The New York Times has an op-ed today, “A Water Doom Loop Is Coming.” It’s by Gary Ferguson, author of “The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West.” As a subscriber, I’m allowed to “gift” access to the essay. Here’s the link.
First 2 paragraphs:
In much of the Southwest, the ponderosa pine is the one and only truly big tree, thriving in dry heat and poor soils. The painter Georgia O’Keeffe captured the beauty of a stately ponderosa north of Taos, N.M., in one of her most stunning works, “The Lawrence Tree.” The creators of the television show “Yellowstone” were so taken with ponderosa forests that they did much of their filming within one far from Yellowstone in western Montana.
But after about 26 years of exceptionally high heat and drought, hundreds of million of these trees in lands stretching from New Mexico and Colorado to the southern Sierra Nevada of California have died. And in many places, something even more startling is happening: The trees aren’t coming back.
Interesting read; not a lot of facts but it seems scary enough. For the Southwest, what the author leaves out is the intense coniferization of what were grasslands in the 1800’s. Vast grasslands have been replaced by piñon and ponderosa, where none grew before.
Wink Crigler, of the X Diamond Ranch in Arizona, actually has pictures around the Greer area, showing nary a tree in sight. When I was Sup on the A-S, we commercially thinned ponderosa, in that original grassland. Talk about missing the mark, we should have clearcut the whole mess, returning it to its original plant community instead of making a park-like setting of unnatural water guzzlers!
North of Greer, in the piñon forest, we did clearcut huge numbers of acres, taking the biomass and generating power with it at the Snowflake, 27 megawatt biomass plant! Old timers told us they remembered when all that was there was grass!
So, yes it’s drying out, but no it’s not lack of one thing or too much of another, it comes down to taking these landscapes back to their – dare I say, HRV…..
Not a fan of the New York Times.
As a 13 year old I was told that my father lied to me about the Holodomor; which made him an orphan at 13. About over 35 years later, I learned that it was the New York Times that lied and my father had told me the truth.
Thankfully, this article is not as bad as the crime of suppressing information about the Holodomor. But it does raise the issue if the New York Times is clueless or just flat out doesn’t believe in reporting “all the news that is fit to print”.
I tried to find Mr. Ferguson’s academic background from Indiana University and can find allusions to a history degree. But he does base his expertise on being a seasonal interpretive naturalist for the Forest Service on the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. He does write a lot of books.
I did lay out timber sales early in my career in Ponderosa Pine stands. Without a doubt my favorite ecosystem to lay out a timber sale. However, I will defer to others on their management and current status.
Mr. Ferguson believes “As a result, an acre of ponderosa forest that in the late 19th century might have contained 150 large, mature trees may today be packed with 1,500 far smaller and more vulnerable trees. For an acre of PP, to have “150 large, mature trees “indicates a stocking level that exceeds anything I have seen in a timber stand, let alone a ponderosa pine stand.
For 150 PP trees, at four feet the basal area would be 1,885 square feet. The greatest basal area ever measured for a forested stand was a coastal Redwood stand is 1,437 square feet.
Mr. Ferguson does not know of what he writes. But he continues to write.
“Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate change landscape in America.”
Where is the reference??
The Ponderosa Pine forests of the southwest survived the record two droughts in the southwest about 750 years ago. The trees are still there, the Puebloan cultures in the southwest did not survive the drought.
They will survive the current drought. They will be significantly affected by the destruction of our public lands due to wildfires of the past 40 years and the next 40 years.
Worst yet, read the comments of the New York Times subscribers. As foresters, we have an elite in this country that is science illiterate. That does not bode well for the future of our forests.
The New York Times suppressed the information on the Holodomor to support their political agenda in the 1930’s. The only thing that has changed in a hundred years is the topic.
An interesting story, but:
“It was a very different time and place,” says Joseph Kahn, who is about to rise from managing editor to executive editor at the paper. “The notion that you have a single correspondent on his or her own defining a take on a major story doesn’t feel like the world we live in today.”
