When you think about it, money does grow on trees. Lumber and pulp and paper markets, for instance, have been known to make investors a pretty penny from time to time. And so, when billions of the trees start dying, it can create some big challenges for environmentalists and market players alike.

Over the past four years, lumber futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have declined from highs near $460 per 1,000 board feet, to current levels of roughly half that.

The downturn in the U.S. housing sector is mostly to blame, given that so much timber is used to put a roof on top of our heads. But an infestation of mountain pine beetles in Western Canada is also doing its part to weigh on values. The reason: Millions of hectares of forest land have been decimated by the pesky little creatures, converting what would have been a controlled supply of wood into a sudden surplus of altered and less-valued timber ... which is being harvested en masse before it becomes useless.

The beetles are killing vast stretches of pine forest in the British Columbia interior. About 30% of all the lumber used in the United States comes from Canada, the bulk from B.C. Entomologists believe the beetle will have killed 76% of B.C.'s pine by 2013. About half of the pine forests have already been killed by the epidemic. That's a mind-boggling 3.5 billion trees.

There are fears the infestation will spread eastward into the forests of neighboring Alberta, but so far only about 5 million trees have been lost to the beetle in that province. Extreme cold temperatures are one of the few things that kill them, and temperatures below minus 40 degrees Celsius during the past winter in Alberta likely slowed, if not stopped, the progress of the beetles across the Rocky Mountains and into Alberta's northern forests.

Record Outbreak

Mountain pine beetles, each about the size of a grain of rice, are native to the western forests of North America, from Mexico up into Canada. They are a normal part of the forest ecosystem, although they are usually limited to older, highly stressed trees. The beetles burrow underneath the bark and release a fungal toxin, which eventually kills the tree. While there have been outbreaks in the past, the current infestation is the largest in recorded history.

Human efforts to protect those trees from forest fires are one of the main reasons behind the current beetle infestation. Fire suppression in the interior region of British Columbia, while protecting valuable timber assets, has also produced enormous continuous stands of mature lodgepole pine trees, which are especially susceptible to the beetles. Lodgepole pine tends to grow in abundance when there is a lack of natural disturbances like forest fires. The total lodgepole pine stock in 2003 totalled 14.9 million hectares, a nearly sixfold increase since 1910.

Global warming is also taking some of the blame, as a string of milder winters and hot summers provided ideal conditions for the beetles.

(Ironically, the pine beetle outbreak could also be contributing to global warming, according to some research, as the dead trees release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.)

Maps provided by the B.C. Ministry of Forests and Range show the sheer size of the area affected by the mountain pine beetle outbreak: 2007, 2008, 2012 and 2016.

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