American West's most iconic tree is disappearing

A profound unraveling is underway in the American Southwest, happening across a thousand-mile arc from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the central Sierra.

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In an unprecedented calamity, the most widely distributed, most iconic tree of the region — the beautiful ponderosa pine — is disappearing. So significant is this loss, both visually and ecologically, that it’s reasonably fair to say it may be triggering the first post-climate-change landscape in America, according to the Tribune News Service.

It was the ponderosa pine that more than 1,100 years ago allowed the rise of the first cities in what would later become the United States, providing structural beams for the multi-storied dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo. More than 700 years later, under the tutelage of the Nez Perce, Lewis and Clark hewed boats from ponderosa trunks, using them to paddle from the mountains of western Montana to the Pacific Ocean. Settlers used the tree with abandon, fashioning everything from barns to saloons, opera houses to hardware stores to livery stables. Ponderosa gave us literally millions of track ties for our railroads, then often provided the fuel for the fireboxes of the locomotives that ran along them.