Tamaracks in Minnesota

For as long as I've been paying attention to plants in Minnesota, I've thought the white pine had always been the most prevalent tree in the arboreal forest that covers the northern part of the state. Today I learned from a story in the Star Tribune that the tamarack (Larix laricina) originally held that position:

Before European settlement, tamaracks were the most common tree in Minnesota, spreading across some 6 million acres. Their pencil-straight trunks made them ideal for railroad ties and telephone poles and they were quickly logged out of the uplands that cover most of the state, and never grew back. They survived in the lowland swamps and peatlands, where most other tree species cannot survive and logging is much more difficult and can happen only when the ground is frozen.

Tamaracks are conifers, but they're not evergreens. They turn yellow in fall and lose their needles. 

Now, tamaracks are threatened by climate change. Our warmed winters are allowing the eastern larch beetle to get in more reproductive cycles each year, so the trees — which have coexisted with the beetles for millennia — are no longer able to recover.

Before [the early 2000s], there were about 1.4 million acres of tamaracks in the state. The beetles have partially or completely devoured about 1.1 million of those acres.

Before reading the story, I knew about the larch beetles and the role of climate change in their effect on the tamaracks, but I had no idea that "we" (my European American progenitors in Minnesota) had done so much to destroy the tamaracks earlier, and that the only reason there are any left for the beetles was because the trees were located in areas too hard to log.

It's underplayed within the length of the full story, as if the logging was natural. But it stands out as a second — numerically more important — assault on the trees. And now human-created warming has caused this second wave of tree loss, which will send the southern edge of the tamarack's range further and further north.