The West’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years had critically weakened bristlecone pines. Voracious bark beetles — a threat to which bristlecones were previously thought immune — delivered the death blow.
Looking down a hillside dotted with large stumps and nearly devoid of trees, a pair of retired U.S. Forest Service employees lamented logging policies they helped craft to deal with two harbingers of climate change - pine beetles and wildfires.
Bitcoin? Blasé. Gold? Going out of style. "The hottest commodity on the planet," according to Dustin Jalbert, an economist at the market-research firm Fastmarkets, is lumber.
Recent research provides new evidence that the displacement of native plant communities is a key cause of a collapse in insect populations and is affecting birds as well.
