When my East Coast-based parents came to Breckenridge, Colo., for our family vacation in June this year, my dad couldn't stop exclaiming over the dead trees. Scores of rust-colored lodgepole pines, killed by the bark beetle epidemic, lined pretty much every road we drove down or bike path we pedaled on.

My father, who attended college on a scholarship for pulp and paper mill technology, wondered why the trees weren't being logged and used. One answer is that most of Colorado's lumber mills have been shut down for a long time. But the inability to deal with dead trees is just one in a line of management obstacles facing agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, as it struggles to cope with forest management in this age of disturbance.

A recent report issued by the Forest Service on its response to the bark-beetle outbreak in Colorado and southern Wyoming points to deeper problems than a paucity of sawmills. Land managers were slow to respond to beetle kill partly because the agency lacked funding to deal with the epidemic when it really took hold in the 1990s, say the report's authors. Add that to a “lack of public acceptance” of the large-scale logging that managers employ to make forests more diverse and resilient, and you get the perfect setup for the sudden, massive beetle kills that continue to shock locals as well as visitors.

It's not just in the Rockies that forests are quickly changing. In December, the journal Remote Sensing published a study modeling change in the Pacific Northwest's forests. Its authors predict “large-scale disturbances” by 2080, mostly caused by climate change. Lower-elevation species are expected to move up and invade the alpine zone; warmer temperatures and earlier snowmelt will give tree-killing diseases and insects the advantage.

In places like central California, which lie on the edges of forest belts, researchers predict that more than half of the native tree species will die off. In 2008, scientists estimated that two-thirds of California's endemic species will have their range reduced by greater than 80 percent.

In the face of a rapidly changing Western forest landscape, public-land managers have yet to show they're ready for this new world of disturbance forestry. Sure, they're working on managing in response to beetle kill. But even if they adjust to bark beetles, something else will rear its head: fungus, or drought, or intensified spring runoff, or the sudden decline or death of more aspens, live oaks or other tree species. What will public-lands managers do then?

As social scientists from Max Weber on have noted, bureaucracies have trouble adapting to rapid change. Under-funded, politically polarized agencies are probably even more likely to fail to adjust. When asked about new developments in genetic research that could help restore forests with trees better adapted to future climatic conditions, many Forest Service managers admitted that they were uncertain about their ability to implement that science. They were frank: Changing management plans, they said, can take years.

Even when bureaucracies are quick to react — as forest managers have been in British Columbia in response to beetle kill — the results aren't reassuring. A recent investigative piece in the Vancouver Sun pointed out that in British Columbia, where Canadian forests stricken with beetle kill were salvage-logged, “the collective impact of such large-scale harvesting of a landscape hit by pine beetles is unknown.”

Readers commenting on that story noted that the reporter seemed more interested in describing the shock of seeing clear-cuts than in explaining the science that shows just how such logging can harm forests. But that's just the problem: When active forest management involves large-scale logging, there is almost always a visceral negative public reaction.

Much like the steady increase in global temperatures caused by rising CO2 levels, the science on major landscape-level change caused by those increases keeps marching forward. As researchers document one shift after another, each with its cascade of impacts to the landscapes that so many of us turn to for inspiration, peace and meaning, we're left with a system of forest management based on a social system — bureaucracy — invented in the 1920s.

Back then, atmospheric CO2 levels were about 280 parts per million. Now, they're 390. Maybe our brave new world needs a brave new form of management.

Stephanie Paige Ogburn is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org) where she is the online editor.