State Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark looks out at Washington's unhealthy forests from a pilot's seat, flying his plane from Olympia to his family's ranch in the remote reaches of Okanogan County.
"It is just mind-numbing the damage you see on west facing and south facing slopes . . . an overburden of dead and dying trees," Goldmark said yesterday, referring mainly to predation by pine bark beetles.
Goldmark had just shared his up-close perspective on global warming, and its consequences for trees in the Evergreen State, at a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hearing here.
The likely future for our forests through the 21st Century: Burn Baby Burn.
"There is a 33 percent chance that we will see 2 million acres burn in one year by 2080: That is about 5 percent of the entire state," Goldmark told the EPA.
Big fires in our Okanogan, Chelan and Entiat drainages -- and in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, and in central Idaho -- have served as signal flares of what is to come.
Goldmark is a rancher with a PhD in molecular biology, but he is also a longtime volunteer firefighter. He's also head of an agency manages 2.2 million acres of state-owned forests, and is responsible for fighting fires on 12 million acres of state and private forests.
Tune in TV and radio talk, and you may hear a different message. The global warming denial cult is lately on a bit of a roll.
Man-caused climate change "is a hoax," D.C. pundit Patrick Buchanan declared last week on an early morning MSNBC gabfest. Rush Limbaugh sneers at "screwy little spaghetti light bulbs" and guilt-driven people "using something other than the toilet paper in the bathroom."
These guys ought to come out West, even to places where snows linger, and look around.
As I drove up into the Sawtooth National Recreation Area of Idaho last weekend, the lodge pole pine forests came in three colors. The green trees were alive. The orange trees were dying. The grey trees were dead.
Some of the pines were horizontal, or just stumps. The Sawtooth NRA has launched a vigorous program of forest thinning, seeking to head off a big fire in one of the most drop-dead gorgeous valleys of the Mountain West.
Together with white bark pines in the nearby White Cloud peaks, the dead and dying trees are victims of the mountain pine beetle. Stanley, Idaho, often registers the lowest winter temperature of anyplace in the 'lower 48' states.
With slight winter warming, however, beetle populations in the Sawtooth NRA have taken off.
Up north, British Columbia's Chilcotin Plateau has recorded the coldest registered temperatures in Canada outside the Arctic. Yet, beetle kill has exploded north and east out of the Chilcotin, and now covers a geographic area larger than Sweden.
Goldmark drew on the "Climate Change Impacts Assessment" delivered two months ago by University of Washington scientists:"Due to increased summer temperature and decreased summer precipitation, the area burned by fire regionally is projected to double by the 2040s and triple by the 2080s . . . Primarily east of the Cascades, mountain pine beetles will likely reach higher elevations and pine trees will likely be more vulnerable to attack by beetles."
The Okanogan country -- spelled Okanagan north of the border -- has experienced big fires in recent years. The most frightening was a blaze that swept down out of B.C.'s Okanagan Mountain Park and burned dozens of houses in the suburbs of Kelowna.
"I flew out of the Methow Valley (in 2006) and had to get up to 10,000 feet before I got out of the fire smoke," Goldmark said. "Think of all the carbon that is burned in these fires. We are being encouraged to walk or ride bicycles. Compare what is saved with what is released into the atmosphere by a normal fire."
Goldmark is burned up by something else. The 2009 Legislature tried to zero out money for the Department of Natural Resources forest health program. A part of the budget was saved. Its elimination would have denied the state federal matching money.
The underperforming Legislature also sat on a bevy of environmental proposals from Gov. Chris Gregoire. On Thursday, Gregoire signed an executive order that includes interagency work to cut down traffic.
The order also requires that the state reach an agreement with Washington's only coal-fired power plant, TransAlta near Centralia. It would require TransAlta to comply, by 2025 at the latest, with the state's emission standards for new power plants.
But Gregoire will be gone from office long before the deadline. Goldmark will no longer be lands commissioner. It raises a question: Can our state achieve continuity in dealing with climate change?
Goldmark has an answer: We better.
"No matter what happens out there, we will still have deniers," he reflected. "Our duty is to base policy on sound science, make wise decisions, and -- most important -- look ahead.
"We are going to escape, to a large degree, the consequences of climate change. Our children and grandchildren will not."Seattle Post-Intelligencer
