This summer's fires kindled examinations of federal fire policy-but most folks failed. The problems bequeathed by a century of poor forest management have no easy solution such as more logging and road building. And Smokey the Bear's "Only you can prevent forest fires," mantra, the world's most successful public relations campaign, exacerbates the problem.

Western Republicans blame team Clinton and its green allies for the current fire season. They claim the 75 percent decline in timber harvest from the national forests has destroyed both jobs and the environment. They advocate a reform agenda that increases the budget of the Forest Service to cut more trees in an effort to "fire proof" the region's forest.

This violates their purported ideology of limited government and ignores the ecology of western forests. It also misses the major lesson from 100+ years of federal forest management. Namely, when decisions are made in the political arena, political considerations trump ecological, ethical and economic factors. Western senators and representatives speak as though extraction still drives the Western economy. But this is a persistent myth undermining the region's natural evolution from a commodity to a service and information-based economy.

Commercial timber in the Rockies' high elevation national forests has a negative economic value, i.e., it costs the Forest Service more to manage a sale than it receives for the stumpage. These trees are worth more standing than as boards, especially in the region's roadless areas. These are generally high, fragile areas with submarginal timber. We stress a key fact, in most Rocky Mountain national forests the cost of managing a timber sale exceeded the value of the logs by a factor of five. Most logging here was politically driven and the full costs of exploitation were ignored, discounted, and obscured.

However, the West's attractive environment has tremendous economic value. Roadless lands, wilderness, free-flowing rivers, national parks and forests, and healthy wildlife habitat stimulate much of its new economic activity. These amenities attract entrepreneurs. For example Bozeman, Montana has over 60 high-tech firms in a town of 35,000. Freed by FedEx and the Internet, "modem cowboys" (and cowgirls) move here for our high environmental quality.

Ray Rasker of Bozeman's Sonoran Institute notes that since 1970, "Montana has added over 150,000 new jobs, and not one of the new net jobs has been in mining, oil and gas, farming, ranching, or the woods products industry". The extractive industries are notoriously unstable, and commodity prices continue to cascade. The timber industry, for example, is leaving the West for the Southeast and foreign countries.

Even here cutting some trees makes sense. Thinning small trees is an especially effective fire management tool in the region's dry, low-elevation ponderosa pine forests. Historically, periodic slow, creeping fires cleared out weaker, less fire-resistant foliage and created an open forest landscape with only 20-50 trees per acre. However, over the last century these huge, thick-barked pines were cut and fire virtually eliminated. Consequently, dense thickets of scrawny, Christmas tree sized trees replaced these giants. These landscapes are highly vulnerable to insects and disease-and fire naturally follows.

Many reformers are floating the notion that traditional logging can effectively "fire-proof" the region's forests. This is ecological fiction. Fire is a dramatic and essential ingredient in the West's ecosystems. Fires, especially in the higher elevations are characterized by infrequent stand replacing events such as the 1988 Yellowstone fires that burned approximately one half the Park. Veteran firefighters know the only sure way to fight such fires is with an early snow fall. Last week's Bitterroot snow storm finally, after six weeks of fire fighting, contained the 250,000 acre Bitterroot fire.

On a planet whose atmosphere is 21 percent oxygen, one lightening storm can spark over 300 ignitions, and forest fuels accumulate, its fantasy to believe fire can be completely eliminated. Unless there are enormous subsidies to sanitize high elevation, low productivity forests, huge, out-of-control fires are inevitable. 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. Prudent siting of buildings and managing defensible space around them surely is.