“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means
to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are
separate from.” —Terry Tempest Williams, July 13, 1995,
testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Forest & Public
Lands Management regarding the Utah Public Lands Management Act
of 1995. Pine beetles appear to share Santorum’s views on sex
For pine beetles, sex is apparently all about procreation. While
that might play well in some conservative circles of the insect
kingdom, it’s not so good for Colorado’s lodgepole and ponderosa
pine trees, which the beetles are destroying at an astronomical
rate. According to new research by Jeffry Mitton, a CU-Boulder
professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and one of his
graduate students, Scott Ferrenberg, the destructive pine
beetles actually produce two tree-killing generations of
offspring every year instead of one, as previously believed.
Because of this extra generation being born each year, it is now
estimated that there may be as m