Perhaps you’ve driven through a national park recently and seen scores of gray, dead pine trees, cut down not by fire or chainsaw, but by swarms of tiny, industrious bark beetles. Since the 1980s, the mountain pine beetle and its ilk have swept through forests from North America to Europe, causing billions of dollars in damage and transforming entire ecosystems. Andrew Nikiforuk, one of Canada’s leading environmental journalists, examines the changes in his new book, Empire of the Beetle (read our excerpt here). Aided by climate change, the beetles’ empire has expanded, and no one -- including scientists and foresters -- knows what will happen next. In a conversation with OnEarth, Nikiforuk shared how the bug has taught him that nature, not man, is the boss of forest management.

At a time when so many potentially catastrophic environmental problems trouble the world, what made you decide to write about bark beetles?

There are three reasons. First, I’m a landowner in southern Alberta -- a place called Porcupine Hills -- and I lost a lot of trees from the beetle epidemic. It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine other people losing trees. Second, beetles make up a quarter of all the animals on the planet. A lot of environmentalists get so obsessed with fossil fuels and energy, but these animals are important, too. The third reason was curiosity. In 2006 there was a bark beetle summit in Calgary, and they gave people an opportunity to take an aerial tour of forests affected by beetle infestation. It was amazing to see, from above, that a creature the size of a rice kernel could transform a landscape in the space of a year.

I’ve visited both Yosemite and Yellowstone over the last month and seen gray, dead trees everywhere. Were bark beetles behind that?

When beetles successfully attack a tree, there are different phases. There’s the red needle phase, then the gray phase -- the ghost forest. You see a lot of that in Yellowstone and Yosemite. Climate change has allowed bark beetles to migrate to higher altitudes than before, into alpine forests. That has enormous implications. For example, those big trees provide habitat for bears and shade for the snow that feeds streams and rivers (which serve as salmon hatcheries) with cold water. A lot of people call (Utah-based USDA researcher) Jesse Logan the beetle Nostradamus. He warned 20 years ago that climate change would enable beetles to get into areas they’d never been before, with devastating effect. Everything he predicted -- beetles moving into the Canadian boreal forest and alpine forests around North America --has happened.

Another scientist who has exhaustively studied bark beetle populations, Stephen Wood, features prominently in the book. In writing about bark beetles, did you come to feel a certain kinship toward him?

No, but I was fascinated by Wood. That a man would devote so much of his life to so tiny a creature -- to so painstakingly draw and record them -- is impressive. But I think he had a great time doing it. A lot of entomologists who studied beetles were smitten by them at a young age. It was like the beetles picked them. It’s a charismatic animal.

How so? What are their communities like?

We know that, like ants, they’re extremely social creatures. They have complicated forms of communication that involve chemical perfume that signals other beetles to accelerate or stop an attack against a tree. Once inside the tree they have a different way of communicating -- they make sounds by scraping parts of their bodies together. We don’t know what they’re saying, but there are a lot of conversations going on in there. They’re farmers: After 330 million years on the planet, they’ve become adept at cultivating fungi. They’re also warriors. Attacking a tree is a highly coordinated, deadly event associated with a lot of casualties. In the case of the mountain pine beetle, attacks are led by females.

What role should bark beetles play in a managed forest, the kind used for logging?

Our big mistake is that we appropriate forests for either conservation or logging. We really have to rethink the way we manage large forest landscapes; maybe we shouldn’t manage them so much. The other mistake we’ve made is that we keep forest ecosystems stable forever, and that’s not how nature works. As a society, we like stability at all costs, but the beetle is telling us that life is unpredictable. It’s about collapse and renewal and not trying to manage every goddamn thing.

When I started the book, I thought beetles were these nasty little creatures destroying magnificent forests. The real story is that they’re doing exactly what they’re programmed to do. The sad part is that our actions -- successful fire suppression and logging -- are what caused so huge an infestation.

Are we headed toward a North American version of the medieval Age of Great Clearings, when the landscape of Northern Europe was changed forever?

We’ve already had that in some respects. The beetles are still working their way through parts of British Columbia, Colorado, Wyoming  and so forth. Almost 30 billion trees have been killed, but what we don’t know -- especially in the face of climate change -- is how much of that will come back as trees and how much will come back as grassland. I don’t have a crystal ball, but we’ll see more of the volatility and unpredictability we’ve already seen. Any culture that imposes human concepts of stability on a landscape doesn’t get stability in the end. It gets more chaos.

What’s happening at the human-beetle nexus in other parts of the world, such as Russia and China, where the logging is an important industry?

There’s a huge debate in Poland about how to deal with a beetle infestation that’s collapsing the forest. Some want to cut down all the trees, and others are saying, "Wait a minute, you can’t take away the whole forest, this is a process of renewal." China, in particular, is concerned about importing non-native bark beetles. But there are issues about that all over the world. Europeans removed most of their hardwoods in the 13^th century and replaced them with conifers that turned out to be beetle factories. That’s why European forestry has sought so aggressively to eradicate beetles. Over the last 15 to 20 years, they’ve realized that they need to restore some of the hardwood diversity they lost.

In the last chapter of your book, you talk about nature’s robustness. What solutions to the problem of bark beetle infestations does science suggest?

I think we need to accept some humility. We got our asses whipped by a tiny creature. It’s interesting that someone like (the University of Florida’s) Buzz Holling -- who is a phenomenal ecologist -- has advised that we need to find ways to hear the rustle of the mouse, so to speak. In other words, we need to look at the small, the extreme and the improbable, because those things will decide our future. In a way, the beetle is the ultimate black swan. You can’t change a bark beetle epidemic any more than you can redirect a hurricane.