Seasons & climate
By Suzie McMurtry, Rowan Bayliss Hawitt, Megan Stamp, and Charlotte Werth
Interdisciplinary Workshop Outcome
The proliferation of the mountain pine beetle was one of the first and most vivid stories told to me of climate change affecting the phenology of a specific species. My teenage brain could hold it: greenhouse gas emissions heat Earth, winters get milder and shorter, precipitation mostly decreases, and organisms work together to react as their evolution has allowed them to. And the human economies built around these organisms react, too.
The three of us in my group were happy to get caught up in discussing all the loops and entangled ways of understanding the problem and felt that it deserved a proposal fittingly elaborate, deeply sad, fun, hopeful, engaging: a “Frost Festival”.
Since the late 90s and peaking around 2016, the mountain pine beetle capitalised on warmer, shorter winters to mature faster and cover more ground in North America than has ever before been recorded. The beetle can kill trees because of a symbiotic partnership it has developed with a blue fungus that converts the pine’s nutrients into a perfect food for the beetle larvae. The beetle bores and reproduces; the fungus spreads, blocking off the phloem (which transports nutrients around the plant) and creating a blue stain throughout the xylem (which mainly transports water).²
mountain pine beetle outbreak causes & effects flow chart
Beetle kill pine, with its grey blue tone, gained popularity in regions affected and brought a significant, if not unreliable, flow of profit to local loggers who harvested freshly dead pine.
source: Alpine Blue Home
We found an irony and point of entry with this temporally specific product and decided to begin the Frost Festival by burning a blue stain timber beetle effigy on the first frozen night of that year’s winter.
The Frost Festival
By centring frost, the simplest reason why the beetle populations have increased, and asking the whole community to mark the first frozen night and monitor winter’s length, the Frost Festival has multiple points of entry to the topic of beetle kill and climate change in general. We envision workshops to share knowledge of prescribed burning happening throughout the festival and each year a new pine beetle song is composed and performed.
A long-term change visualisation tool would be active throughout the festival with different levels of control or input for children, loggers, council members, landscapers, etc. Here, one could toggle weather conditions and duration, forest management techniques (prescribed burning, cutting for staggered growth, etc.), and greenhouse gas emissions globally to see changes in beetle population, wildfire severity, timber prices, timber stock/tree death rate, tourism, real estate (“viewshed contamination”²), native squirrel populations, etc.
The festival format should allow everyone (all ages, professions, spectrums of climate change awareness) to engage with different aspects of the issue yet still forces them to confront the key point: warmer winters means more dead pine, more dead pine means more severe wildfire seasons and, within years, much less timber.The whole town or county will not know the date of the Frost Festival until a few days before it begins, then it will only last as long as there is a consistent freeze. Could it really last through March? Next year, how much shorter will the festival be? Children and adults alike would wonder.
Collective mourning and celebration is vital to moving through climate change while maintaining an attitude of care of local ecosystems. Could the whole town see this in their town square? Would this event planners’ nightmare keep climate change on the mind in an approachable and realistic way? It may keep the town on their toes, hoping for and perhaps somehow protecting cold winters.
“The brand of holist ecological philosophy that emphasizes that ‘everything is connected to everything’ will not help us here. Rather, everything is connected to something, which is connected to something else (Rose 2008:56). While we may all ultimately be connected to one another, the specificity and proximity of connections matters—who we are bound up with and in what ways. Life and death happen inside these relationships. And so, we need to understand how particular human communities, as well as those of other living beings, are entangled and how these entanglements are implicated in the production of both extinctions and their accompanying patterns of amplified death.”³
- Negron, Jose F.; Cain, Bob. 2018. Mountain pine beetle in Colorado: A story of changing forests. Journal of Forestry.
- Oatman, Maddie. “Bark Beetles Are Killing Forests — but They Might Be Saving Them, Too.” Grist, Mother Jones, 20 Mar. 2015.
- Dooren, Van Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. Columbia University Press, 2016.
image 1: https://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/the-mountain-pine-beetle-epidemic/#gsc.tab=0image 3: https://www.alpinebluehome.com/reclaimed-wood-furniture