I’m not sure a comparison of Fletcher to Duranty is appropriate:
“He was not only the greatest liar among the journalists in Moscow, but he was the greatest liar of any journalist that I ever met in 50 years of journalism,” said the late Malcolm Muggeridge in 1982 for a documentary produced by two Ukrainian-Canadian groups.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/08/1097097620/new-york-times-pulitzer-ukraine-walter-duranty
The managing editors take is incorrect.
Duranty was a liar, but the New York Times refused to publish other reports primarily from England documenting the Holodomor. The New York Times knew millions of people were being killed by the Soviets and affirmatively decided to NOT report the story.
It is still true today. What you decide not to publish is sometimes more important than what you publish.
I have a friend that was the editorial editor for the Wenatchee World and he published my editorials. I did have a “minor” fan base in the community, just because it appealed to folks that lived in a conservative small town (at that time). The Pacific northwest papers shared editorials. Mine were never picked up. Didn’t meet the narrative for the urban newspapers.
Even wrote a editorial on the Holodomor titled “The Crimes of the New York Times”. It did make the rounds on the internet sites. It was even used in a high school English class with the discussion of the responsibilities of the media in a democratic society.
Does the media have a responsibility to report on the killing of 10 million people?
I am not sure if your aware of Camp 70 foresters and their Substack account.
We have sent editorials on saving the giant sequoia’s, why Chad Hanson is wrong, and the epidemic of trees that is fueling the wildfire crises. We sent these editorials to the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Oregonian, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Spokesman-Review, and a host of others.
None of the papers published the editorials.
They did continue to publish Chad Hanson’s articles and from the Center for Biological Diversity written by science illiterate lawyers. Not an editorial published by professionals in the field of forestry without a axe to grind in the battle.
Just like the American people had no clue that the Soviets were killing 10 million people in the Ukraine in the early 1930’s today the mass media is refusing to show America a different perspective on the wildfires.
It is one reason why newspapers are dying and Substack accounts are booming.
“What you decide not to publish is sometimes more important than what you publish.” Absolutely agree. My dad was the city editor of a mid-sized city newspaper. I expect that he knew a lot about how those kinds of discussions went with the publisher (and now I wish we’d had a conversation about that). Those decisions are lurking in the background of today’s political disputes over who owns (literally) the media, and its rightward trend (it seemed like Fox was first to prominently cover what the “mainstream” media didn’t, but that in itself was clearly a political decision). It would be nice to know what the policies are for what is news and who makes those decisions.
My friend was the editorial page editor. He was told in a staff meeting that there were no sacred cows that were off limits. He pointed out the dams in eastern Washington and the apple industry mooed a lot.
We do not even watch the same news anymore.
When we had cable TV I would tape “news” programs, that on the same day, same time the items covered by the various news sources were dramatically different.
At least the New York Times is hones about it on their masthead “All the News Fit to Print”.
The explosion of information on the Internet has led to a contraction of information available to the public. Oh, it is there but it is difficult to find.
For information on issues I am interested in I just usually go to the source particularly on governmental issues.
Newspapers and other media need to recreated for the digital age.
Vladimir, some things don’t change much with the NY Times, that was also true with the Holocaust coverage or lack thereof.
Here are the links to some forest-related disappointments I’ve covered here.
https://forestpolicypub.com/2026/04/08/blast-from-the-recent-past-new-york-times-story-people-still-think-forest-fires-are-bad/
https://forestpolicypub.com/2017/12/13/tree-die-offs-and-climate-change-a-case-of-mega-extrapolation-via-the-new-york-times/
https://forestpolicypub.com/2017/08/08/new-york-times-on-fire-science-without-fire-science/
Then there’s this classic
“Our research shows that reducing fuels isn’t going to reduce severity much,” he said. “Even if you reduce fuels, you are still going to have severe fires” because of extreme weather.”
https://forestpolicypub.com/2012/09/18/ny-times-forest-fire-research-questions-wisdom-of-fuel-reduction/
That’s what I tend to call “fire science without fire scientists”
And I’m going to repost one today from their editorial board from 2011 you might find entertaining (or depressing).
