Bugged.

Bark beetles are decimating Alaska's spruce and bringing together the most unlikely of partners. Story and photos by Jane Braxton Little

Rick Smeriglio is thrashing through thigh-deep snow, batting at the fresh flakes falling on the forest, and talking intently about fire. Even in the midst of this late April storm, it's not hard to

imagine flames racing through the logged-over spruce stand surrounding us. Dead trees are everywhere, the victims of bark beetles.

Smeriglio, an environmentalist and firefighter, pulls out a hunting knife and slices into the bark of a nearby spruce, exposing the culprits - tiny white grubs that squirm in the sudden light before spilling out of the trunk and onto the snow.

This grove near Moose Pass is sadly commonplace in south-central Alaska. From Anchorage to the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, a progression of dead treetops cuts the skyline with rust-red gashes in an infestation so devastating it dims even the rugged beauty of the timbered shoreline along Cook Inlet. Farther south the damage gets worse. The town of Homer, built among mature spruce on a spit of land that drops into Kachemak Bay, is fast becoming a landscape of grassy vistas fringed with stumps.

But the bugs are transforming more than just the landscape. In this incongruous land of glaciers and volcanoes, deep snows and wildfire, the bark beetles have created yet another anomaly. Along with enormous destruction, they have unwittingly produced collaboration among the humans who share their woods - people who have been at odds for decades. A creature smaller than pencil lead has brought Alaska's notoriously independent residents together to resolve the problems caused by dead and dying forests.

"A lot of communication has taken place," says Mike Navarre, Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor. "When you find common ground in one area, it fosters more common ground in other areas. We've even got credibility across agency lines."

No one thinks communication can halt the beetle kill. The goal of these new-found partners is to coordinate their efforts to protect communities from wildfire and to provide information about the choices facing landowners. Their biggest challenge is money. So far their request for $13.2 million in federal funds has floundered, leaving an alliance with enthusiasm but few on-the-ground accomplishments. That, however, has not discouraged them.

"We're going to do public education and forest stewardship and all the rest. We will," says Navarre, narrowing his eyes.

A deceptively mild-mannered man with great determination, Navarre presides over an area as big as West Virginia known as Alaska's Playground. With active volcanoes smoldering across Cook Inlet to the west and the Harding Ice Field shimmering to the east, the Kenai Peninsula is a still-wild land where moose are almost as common as loons. Now it also has 49,000 residents and more than a million annual tourists who come for the hunting, fishing, and the forests clinging to steep mountains rising up from the sea.

It is the combination of a mushrooming population and a tourist-based economy that raised a red flag over the bug-killed trees. A normal presence in the forests of Alaska, spruce bark beetles (dendroctonus rufipennis) began to spread dramatically a decade ago. The infestation has claimed more than 2.3 million acres - an area bigger than Yellowstone National Park. The beetles have been egalitarian, boring through bark and breeding in trees on private property, federal, state, and tribal lands alike. Some property owners logged their dead trees; others left them standing. Some thought only aggressive action would save the land; others wanted to let nature take its course.

Then, in the summer of 1996, a logging operation sparked a wildfire near Crooked Creek 20 miles south of Soldotna, the Kenai Borough seat. By the time firefighters brought it under control, the fire had scorched 17,000 acres. That wake-up call, says Smeriglio, the first firefighter on the scene, sounded an alarm for Kenai residents far greater than the threat of wildfire in the beetle-killed forests.

Conflicts were multiplying over salvage logging roads, erosion, and the long-term impacts of piecemeal land management on brown bear and fishing, an economic mainstay. The Kenai Peninsula had a natural resource crisis begging for coordinated planning, Navarre says. "You can't just clearcut the entire peninsula."

He turned to Senator Frank H. Murkowski, Republican chairman of the energy and natural resources committee. Congress responded with legislation directing the U.S. Forest Service to form a multiparty task force charged with developing an action plan to manage and rehabilitate the infested areas. The legislation provided $500,000 and set a June 30, 1998, deadline.

Navarre, designated as task force chairman, held a public meeting that resulted in an 11-member group representing native tribes, environmental groups, timber and tourism, fishing, and education. Officials from six public agencies, including the Forest Service, participated as an advisory panel. Together the group embodied the polar extremes of land management philosophy: from harvesting every tree to harvesting none; from building more roads to building none; from passionate believers in man's dominion over the earth to leave-no-trace environmentalists.

