It’s no secret that our Sierra Nevada forests are in big trouble. We have more than 66 million dead trees in the mountains and foothills of California—killed by a prolonged drought and an onslaught of bark beetles. The images from the Southern and Central Sierra are frightening. Acres and acres of pine trees are orange and brown, dead, dying, dry. And the bark beetles are moving north. As they kill entire stands of trees they move on to new sections of forest.

As a long-time rancher, I know that there is a cycle to life and that no creature lives forever. Animals, people, we all have a limited time on this earth. The same is true of trees. Although some species can live for hundreds of years, even trees eventually die. But now in forests up and down the state, we are seeing the early and disastrous death of millions of trees. The latest estimates indicate we have 29 million dead or dying trees in California.