David Walkem was just finishing his breakfast at Vicky's Café on the banks of the Thompson River and gazing out the window at a dozen bighorn sheep moving up the hillside on the opposite bank.
Here at Spences Bridge in the southern interior of British Columbia, the hills gently rise into mountains, and above everything looms Shawnikenmx, a beloved peak where Mr. Walkem's Nlakapamux people used to go in the old days to get spirit power. Back then, the 50-year-old chief of the Cook's Ferry Indian Band explains, the high country was like parkland. As a boy, his grandfather could ride his horse through the forest at full gallop.
"We used to use fire to keep it open, for berries and for mule deer," Mr. Walkem says. "Now, it's all dead and dying and bug-infested, and you can't even walk though it. It's just like a plague, all over."
Lodgepole pines are supposed to be green. But B.C.'s pine forests are turning red, and grey, and black. They're dying from a plague of mountain pine beetles that has suddenly ravaged an area roughly the size of Britain. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before.
British Columbia hasn't been this warm in 8,000 years, and the winters are no longer cold enough to keep the beetles in check. Global-warming scenarios the International Panel on Climate Change forecast for 50 years from now are already unfolding in the province's interior, says Richard Hebda, the 56-year-old curator of botany and earth history at the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria.
Now, Dr. Hebda is starting to wonder whether the pine forests will ever grow back. "We just don't know," he says.
Lodgepole-pine forests need catastrophic events such as beetle outbreaks and fires to regenerate themselves. Normally, they grow back quickly -- in only a few decades, even from a beetle outbreak even of this magnitude. But nobody knows whether B.C.'s climate, decades from now, will be able to support pine forests. Nothing is "normal" any more.
"The question is, will there be forests at all in the southern portion of British Columbia's central interior? Will there even be any trees?" Dr. Hebda asks. "It all depends on how much CO{-2} we push into the atmosphere."
Although the beetle outbreak began only in the 1990s, the story really began about 140 years ago, with an event that gave B.C.'s pine forests their dominant, bug-vulnerable characteristics. That event involved another plague, smallpox, which decimated B.C.'s aboriginal communities, and ended an ancient regime of prescribed-burn landscape management.
The practice of controlled burning of the forest to enhance food-plant production and maintain optimum habitat conditions for mule deer, elk and other game animals has been meticulously documented by University of Victoria ethnobotanist Nancy J. Turner.
She says a "very plausible and likely explanation" for the pine-beetle catastrophe is that the aboriginal regime ended, and was replaced by a rigid orthodoxy of fire suppression -- a central feature of 20th-century industrial forest management -- and now global warming is upon us.
In 2000, B.C.'s drought-stressed, dense and tangled pine forests lost about 184,000 hectares to the beetle. In 2001, the dead zone grew by 785,000 hectares. The next year, 1.96 million hectares turned red, followed by another 4.2 million in 2003 and seven million in 2004.
The toll so far amounts to about 400 million cubic metres of timber, which is enough wood to build another Toronto, another Montreal and another New York. The pace of the infestation is slowing; last year, it spread only to an additional 1.7 million hectares, but even that roughly equals the extent of all the forest set aside for preservation in this year's hard-fought "Great Bear Rainforest" truce.
Nobody is expecting the plague to halt. About half the living pine forest is already gone, and most of the rest is expected to be infested and die within 10 years. The economic prospects of at least 30 B.C. towns and cities have been turned upside down by all this. But the aboriginal communities are facing distinct and daunting challenges.
So, when Dr. Hebda looks into the future, he sees a lot of sagebrush, grassland and rangeland where the pine forests are now, at high elevations, and down among the spruce, fir and ponderosa pine. That's where the Nlakapamux territory is, as well as that of the Okanagan and Ktunaxa.
