In what looks like an anticipation of a 2008 eco-disaster, a lodgepole pine beetle infestation in the high country of New Mexico and Colorado, Riders of the Whistling Pines comes close to fulfilling Joni Adamson’s environmental justice aim to find a middle place between traditional environmentalism and environmental jusetice but is limited by its reliance on solely mainstream environmentalist views. The film “discusses differently situated human practices and perspectives on nature” (Adamson xv) and arrives at a contingent and localized consensus on how best to protect forests. In Riders of the Whistling Pines Gene Autry illustrates earnest, but potentially deadly, attempts to save a forest by spraying it with DDT. The remedies applied in the film seem effective until assessed, understood, and critiqued in relation to our current context, a context that demonstrates that this use of chemicals serves as one of Daggett’s “failed remedies” with long-term detrimental consequences for water, soil and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest. With its mainstream environmentalist message, Riders of the Whistling Pines falls short because it valorizes only one view—that of the park rangers who act as environmentalists working to save a forest in spite of possible detrimental consequences to both humans and their domesticated animals.
This same valorization of mainstream environmentalist views contributed to the 2008 pine beetle eco-disaster in Colorado. According to Stephanie Simon, “The mountain pine beetle has killed tens of millions of trees in Colorado alone and has destroyed forests from New Mexico to Canada. Across the Rocky Mountain West, iconic postcard vistas are vanishing as sickly mountainsides turn first a sickly shade of rust, then a ghostly gray” (A2). Simon asserts that “The beetle is expected to kill virtually every mature lodgepole pine in Colorado, or five million of the state’s 22 million forested acres” (A2).
The devastation is on par with an environmental disaster and will have dire long-term consequences, including fires and fallen trees destroying power lines, roads, trail, campgrounds, and fencing (Simon A2). Solutions from turning dead trees into fuel pellets for wood-burning stoves, to converting lumber into ethanol have been proposed, but long-term solutions will require policy changes by environmental groups. Although factors like climate change and drought contributed to the problem, according to Simons, “foresters pin much of the blame on management practices. Decades of fire suppression and logging restrictions left the forests densely packed with towering, century-old lodgepole pines, which happen to be the beetles’ favorite food” (A2). To avoid future infestations, mainstream environmentalists must take the advice of scientists and public citizens to implement strategies that promote “the ideal forest” where “old-growth trees would stand 20 feet apart from one another” (A2) and, as Todd Hartmann suggests, forests “have a better mix of tree species, as well as more age diversity, making it unlikely the beetles will find as many suitable hosts as in the pure 80-plus year-old lodgepole stands it has favored.”
An ideal forest would require thinning of trees through controlled fires and controlled lumbering. In Riders of the Whistling Pines, such strategies are constructed as bad for the environment. Instead, the forests must be preserved no matter what the cost. The tussock moths infesting the forest must be destroyed, so a lumber company cannot steal the rotted timber for themselves. In the film, forest ranger Gene Autry discovers that moths are destroying a large swath of federal lands. Lumberman Henry Mitchell (Douglass Dumbrille) has made the same discovery and wants to see the infestation continue, so the land will be given to him to be harvested. Autry’s proposal to use DDT to kill the moths and save the forest will foil the businessman’s land grab. When Mitchell overhears townspeople discussing the potential dangers of DDT, he hires someone to spray powerful chemicals to kill animal life and frighten farmers, so they will believe that DDT is the cause and will stop the rangers from saving the forest.
After Mitchell discusses the livestock and wild animal deaths during a camp meeting with concerned ranchers and blames them on DDT, Autry and another ranger find Mitchell’s stronger chemicals and ride to the airstrip to stop Mitchell and his gang. Ultimately Mitchell and his henchman are killed, and the Rangers return to their mission to spray the forest with DDT, kill the moths, and save the trees. The lumberman has been defeated, and spraying can continue, so the forests will survive, according to the film’s narrative. Yet the consequences of maintaining forest growth no matter the cost and of such widespread spraying of DDT are not explored, chiefly because, it would seem, the film was released in 1949, and DDT was still seen as a wonder chemical.
In 1945, however, years before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1960, the seminal work that warned us about the dire consequences of widespread DDT and other pesticide use, the United States government restricted the use of DDT, complicating Autry’s position and, perhaps, valorizing Mitchell’s and the townspeople’s. According to Edmund P. Russell III’s “The Strange Career of DDT: Experts, Federal Capacity, and Environmentalism in World War II,” the United States had “apprehensions about the insecticide’s effect on wildlife and ‘the balance of nature.’” Russell explains that the U.S. policy asserted that “while it may be necessary to ignore these considerations in other parts of the world, in the United States such considerations cannot be neglected” (770). Representatives from the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Public Health Service and other federal agencies restricted the use of DDT to rare circumstances because it harmed wildlife, caused cancer in humans, and passed through mothers’ milk to their infants (Russell 770).
At the same time, however, DDT was hailed as “the War’s greatest contribution to the future health of the world” (Russell 770-71). Russell explains that after its “release to civilians in August 1945, public health officials, farmers, and homeowners snapped up the wonder chemical to kill insects that caused disease, attacked crops, or created a nuisance” (771). According to Russell, “in 1948, DDT developer Paul Muller received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine” (771). Russell attempts to reconcile these two views of DDT by exploring the history of its usage during and after World War II. He suggests that the pesticide met certain needs during the war like quelling insect-borne diseases among the troops (774). When control of DDT passed from military to civilian hands in August 1945, the 1945 U.S. policy no longer applied to DDT usage. According to Russell, free and widespread use of DDT continued until scientists like Rachel Carson joined with environmental groups and pressured the U.S. government to ban DDT. The ban occurred in 1972, two years after the first Earth Day and the establishment of the EPA.
In 2008, more than 35 years after the DDT ban, Colorado State Foresters suggested using insecticides to ward off the bark beetle infestation only “on high-value trees, such as those that provide shade or ornamental value” (Hartman). But the problems in the Wyoming and Colorado forests are “fueled in part by uniformly older lodgepole forests” (Hartman), there because, according to Jim Robbin, “fires have been suppressed for so long.” Attempts by environmentalists in Colorado and Wyoming to preserve forests failed because they relied on only one perspective—that of mainstream environmentalists. By foregrounding use of DDT as the only environmental solution and valorizing the preservation of all trees in a forest, Riders of the Whistling Pines also highlights strengths and weaknesses of mainstream environmental views and reinforces the need for a “middle place.”
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