The beetle that sunk a thousand investors

No bigger than a grain of rice, the mountain pine beetle is giving many a well-heeled investor nightmares. Over the past fourteen years it has, according to The Economist magazine, "laid waste a swathe of British Columbia's forests so vast that the rust-red wasteland is visible from space." Losses could reach C$40 billion! The real damage is done not so much by the beetle itself but by a fungus which is carried by the beetle in its travels and weakens infected trees to the point they become vulnerable to further, death-dealing attack. Government sources forecast the death of 76 percent of invaluable lodgepole pine trees by 2015. Terror grips governments and investors at the prospect of the coleopteran's eastward spread. Enormous effort is being expended to keep beetle populations in check. However, unless the real cause is dealt with, all control methods will invariably end up being about as effective as shooting an elephant with a popgun.

You've got to take your hat off to the diminutive six-legger. The pest emerges in summer and flies off to find new trees in which to drill holes and mate. Hatched grubs feed under the bark until metamorphosis. Divine wisdom has imparted to the beetle the amazing ability to produce antifreeze, enabling it to withstand mid-winter temperatures as low as -40ºC. Indeed, we would be erring to demonize the beetle. The ultimate cause of the disaster, you see, is - you guessed it - climate change. The same divine wisdom that created the marvelous tyke also imposed constraints on its spread. In a healthy forest under normal high boreal conditions the beetle causes no major problems. Probably it even contributes to the overall health of the ecosystem. Until the planet began warming, the infested region would experience regular severe freezes in early winter and

sustained bitter cold late in winter; massive numbers of the culprit would perish under such conditions. Summer fires also contribute to keeping them in check.

This disaster not only illustrates the parlous state the world finds itself in right now (which will eventually pass), it also underscores the Almighty's genius in creating a huge diversity of ecosystems on our wondrous planet, a planet which sings forth His praises from its every nook and cranny. Barriers, often invisible and delicate, separate one ecosystem from another. As conditions change imperceptibly from one spot to another, ecosystems undergo phased transitions from one to another. Just as color changes gradually across the spectrum of light, so too do ecosystems come in a graded spectrum across the landscape. Drive from east Texas to west Texas and you cannot help but be struck by the gradual transition from green piny woods to cactus-covered dryland. On the other hand, discrete systems can be tiny in area; we never see noisy miners in our garden, but you can see them almost every time you walk 400 meters up the road from here!

Ecosystems merge from one to another in lockstep with changing conditions which, in turn, are affected by a multitude of graded factors - altitude, light levels, rainfall, soil conditions and temperature, amongst others. The ever-so-slight increase in average temperature in Canada has reduced the critical severe weather events that have kept pine beetles on the run from time immemorial. Or at least since the last interglacial. Climate change bodes ill for the immediate future, but at least it provides a backdrop against which the finely-tuned balance of the world as we know it is starkly revealed. All to the glory of the One who made all things.