Meet the Beetles

Where is John McPhee now that we really need him?

Way back in 1967, McPhee penned an acclaimed volume, The Pine Barrens, a rich literary excursion into the forests, wetlands, and unique subculture of what’s now called New Jersey’s Pinelands. A longtime writer for The New Yorker, for decades McPhee—born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey—has been one of America’s very best journalists, along the way winning numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. And it’s not at all unreasonable to say that the publication of The Pine Barrens may have helped to save the Pinelands, a vital and complex ecosystem that covers nearly one-fourth of the state’s entire land area, from extinction.

That’s because back in the mid-1960s—before Earth Day, before the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, before the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act—not much attention was paid to ecology, to the planet. And the sprawling pine-covered areas of central and southern New Jersey were grievously endangered.

In April 1963, 37 manmade fires came together as a giant conflagration—dubbed Black Saturday—that burned through 190,000 acres in Atlantic, Ocean, and Burlington counties and beyond. Bad as that was, the pine trees know fires, and they’re able to regenerate. Far more threatening to the region was unchecked growth and development, including industrial projects, housing developments, and in 1964 a proposal to build a gigantic jetport and a city of 250,000 smack dab in the middle of the Pinelands, just outside Toms River. The jetport, McPhee wrote, “would cover thirty-two thousand five-hundred acres and would eliminate all of the Upper and Lower Plains, several ponds, a lake, an entire state forest, and Bear Swamp Hill.”

McPhee’s volume helped spur an outcry that sparked the creation of the Pinelands Environmental Council in 1971. Seven years later, the U.S. Congress created the Pinelands National Reserve, designed to safeguard the region, and a year later the New Jersey state legislature passed the Pinelands Protection Act. It was, to say the least, a tremendous accomplishment, establishing at a stroke an umbrella covering a vast expanse of protected forests, wetlands, lakes, rivers and streams and a huge underground aquifer.

But today the Pinelands is endangered once again. Now, the threat comes from New Jersey’s rapidly warming climate and changing weather patterns. Among the concerns that worry scientists, forestry officials, and environmentalists are the increased risk of fires as temperatures rise and the ground dries out; rising sea levels that, especially during storms, can push brackish, salt-heavy water up rivers and streams; and perhaps most of all, the spread of a tiny pest, the southern pine beetle.

Thanks to global warming, these voracious insects, once largely confined to America’s southeast, have migrated northward, and they’re now firmly established in New Jersey. About the size of an uncooked grain of rice, these creatures—when gathered by the hundreds of millions—can destroy countless acres of pine trees, scientists say.

“It might not be many years before people are driving through the Pinelands, saying, ‘Why do they call it the Pinelands?’” says Matthew P. Ayres, professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth College, an ecologist who’s spent nearly three decades tracking the habits of the southern pine beetle.

Shaggy-haired, bearded and bespectacled, Ayres began studying the southern pine beetle and what he calls its “crazy population dynamics” in the early 1990s in, appropriately enough, Pineville, Louisiana, before taking up residence at Dartmouth. Back then, the beetle did not range further north than Tennessee and Virginia. “I used to spend three days driving down to Mississippi and Alabama to study the southern pine beetle,” he recalls. Now that they’ve moved north, infesting New Jersey, Long Island and even showing up around Albany, New York, and western Massachusetts, Ayres doesn’t have to travel far to see the pests. “They’re in my backyard.”

The hungry critters started turning up in New Jersey, starting in Cape May and infesting large swaths of the Pinelands to the north, around 2001. They were voracious. “They operate the way wolves kill their prey,” Ayres says. “They gang up and attack.” Burrowing into a tree’s bark, they eat the tree from the inside and generate larvae which, the next year, swarm out to attack nearby trees. In a season, they can devour and kill thousands upon thousands of pine trees, creating a sea of dead vegetation that Ayres notes can be seen from outer space. “The trees go from green to red, then they turn brown, and then the needles fall off,” he says.

“They can really do a lot of damage,” says Corey Lesk, a PhD student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, who has co-authored a number of studies on the southern pine beetle. “A serious outbreak can kill all of the trees in an area,” he says, calling it an “eruptive insect” that he compares to a volcano. “Their job is to go out and find pine trees and eat them.”

Not seen in New Jersey for at least a century, southern pine beetles started showing up in significant numbers about 20 years ago. In 2002, the newly arrived beetles deadened 1,270 acres of pineland forest; the following year, 2,508 acres. Over the next decade, they spread. In 2010, at the maximum extent of the recent outbreak, they destroyed 14,000 acres of trees, in what Ayres calls a “landscape epidemic.” Since then, state efforts to control their spread and a polar-vortex winter freeze in 2014 reduced their numbers, but they haven’t gone away. They’re still lurking.

