The scale of the mountain pine beetle’s destruction of Western North American forests is almost unimaginable. Already more than half of the 5 million acres of lodgepole pine forests in Colorado have been destroyed, and 10’s of millions more acres across the Western U.S. and Canada are affected — with an estimated 40 million acres of lodgepole pine devastation in British Columbia alone.
While this is a sad state of affairs — we could be witnessing the end of the western lodgepole pine forest as we know it — the huge amounts of dead wood left in the beetle’s path of destruction are finding a happy end as a source for renewable fuel.