There should be a special word for the type of mourning you know is to come. In a decade, 18 million hectares of mature pine forest would be dead, representing about one-third of the forested area of British Columbia. The beetles would continue to chew their way through whitebark, western white, and ponderosa pines, through the United States from Oregon to Yellowstone, and would start infesting the jack-pine hybrids across the boreal forest of Canada, producing a total epidemic across North America in an area roughly the size of California, surpassing that of any insect outbreak in recorded
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