Also is there a book you recommend on the Holodomor?
https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine/
Sharon,
Anne Applebaum is one of the better researched books on the Holodomor. My great grandparents [first generation Americans] knew what was going on to their relatives that didn’t make it to America despite the NYT’s politics of that era.
People will believe what they want to believe; some will believe what they are told to believe.
I have not found a “good” book on the Holodomor written from the perspective of the “people”. I was really looking for something that would be written from the perspective of my parents, not some historian.
I am also looking for books on the slaves that Germany took during WWII to work in the war factories. On that topic, I keep finding books by “rich” people and their experiences, but none by actual slaves that were held by the Germans.
The best book I have found on the Holodomor covers the period of time between WWI and WWII as the Soviets started killing millions of their own citizens and the Poles as well. The Holodomor was just a chapter in the book of killings during this time period.
The book is so gross, that I could only read a chapter at a time.
You will get nightmares from reading it. That is how awful the story. It is an academic book. I cannot believe that my parents survived those years.
https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471
This is a recommended list on the Holodomor, but I have not read any of them. I will probably start with the first one on the list.
https://sites.rutgers.edu/books-we-read/holodomor-reading/
Vladimir,
Thank you for posting the book list link
This reminds me of a study conclusion from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that was released a few years ago. The conclusion was that deforested areas from fires and logging would not support tree regrowth due to a warmer, dryer climate.
The Times story went on to discuss a “catastrophic feedback loop”, where the loss of trees will create further heating/drought, which in turn will accelerate regional heating and desiccation, leading to further climate stress on ecosystems.
Note that this is occurring at precisely the same time as the present administration is sabotaging offshore wind energy, and disincentivizing solar energy- both of which are cheaper than fossil/nuclear power. Chinas production/exporting of solar panels recently skyrocketed … a 67% increase in one year. And … Between January and May 2025, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind to its power grid – enough to generate as much electricity as Indonesia or Turkey.
JZ brings up a good point. Maybe somewhere in the mid to late ’90’s someone (maybe a researcher from the old Intermountain Research Station), published pictures of mid to southern UT taken ln 80’s or so into the the teens or maybe later. showing a patchwork of PJ stands with lots of grasslands in between. After fire repression PJ stands proliferated so the the trees touched each other and nothing could grow beneath them. Fires in the 1990’s didn’t need wind to spread because the closeness of the PJs to each other. As one of the range conservationists in the R-4 RO said , the fires were the best range reveg on could hope for.
Fun fact: When I worked on the Dixie NF in the 1960’s it issued contracts to “chain” PJ stands to create openings for reseeding to grass and other shrubs. Our range staff was always looking at government surplus list for large ship chains for this purpose. Of course that approach became a bit unpopular.
Since the earth is in a constant state of change, I wonder if there is any research into what the vegetation looked like in various parts of the US some 5000 years ago.
Ohhhhhh myyyyyy Chas; you hit on something I’ve been tinkering with, albeit from the geologic standpoint, of 5,000 – thru the Younger Dryas – thru about 20,000 years ago in the Lake County, Colorado area! To be able to connect vegetation would certainly be sweet!
Thanks for the nod; I did forget to add the “juniper” to my piece, but reckoned most folks know it’s not one or the other, it’s “pj”….
This book covers the climate history in the west, though focused on California, over the past 10,000 years.
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-west-without-water/paper
The climate history is inferred from pollen plots and other vegetative markers for climate.
Like you I would love to see a vegetative map over the centuries. Given all the research into past vegetative change, I suspect it would be a fairly “easy” project to complete.
Lots of inferences would have to be made, but it would be an eye-opening experience.