This wasn't the first time Kenai community leaders gathered to study natural resource conflicts. Since 1990 at least 11 separate groups have made recommendations to the Forest Service and state agencies but with few visible results. Homer Fire Chief Robert Purcell and others were understandably wary when they were named to the bark beetle task force.

"We didn't want to go back to our constituents and say nothing happened - again," says Purcell.

The 1998 task force began with a binding commitment to reach complete consensus on all recommendations. "If someone's going, 'I don't agree,' the issue died. I did that twice," says Mike "Huck" Huckabay, a Soldotna snowmobiler who represented recreational interests on the task force.

Unlike past study groups, which were formed and led by agency officials, the bark beetle task force was citizen-driven. Although the agencies provided valuable expertise and agreed to adopt and implement the recommendations, community leaders controlled the process.

"They listened to us," says Ann Whitmore-Painter, a Kenai Borough planning commissioner who represented private landowners. "We were not used as a sounding board."

The task force produced 50 recommendations in eight categories. The issue unanimously earning their highest priority was fire prevention and public safety. Despite widespread fear of fire, however, several recommendations went well beyond the immediate problems posed by dead and dying trees. The result is a comprehensive review of natural resources and land management. A call for adequately funded scientific research programs, for example, reflects the task force members' concern over understanding and maintaining healthy ecosystems. They also recommended that state and federal agencies develop a brown bear conservation plan, acknowledging the importance of wildlife to the local economy and quality of life.

The way the task force dealt with issues it could not resolve is as significant as its consensus achievements. One of the most contentious was whether logging or prescribed fire is more successful in regenerating beetle-killed spruce forests. Smeriglio, who represented environmental groups on the task force, is such a strong advocate of managed fire that he has ventured into spring snow to make his point.

"Fires, not clearcuts, are the way forests have historically regenerated themselves," he says, tugging at his wool hat against the swirling storm.

Many on the task force disagree, and so this clash was deferred along with other controversies that would never win agreement. Amazed that they found issues on which they did agree, the task force focused instead on urban interface areas, where even Smeriglio advocates logging to reduce fuels created by the beetle epidemic.

"They said, 'We're not going to fight these political battles again,' "says Jeff Jahkne, Alaska's state forester. "In an atmosphere that is already polarized, particularly over the bark beetle, they found a common approach. To me that is unique in natural resource management anywhere."

Being part of a new collaboration - sharing Whitmore-Painter's delight that "enemies were really listening, then talking" - was the major accomplishment for most task force members. The process also improved relationships with state and federal agencies, even for their diehard critics, says Navarre. The group assigned each of its recommendations to a specific agency and estimated the funding required. But the clout remained with the community leaders. "This was basic democracy," Purcell says.

As active advisors, agency officials earned new respect for responding to questions "without politicking or denying past transgressions," he says. "All of a sudden these agencies had a real face. They became real people you could call up on the phone."

Despite these changes, the bark beetle task force has been frustrated in its efforts to win the money needed to make its recommendations realities. A year has passed since it completed those recommendations, but so far Congress has authorized no new funds. The Kenai Borough is seeking $9.5 million to remove hazard trees, buy a grinder, and take other steps to reduce the hazards caused by the infestation.

"It's discouraging," says Whitmore-Painter.

There are hopeful signs within the agencies. The Forest Service and state Division of Forestry are directing their own budgets toward several on-the-ground activities identified as priorities. Around $825,000 is funding assistance to forest owners, hazard fuel reduction, and other work. The Forest Service has requested substantially more money to implement task force projects next year.

That sounds promising to the group's members. However pleased they are with their new colleagues in public and private offices, they measure their success in terms of the natural resources that drew them to Alaska. Like Smeriglio, they are not waiting for the snowmelt to monitor the wildlife, test their fire safety measures, and assess the advance of the bark beetle infestation. Blizzard or not, they are looking for results on the land where it matters.

"We'll talk about success after the dust settles," Smeriglio says. "What really counts is out here on the ground."

Contributing editor Jane Braxton Little writes about the environment from Greenwood, California.