Bark Beetle Book Volume XIV: Ars datum est

Abstract

Forest fires are intensifying in a world bearing rapid anthropogenic climate change. Among the many factors affecting forest fire frequency and severity, such as hotter and drier conditions, there is also the increase in a certain kind of insect: bark beetles. Most bark beetles prefer dead tree wood as their diet, but some (e.g., the mountain pine beetle) have evolved to mass attack living trees. Previously, their larvae were kept in check by early winter freezes. However, in warmer winters, thanks to climate change, the larvae no longer freeze, plus more trees are drought and heat stressed, resulting in soaring reproduction of these beetles. The increasing volume of dry and combustible woody materials can help feed larger fires. Suze Woolf, an artist preoccupied with climate impacts on forests, observed their hieroglyphic “scribing” on bark and sapwood while hiking and turned those observations into a series of Bark Beetle Books. “Volume XIV: Ars datum est” is one that presents the trails of bark beetles—i.e., galleries where beetles deposit eggs—as a bar in a bar chart. The chart represents forest areas affected in British Columbia and Alberta from 1999 to 2007. These trails, to Suze, are undecipherable cryptograms that seem like a message we’re just not getting. This artist book, as Suze’s meditation on human impact, illustrates how bark beetles enthusiastically respond to the conditions we cooked: a warming world, a century of fire suppression, and a vast menu of even-aged agri-timbers over which we and the beetles now compete.