In August, the National Wildlife Federation released a report that said global warming is increasing the wildfire risk in the West, leading to an accumulation of unsafe fuel loads that also serve as perfect breeding grounds for bark beetles. Once the bark beetles take hold, they add even more to a forest's volume of fuel for wildfires, which further contributes to global warming by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and decreasing a forest's ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

Keyes said old forests need proper management in order to reduce their susceptibility to a bark-beetle outbreak. Many bark-beetle varieties target weak or dying trees, usually older ones, that are less able to survive an attack. Years of fire-suppression efforts in forests have allowed those trees to become more dense.

People are building homes in some of those areas, and fire crews are being sent to areas of the forest that might otherwise be allowed to naturally burn, she said. She believes the forests need to be thinned and older trees removed.

"If we're not going to do it, the beetles will do it for us — and they won't pick and choose," she said.

Last February, the Utah Environmental Congress filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service, trying to stop the federal agency from logging 10 million board-feet of timber in the Dixie National Forest. The Forest Service had cited bark-beetle infestation as the reason for logging the timber.

But the environmental group's lawsuit claimed that a Forest Service-prescribed burn in 2002 went out of control and was ultimately the reason for the beetle outbreak. The lawsuit said Forest Service mismanagement caused a domino effect, requiring more time and less human intervention for healing.

Keyes said that the best hope this year for letting nature control bark-beetle outbreaks would be a cold Utah winter with several consecutive days of minus 40 or below at higher elevations. If that doesn't happen, Keyes said, the Ashley and Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National forests may see years of increased beetle activity.

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com