President Bush has just proposed a "healthy forests initiative" aimed at reducing the fire hazard on national forest lands. This calls for thinning 2.5 million acres of national forests a year for the next ten years. The total cost could exceed $100 billion. Mr. Bush proposes to expedite this process by exempting it from environmental oversight.

This plan will surely give opponents an opportunity to again accuse Republicans of environmental insensitivity. Worse, it's doomed to failure because it ignores the ecology of Western forests and misses the major lesson from 100+ years of federal forest management. Ironically, it may also have negative implications for economically vibrant towns, e.g., Bozeman. How can we do better?

First. Let's be clear: drought combined with hot, windy weather are the chief culprits behind this season's fires. The West has a history of sporadic big fires and always will.

Fire is a dramatic and essential ingredient in the West's ecosystems. Fires, especially in the higher-elevation forests, are characterized by infrequent, stand-replacing events such as the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Veteran firefighters know an early snowfall is the best way to extinguish such fires. It is impossible to fireproof these forests. In high-elevation, low-productivity forests, huge, out-of-control fires are inevitable.

Second. Federal fire suppression has changed some forest ecosystems. In Montana's Bitterroot Valley, low-elevation stands of ponderosa pines once held 20 to 50 trees per acre. Since effective fire suppression began, around 1900, these same stands are now choked with 10 to more than 100 times as many trees per acre. It is in these forests that wildfires are typically burning hotter and larger than in the past.

It's here that logging can effectively reduce the threat of fire. That's because these forests share the following characteristics. They are (1) roaded and developed, (2) surrounded by relatively intensive resource use, and (3) have some of the region's highest levels of home construction. But these stands make up only about 20 percent of the Northern Rockies forests, possibly a similar percentage of forests in the Sierras, and only a tiny fraction of those on the west slope of the Cascades.

Third. The West's attractive environment has tremendous economic value. Roadless lands, wilderness, national parks, and healthy wildlife habitat attract entrepreneurs and well-educated professionals. Western politicians speak and act as though timber still drives our economy. But this is a costly, persistent myth; it undermines the region's natural evolution from a commodity- to a service- and information-based economy.

The Forest Service budgetary process rewards managers for losing money on environmentally destructive timber sales and penalizes them for making money or doing environmentally beneficial activities. Until those incentives are changed, giving the agency more power to sell or thin trees without environmental oversight will only create more problems than it solves.

Fourth. Much new residential development in the West is occurring in fire-prone areas close to federal public lands. This is known as the "wildland-urban interface." Here, the key policy question is how to effectively and economically protect lives and property. Giving more money to the Forest Service to foster commercial logging of non-merchantable trees is no answer.

According to USA Today, the National Fire Plan, launched in 2000, was supposed to thin forests of overgrown trees and brush in areas containing homes—and allow fires to burn in remote areas. Over $6 billion later, less than 40 percent of the thinning has been in the wildland-urban interface; much of the work has been in the South, not the West where fires are a problem; only 82 of the more that 59,000 fires in 2002 have been left to burn.

Forest Service fire researcher Jack Cohen has found that homes can be effectively protected if their roofs and landscaping within 150 feet of the structures are fireproofed. There are 1.9 million high-risk acres in the wildland-urban interface, of which 1.5 million are private. It makes sense to start with these lands by creating breaks along federal land boundaries, rather than in the backcountry.

Once private lands are protected by their owners, the Forest Service can let most fires on federal lands burn. Fire ecologists agree that letting fires burn is the best and most efficient method of restoring forest health.

Pete Geddes holds a graduate degree from the University of Montana School of Forestry and is Program Director with the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) and Gallatin Writers, both based in Bozeman, Montana. John A. Baden, Ph.D., a recovering logger and former forestry professor and Chairman of FREE and Gallatin, coauthored this piece.