Belize is a little country in Central America next to Guatemala,  and I’ve been there twice. You would think Belize would look a lot different than Minnesota, but it has lots of pine trees in the Mountain Pine Ridge area, which reminded me of home.   On the way to ruins called Caracol in the middle of this little country are miles of hills covered with pine trees.  In 2005, the first year I was there, we saw so many of these pine trees dead, just trunks standing there stripped on the top half of the tree.  Hills and hills full of dead trees.  We were told it was caused by pine beetles which were recently infesting the area.  It was the first time I had ever seen mass areas of trees being eaten by beetles and it was an eerie sight. Two years ago I saw the same thing in South Dakota, only worse and on different trees.  Entire trees, grey and stripped of every leaf, dotted the landscape in small groups.  I was entering the Black Hills national park, and was not allowed to bring any wood from anywhere else due to beetles,  which were eating trees all over the state.  Now these tree-eating beetles are in Minnesota, eating ash trees.  And they are all feasting on weakened trees due to climate change.

Central America is fighting back at the beetles with pesticides, and when we went back in 2007, the trees in the same area looked a bit better, though many of them, as you can see in the photo above I took in 2007, were still without foliage in the top portions and appeared to be dying.  South Dakota didn’t look like it was successfully fighting the beetles, at least not then.  The question is whether or not this is a battle that can even be won.  It’s not just North America because I’ve seen this in Central America.  And it’s not just America.  Trees all over the world are being infested with insects that are killing them.  Here’s an article on the latest news on the subject from Yale’s e360:

What’s Killing the Great Forests of the American West?

Across western North America, huge tracts of forest are dying off at an extraordinary rate, mostly because of outbreaks of insects. Scientists are now seeing such forest die-offs around the world and are linking them to changes in climate.  by jim robbins

For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That’s when her quarry — tiny, black, mountain pine beetles — hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start their life cycle again.

Now, says Six, the field rules have changed. Instead of just two weeks, the beetles fly continually from May until October, attacking trees, burrowing in, and laying their eggs for half the year. And that’s not [...]