Vanderleun writes about the death of hemlock trees in the Great Smoky Mountains. He has some nice autumn photos to go with it.

Fast fires consume California. They take men’s homes and the habitat of “protected” and unprotected species without fear or favor; without asking permission of the coastal commission or the EPA. Whether sparked by nature or arson, the decades of overbuilding, misbegotten “environmentally correct” management policies, the logjam of litigation that prevents stewardship, all combine — like the fires and the winds themselves combine — into “the perfect firestorm.”

Many, afraid to blame utopian politics and fanatic environmentalism as two of the culprits, blame “nature;” the only admitted vengeful god of our age. But nature, as wise men know, always sides with the hidden flaw, and the flaws hidden here are those of men, foolish men who believe they can control and terraform the planet they inhabit. The walls of flame and hills of smoldering ash are the answer to their green hubris.

A similar instance of eco-utopianism currently seethes in the Great Smokey Mountains. The fire there burns much more slowly and selectively, but it burns all the same. In the end, a spark or a maniac will touch it with flame and then it too will rage up and destroy that which the fire’s enablers most wish to save. And when the ashes cool and everything is bare and dead, their answer will be — as it always is — “we need more laws to protect that which our present laws have destroyed.”

The slow fire in the Smoky Mountains is a pest, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, that attacks and kills the hemlocks in the park. The adelgid has been having its way with hemlocks throughout the eastern seaboard since it first snuck into the area from Asia in the 1920s. The park service reports that:

“Over 800 acres of old-growth hemlock trees grow in the Smokies — more than in any other national park. Younger hemlock forests cover an additional 90,000 acres of land in the park. Originally discovered here in 2002, adelgid infestations have now spread throughout the park’s hemlock forests. In some areas infested trees have already begun to die.”

“Begun?” It would be more accurate to say that in pretty much all areas that can be observed, the hemlocks have not just “already begun to die,” but are — in fact — stone cold dead and gone.