Scientists from Rutgers, Columbia, Dartmouth, and various state and federal agencies think they know why the southern pine beetles suddenly packed up and moved north two decades ago: thanks to climate change, it got warmer, especially in winter. That’s important, because it isn’t just the average year-round temperature that allowed the pine beetles into the Garden State. What they found in their research is that what matters is the annual lowest winter temperature. The colder it gets, especially even if just for a night or two it gets down to, say, zero degrees Fahrenheit, or even five or ten degrees below zero, the worse off for the beetles. “At zero degrees, there’s going to be significant mortality for the pine beetle,” says Ayres. “At minus ten, they pretty much all die.”

Problem is, that doesn’t happen any more. As highlighted by the exceptionally warm winter of 2019–2020, New Jersey just doesn’t get as cold as it used to in January and February. It’s been a quarter century, since 1996, the last time the temperature cooled to as low as minus-8 in the Pinelands. “Since 1960, the average coldest night of the year in New Jersey has warmed by about seven degrees Fahrenheit,” says Ayres.

David Robinson, born and bred in New Jersey, is a distinguished professor and earth scientist at Rutgers University. Since 1991, he’s also been the state’s official climatologist, and for the past 30 years he’s specialized in tracking, studying and analyzing New Jersey’s climate and weather patterns. “It’s been a labor of love,” he says.

He also knows Cape May pretty well. “I’ve kayaked it and biked it. I’m on the board of the Nature Conservancy. I’ve been out bird watching at 6am,” he says, adding that five years ago he convened a meeting of the American Association of State Climatologists at the Grand Hotel in Cape May.

Robinson doesn’t doubt the seriousness of what New Jersey faces as it confronts the climate changes underway. “We’re created a different baseline environment,” he says. “We’re dealing, from a human perspective, with a slowly evolving crisis. We’re seeing warming. We’re seeing it throughout New Jersey, and we’re seeing it globally. New Jersey has already warmed several degrees from preindustrial times, changes that climatologists are quite confident are associated with human impacts on the climate system.”

Whether we call it global warming, whether we say that it’s human-induced or anthropogenic, it’s here to stay, he says.

“The imprint of humans on the climate system has become notable,” says Robinson. “Essentially, the signal has emerged from the noise of the always-varying climate system over the past 40 or 50 years, and since that time we have seen changes that our investigations show would not have occurred without human interference in the environment.” The result, he says, is that New Jersey is getting hotter, more susceptible to drought, and more vulnerable to weather extremes, including heat waves and flooding. “It was warm this winter. It would have been warm whether or not humans were occupying the earth,” says Robinson. “But our activities made it even warmer.” In 2019-2020 southern New Jersey, he points out, is on track for the least amount of snow since record-keeping began in 1895.

All of that, says Robinson, has created the conditions that allowed the southern pine beetle to take up residence here. And it has escalated threats to the Pinelands from other directions, too.

First, there’s the danger that sea water will get into the Pinelands and its vast underground water reserve. More than 17 trillion gallons of vitally important fresh water are stored underneath the Pinelands, enough to cover the entire state of New Jersey ten feet deep, in what’s called the Kirkland-Cohansey aquifer. That water not only provides drinking water to south Jersey and Philadelphia, but it sustains the network of marshes, wetlands, and streams that cover the region and sustain the pine trees and countless other species of plants and animals that inhabit it. It also allows New Jersey blueberry and cranberry farmers to count on healthy crops year after year.

Robinson is concerned about how rising seas and more violent storms might impact that aquifer. “It’s known as saltwater infiltration,” he says. Brackish water, driven inland from the coast, becomes saltier and saltier, eventually turning into saltwater. Driven by rising sea levels, it not only backs up into rivers and streams, but it can contaminate the groundwater. “Sea level rise comes up into the bays, and into the estuaries, and then into the rivers. And there’s evidence that it’s killing forests. As you increase the brackishness of the near-coastal pinelands, you end up with a wasteland of dead trees.” The Atlantic white cedar is especially vulnerable to saltwater intrusion, say forestry experts. The result, according to a study from the state Pinelands Commission, is what are called “ghost forests” or “cedar cemeteries.”

Another danger is fire, according to Robinson. Because the soil is so sandy, it quickly absorbs rainfall, meaning that very quickly after it rains the ground is dry. “The Pinelands is a tinderbox within days of the last rainfall,” he says. “And given that the Pinelands can dry out so quickly, and those trees and the underbrush are so flammable, we could be faced with a greater fire danger in the future.”

All of these threats—insect invasions, drought, fire, and saltwater—mean that the Pinelands is under siege.

