Arizona’s iconic ponderosa pine forests are disappearing

The ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona are one of the state’s natural treasures. Their reddish trunks and soft green canopies cover 2 million acres of our state. Their forests stretch from Santa Fe to the Sierras in California.

But they’re disappearing. The data is stark: We could lose up to 90%of the ponderosa pines across the Southwest over the next several decades.

Starved by climate-change-driven drought and scorched by wildfires, Gary Ferguson says Arizona could be the first post-climate change landscape in America.

Gary Ferguson is the author of the new book "The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West."

Brady Smith/U.S. Forest Service

Full conversation

GARY FERGUSON: Once those ponderosa forests are gone in a lot of places, they won't be coming back. They're going to be replaced by permanent grass and shrub lands.

And of course, that has lots of ecological consequences. ponderosa forests support, what, 250 different species. But it also has, I think, emotional consequences as well, not just for me, but this is, I would argue, the most iconic tree of the American West.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Let's talk about why, because I think most of us could probably assume, but I'm sure climate change has to do with this. I'm sure wildfires have to do with this, and those two things are kind of related as well. 

FERGUSON: Yeah, maybe we should start with the wildfire question, because in the inland, interior arid West, the only way that biomass, let's say dead trees or dead branches or other things that are going on on the forest floor, get returned to the soil to produce the kind of nourishing nutrients and minerals that the next flush of life needs, it's through fire.

So fire is not by any means a bad thing. In fact, most of the plant life and animal life, arguably in the West, evolve to take advantage and dance with fire. In the early 20th century, we got it in our heads, our land managers, that the best thing to do with any fire was to put it out. The war on wildfire was a phrase that was very common back then.

And so what we did, we allowed, inadvertently, a lot of debris to build up. in the forest and we allowed trees to start bunching young trees that would have been bunched trees that would have been burned out by those healthy fires started accumulating. There are places in Arizona right now where, in a mature ponderosa forest a couple hundred years ago, there might have been 150 trees growing on that acre. Now you might find 5,000.

GILGER: Wow.

FERGUSON: If you combine that built up debris and the bunching of the forest, you get a real recipe for infernos. And then you add the climate change factor, and all bets are off.

GILGER: Right, and that climate change factor has to do with drought, heat, sort of starving them, right, of what they need?

FERGUSON: That's right. Some trees die literally from thirst, but more often, to be honest, and gosh, in the last 20 years, we've lost about 300 million ponderosa. A lot of times just weaken the trees and make them easy prey for especially pine bark beetles and then other kinds of blight and mistletoe and other things.

And it's kind of interesting. Scientists recently put their heads together and came up with a notion that for every 1 degree Celsius of temperature rise, we'll probably see about an increase in number of acres burned in the West by about 400%. And that's a lot. That would calculate in the next 10 years to another 5 or 6 million acres burning in the West than we're already seeing. And we're already, of course, as people in Arizona know all too well, we're seeing an awful lot of fire activity.

GILGER: Yeah, we definitely are, as we saw just this summer. I mean, the Grand Canyon Lodge burning down, right? 

I want to back up for a moment, Gary, and just talk about something you kind of mentioned at the beginning, which is the emotional impact of this, right? Like, it's hard to even wrap your head around the fact that this forest just might not be there, right, in the future, in the pretty near future. 

But you have a personal connection, it sounds like, to the ponderosa pine forests of the West as well. Tell us about that. 

FERGUSON: My first introduction to ponderosa was through the television. And for some reason, I just was struck by the beauty, these massive 4-, 5-, 6-foot wide trees. Once we got color television, I could see that they were these beautiful cinnamon colored trunks.

Once I got out West, I could then experience this beautiful perfume of vanilla and butterscotch that weft these forests. They're very spacious for us. So spacious, a lot of early explorers talked about how they could ride their horse at full gout through the ponderosa, even drive a boxwagon through it.

GILGER: Wow. 

FERGUSON: When I was out west working for National Geographic, doing a lot of backcountry work throughout the West, ponderosa was the tree that often gave me shelter from heat, from snow, from rain, from hail. And so I started to appreciate that friendship for that reason.

But then I had some very big losses across my life. And every time I chose the ponderosa forest to go to grieve and to mourn, and it wasn't just to feel some sense of peace. But I have to say the ponderosa forest has always left me with a sense of no matter what's going on in your life, you still belong. And so I feel like I want to stand up and profess my admiration for this tree as much as I can.

GILGER: So it's a personal loss to you and to so many people as well, but I don't think it's one that most people realize is happening. 

I mean, is this a message that's getting out there that is starting to be spread? People starting to realize that in northern Arizona especially that you know this forest is disappearing.

FERGUSON: I think slowly but surely. At this point I would guess about a third, a fourth to a third of the severe wildfires in northern Arizona that have taken ponderosa out are still without trees even if they burned 20 or 30 years ago. And so they're starting to get the sense that with the fires being so hot and so severe again this is a big function of climate change.

And you know one interesting thing, too, Lauren, we don't have Southwest, a bench, if you will, of trees. You know, if we were in the east or the northwest, lots of other trees fill in and make the landscape seem somewhat similar. But when ponderosa goes, it changes everything. And in my mind, this is really a reason to claim that much of the Southwest is the first post-climate change landscape in America.

GILGER: Right. I wanted to ask you about that because that seems really stark. We are living in the place in which we will be the first in that way. You talk about the term solastalgia in the book and this idea of pain and I guess a homesickness is the best way they describe it. 

How do you apply that term to this experience of, of mourning the loss of and watching the loss of this forest?

FERGUSON: Well, Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher from Australia, came up with that word about 20 years ago. And it really literally does mean a kind of, as you suggest, “homesickness” in the face of a home landscape that you've known for a long time, beginning to unravel so that you don't recognize your place anymore.

This is happening so often to so many people that the psychology community and the therapy community is really working hard to try to figure out how to help people through this kind of solastalgia. I think it's a great way to think about this. And ultimately, perhaps it will also provide some incentive for us to all come together and get a little more serious about what we plan to do about it in the future.

GILGER: Right. So, I mean, that has to be our final question today, right? Which is, is there anything that can be done? 

FERGUSON: Well, I want to encourage everybody to keep doing whatever you might consider little things. Bill McKibben sometimes is asked, what can I do as a lone individual? And his reaction is, stop acting as a lone individual, get with other people, and do what you can.

In Arizona alone, just for the ponderosa, Northern Arizona University, Coconino National Forest, they have opportunities to help replant after burns, to collect seeds from ponderosa trees to grow into seedlings later. So there are lots and lots of opportunities.

The other thing though, it may sound a little odd, but I would say pick one thing that you really care about that you feel is struggling in the face of climate change and, and just pour yourself into it. Learn everything you possibly can.

Will that make you sad and will it take you into grief? It absolutely will, but will also, I think reinvent your love for the world. There's a kind of gratitude for being able to care about something so much that it disappearing hurts so much. And that may sound hard to believe, but give it a try, because I think it's that nourishment and that awakening the heart to the kinship that we have with other beings on this earth that will carry us all through the difficult decades to come.

GILGER: You don't know what you have until it's gone, right?