Subtitled “How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests,” Empire of the Beetle is about the devastation wrought by the bark beetle, a voracious insect the size of a grain of rice that often swarms in masses larger than schools of killer whales. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of unprecedented bark beetle outbreaks killed more than 30 billion pine and spruce trees from Alaska to New Mexico, resulting in the greatest tree die-off since the deforestation of Europe by peasants between the 11th and 13th centuries.

Andrew Nikiforuk explains why, in what I am sure is the world’s only page-turner about beetles. Over the past two decades this award-winning Canadian journalist has tackled subjects ranging from education and economics to the environment, in the process winning a Governor General’s Award (for Saboteurs) and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award (for Tar Sands). He has a clear, muscular style and a masterful command of simile, metaphor and analogy to illustrate otherwise dull or obscure scientific data. His research is awe-inspiring, his conclusions irrefutable, and the implications dismal.

It is impossible to even begin enumerating the wealth of astounding facts peppering this book, so I will simply note that Nikiforuk artfully breaks up his science with a social history of mankind’s age-old fascination with beetles, from Aesop to Darwin.

This fascinating and thought-provoking book about an ancient insect pest exposes the frailty of seemingly stable man-managed habitats and presages the climate-induced ordeals to come.