There’s no question that the Pinelands is a vitally important part of New Jersey’s environment. Covering nearly 1,500 square miles, the pine forests are the state’s “lungs,” sucking in vast quantities of carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. More than 850 plant species and 500 animal species inhabit the Pinelands, scores of which are either endangered or threatened species, including four varieties of sparrows, bald eagles, piping plovers, several species of owls, falcons, hawks, and woodpeckers, along with wood turtles, bog turtles, the northern pine snake and New Jersey’s bobcats.

“The Pinelands holds the largest coastal freshwater aquifer on the eastern seaboard,” says Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “It’s a United Nations-designated biosphere reserve, with plants and other species found nowhere else in the world. It’s a very unique place. There’s nothing else like it.”

For many people, whizzing up and down the Garden State Parkway or zipping across the Atlantic City Expressway that slices through the heart of the Pinelands, it’s easy to miss, well, the forest for the trees. Despite its vast size—it’s about twice the size of Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Teton National Park, combined—not that many people go out of their way to explore the Pinelands and the many state forests and wilderness areas inside it. In addition, 700,000 people in 56 towns and villages live inside the Pinelands, often engaged in agriculture, producing 58 million pounds of blueberries and 512,000 barrels of cranberries annually.

“My favorite view of the pines is going up to Apple Pie Hill [in Burlington County] and seeing just this sea of green, with Philadelphia and the Atlantic City casinos in the distance, but in between all you see is green,” says Tittel.

Carleton Montgomery has been the executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance since 1998. The alliance, founded in 1989, is a private, nonprofit organization whose purpose is to protect the Pinelands. Besides environmental threats to the area, the alliance is also concerned about the harmful effects of overdevelopment, poor forest management, and overuse and abuse. “It’s a Noah’s ark, surrounded by threatening seas,” he says. “Twenty million people live within an hour’s drive of it, so its always being threatened.”

Asked how much the people who live in New Jersey understand the importance of the Pinelands, Montgomery says that most people have heard of it, and want it protected. “But it’s an abstraction. Most people have not explored it. So that’s part of our mission.”

With proper management, securing the future of the Pinelands is certainly within reach. By limiting further development, by restricting how much water is pumped out of the aquifer, by regulating the damaging use of off-road vehicles, by taking steps to clear out forests where too much potential fuel in the form of dead trees and underbrush has accumulated—all of these things and more can help sustain the Pinelands ecosystem.

Even the beetles can be stopped, despite warming temperatures. By cutting down and hauling away infested trees and some of those in the near vicinity of an infestation, and by constant monitoring and surveillance of the forests, it’s possible to retard the spread of the southern pine beetle.

But, many of those involved in studying the beetles say, for reasons of both cost and politics, New Jersey isn’t doing enough. Perhaps, in part, the state authorities relaxed a little too much after the 2014 hard freeze seemed to inhibit the spread of the beetles. “The year of the polar vortex, we predicted that it would kill about half of the beetles,” says Dartmouth’s Ayres. But he’s still worried. He and his colleagues told federal and state forestry services, “Don’t take this as a sign that you’re out of the woods.” So to speak.

“They’re still there.”

In the past, say Ayres and other specialists, the state conducted aerial surveillance of the Pinelands, looking for telltale signs of infestations and then carrying out explorations on the ground to check for beetles in areas that looked suspicious. According to Ayes, they’re not doing that anymore. “They’ve stopped doing the surveys, the aerial surveys, the ground surveys, to map areas killed by the southern pine beetle. As far as I know, that hasn’t been done in the last four or five years.”

Why did they stop? “Money and optics,” he says. “It’s expensive to do this work, and they kind of declared victory and shut down the operation. And it was hard for the higher-ups to justify the money to continue to monitor and control.” That’s a dangerous mistake, he says. “If they’re not doing the monitoring and suppression, there’s going to be another outbreak.”

According to the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, the state authority with responsibility for the area, the Pinelands Commission is failing in its primary task. In its report, State of the Pinelands 2020, the alliance said that the commission is “paralyzed by a combination of empty seats and years of mismanagement,” adding: “The Commission lacks any plans or policies to alleviate the impact of climate change on this region.”

Many environmentalists hoped that the changeover from the administration of Governor Chris Christie, who favored development and big business, to that of Governor Phil Murphy would translate into more attention being paid to the health of the Pinelands. So far, however, the appointments of five new commissioners to the Pinelands Commission have stalled, tangled up in Trenton’s political gridlock. As a result, the Sierra Club’s Tittel told a journalist, the commission “is still dominated by Christie’s appointees who were put there to weaken protections… especially with the threat of climate change.”

Ayres says that in the southeast, where the southern pine beetle had its original home, their spread has largely been brought under control. “It would be a very, very good investment to do detection and, when necessary, early suppression,” he says. “The southern pine beetle can be managed. We know a lot about its biology. We know how to manage it. There’s no silver bullet. It involves monitoring and suppression and prevention.”