk argues that bark beetles are a part of western North America's natural ecosystem, but the growing human population and its demands on natural resources place the insects in the role of nuisance. As a pest, however, they are incredibly dangerous to forests and have, to date, killed more than 30 billion trees since the 1980s. VERDICT Nikiforuk tallies the human and ecological costs of bark beetles' destruction of wide swathes of trees, costs that are exacerbated by climate change. His plainspoken writing style is especially poignant as he gives voice to the devastating human experience of lost forests. Recommended.--Marianne Stowell Bracke, Purdue Univ. Libs., West Lafayette, IN

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
Given the recent media attention spotlighting wildfires, hurricanes, and other climate-change-related disasters, it's not surprising news outlets have so far attached scant significance to the havoc created by a tiny beetle. Yet, beginning in the late 1980s, three species of bark beetle known collectively as Dendroctonus have laid waste to more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees in the western U.S. As award-winning Canadian journalist Nikiforuk (Tar Sands, 2008) details in this unsettling overview of a growing environmental catastrophe, the prized lumber used in housing and paper goods is rapidly dwindling to the rapacious appetite of an insect no larger than a match head. While rising global temperatures have unquestionably played a role in the beetle's exponential growth (the author draws vivid parallels with the famous Rocky Mountain locust swarms of the 1870s), unrestrained logging and misguided fire-suppression policies have also been ill-timed contributors. Interweaving entomological science with the personal stories of devastated rural home owners and foresters, Nikiforuk offers a long-overdue analysis of a largely underreported contemporary plague.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)