feet that covering a distance they normally
would walk in seconds took almost an hour.
In the end they counted 2,286 baby trees in an
area half the size of a tennis court. This spot was
producing 70,000 pines an acre. “This is what
lodgepole pines do,” Turner said. “They come
back gangbusters.”
Yet the previous day, in a neighboring patch
of burned timber, Turner had documented
something unsettling. Instead of a river of new
pine seedlings, the ground was a mix of flowers,
grasses, and caked earth. Aspens were there, but
so were invasive grasses and sour weeds. Along
one 50-meter tract, Turner had spotted just 16
baby pines; on another, only nine. All told, this
patch was producing fewer than one-fiftieth as
many young conifers as its neighbor.
The two patches of forest were almost identi-
cal. Before the Berry fire, both sites had burned
around the time of the Civil War. But one
distinction set them apart. The site with fewer
pines had burned another time as well, in 2000.
Trees that sprouted after that fire had not yet
matured to produce enough seeds before being
wiped out in 2016. In this place, rather than
reseeding the pine forest, the Berry fire was
resculpting the landscape into something new,
perhaps for centuries or even millennia.
Yellowstone is part of a global trend. From the
Amazon to the Arctic, wildfires are getting bigger,
hotter, and more frequent as the climate changes.
Australia’s forest fires in 2019 and 2020 burned an
area as big as Florida. That’s devastating enough.
But often overlooked amid the initial carnage is
what happens after the trees die: Many forests
now struggle to recover. That too is not limited to
Yellowstone, nor is it always triggered by fire—but
it is caused by climate change.
In many places, forests are no longer regen-
erating on their own. Some of the world’s mostTHE FUTURE OF FORESTS 49