The first meeting of the new year for the Bow Valley Naturalists will take place on Wednesday, January 25th at 7:30 pm in the Banff Seniors Centre.
The program will consist of a presentation by award-winning journalist Andrew Nikiforuk titled: The Beetle Economy: A Modern Tale of Collapse and Renewal.
Beetles make up a third of all living creatures on the planet. Beginning in the 1980s a series of bark beetle epidemics erupted in western pine and
spruce forests from Alaska to New Mexico. Some of the outbreaks, such as that of BC's mountain pine beetle, transformed entire rural economies.
Although long considered a ruinous pest, the bark beetle has a powerful and surprising evolutionary role to play in the health of aging forests.
For the last two decades, Nikiforuk, who lives in Calgary, has been writing about education, economics, and environmental issues. Included in his
impressive list of books are Pandemonium; The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Plagues, Scourges and Emerging Viruses; and Saboteurs: Wiebo
Ludwig's War against Oil, which won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.
His book Tar Sands won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and became a national bestseller. Most recently, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug are Killing North America's Great Forests was published last year.
He will describe how this charismatic wild organism, the size of a rice kernel, also holds critical lessons for human societies about natural cycles
of collapse and renewal in all ecosystems. What the beetles did to our forests, we are now witnessing in our aging economies and political
institutions.
The program is free and open to the public.
Photo: Courtesy of BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Operations
Photo: Courtesy of BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Operations
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Bow Valley Naturalists (BVN) is a charitable, incorporated Alberta Society of approximately 140 people in the Banff - Canmore area of Alberta, Canada. We have been actively involved in natural history and conservation projects since our inception in 1967.