The intense green of spring cannot mask the dead trees in the Harz mountains. Standing upright across northern Germany, thousands of skeletal trunks mark the remnants of a once great spruce forest. Since 2018, the region has been ravaged by a bark beetle outbreak, made possible by successive droughts and heatwaves. …The loss has sparked a reckoning with the modern forestry methods pioneered by Germany that often rely on expanses of monoculture plantations. The ferocity of the beetle outbreak means there is no going back to the old way of doing things: replacing the dead spruce with saplings from the same species would probably guarantee catastrophe once again. Instead, foresters have been experimenting with a different approach: pockets of beech, firs and sycamore have been planted around the surviving spruce to make sure the returning forest is more biodiverse.