A profound unraveling is underway in the American southwest, happening across a 1,000-mile arc from Santa Fe to the central Sierra. In an unprecedented calamity, the most widely distributed, most iconic tree of the region--the beautiful ponderosa pine--is disappearing.

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 st

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