The little forest started to show signs of trouble years ago, when some trees turned out to be in such a bad shape that one could simply push them over by hand. This wasn’t merely because of drought: because of the density of the forest, the soil couldn’t provide enough nutrients for all trees. The sun would barely penetrate the 20 meters high evergreen tree tops, leaving the dark forest almost barren below, except for some ferns and mosses. The exception was the south-eastern corner, which had a little more deciduous vegetation and caught a lot more light.
In 2018, after an unusually fierce storm, dozens of trees in the forest were blown over, and began to rot. These trees became the first hosts for Ips typographus, the European spruce bark beetle.
Drought and rising temperatures, too, help the beetle to thrive. Mild winters reduce mortality amongst larvae and young adults, and warmer springs mean an earlier onset of reproduction, leaving space for two or even three egg-laying events a year, instead of just one.
“The end of nature probably also makes us reluctant to attach ourselves to its remnants, for the same reason that we usually don’t choose friends from among the terminally ill.
I love the mountain outside my backdoor… But I know that some part of me resists getting to know it better – for fear, weak-kneed as it sounds, of getting hurt. If I knew as well as a forester what sick trees looked like, I fear I would be seeing them everywhere.
I find now that I like the woods best in winter, when it is harder to tell what might be dying. The winter woods might be perfectly healthy come spring, just as the sick friend, when she’s sleeping peacefully, might wake up without the wheeze in her lungs”.
Bill McKibben, ‘The End of Nature’, 1990. Quoted by Glenn A. Albrecht in ‘Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World’, p. 79, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2019.