"SEATTLE — So many pine, fir and spruce trees in the Northwest are riddled with bugs and disease that major tree die-offs are expected to rip through a third of Eastern Washington forests - an area covering nearly 3 million acres - in the next 15 years, according to new state projections."

"Whitebark pines may be among the earliest victims of a warming climate in the Northwest, as rising temperatures at higher elevations have brought the trees into contact with the destructive mountain pine beetle."

Craig Welch reports for the Seattle Times November 7, 2011.

 

"An agricultural leader protesting illegal deforestation was shot to death in northern Brazil, the eighth environmentalist farmer to be killed since May in the Amazon, activists said Tuesday."

"DENVER — A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a law prohibiting roads on nearly 50 million acres of land in national forests across the United States, a ruling hailed by environmentalists as one of the most significant in decades.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule after lawyers for the state of Wyoming and the Colorado Mining Association contended it was a violation of the law.

Forests moderate global warming by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But scientists can't predict whether warming will cause major forests to die back, causing a vicious cycle that will make global warming worse.

"An environmental group accused Republican Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico of inciting a county in his district to flout federal environmental laws by bulldozing 47 road crossings through a stretch of the San Francisco River in the Gila National Forest."

"A century-old federal program that compensates counties straddling huge tracts of nontaxable national forests has expired, and House Republicans are using its reauthorization to push for opening the land to more logging and mining."

"The Interior Department is considering more than a dozen areas for Congress to designate as wilderness, the highest level of protection for public lands, according to interviews with several state Bureau of Land Management offices."

"BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Crews facing adverse weather forecasts rushed to bolster protective lines around blazes that have scorched tens of thousands of acres in the Northern Rockies, while firefighters in Oregon worked to corral a range fire that forced a kids' science camp to evacuate.

Fire conditions rose to critical Thursday as steady winds fanned several blazes and scattered storms threatened to spark new ones across Montana, north central Idaho and northwest Wyoming.

"The legacy of George Washington's centuries-old logging venture in the Great Dismal Swamp is contributing to the possible demise of a valuable ecosystem as a barely contained fire burns on the Virginia-North Carolina border, experts say."

"Only a year ago Russia was overwhelmed by an exceptional heat wave, triggering hundreds of fires that destroyed thousands of hectares of woodland. Burning peat bogs around Moscow stifled the city in a thick cloud of bitter smoke."

"By year’s end, the Obama administration will announce a new plan to manage the nation’s 155 national forests for the next 15 to 20 years."

"With hundreds of fires scorching northern Ontario, and Alberta and Northwest Territories battling bigger blazes than usual, this is potentially shaping up as one of the nation’s most destructive wildfire years."

"The Obama administration [Tuesday] roundly denounced a proposal by Republican lawmakers that would release several million acres of protected public lands into local management plans, potentially opening them to timber harvests, oil and gas development, motorized recreation and other uses."

"The devastation that bark beetles and fungus have wreaked on hundreds of thousands of acres of whitebark pine trees in the northern Rockies has been tracked and chronicled for 30 years. Now the Fish and Wildlife Service has weighed in with a finding that climate change threatens the long-term survival of the species."