"It's going to be a VERY expensive effort to restore the ecosystems of the western states… I don't have any short-term outlook on this. It's going to be at least a hundred years."
What I'd like to see happen over the next hundred years is a reversal of those trends that we've set in place in the past hundred years. But we have to start today, knowing that it's not going to happen overnight. And we've got to begin somewhere. That's already been started over the last several years. The research in ecosystem restoration to me is one of the greatest investments we can make in managing our national forest lands. We need to be able to get out there and manage the land so that we can either mimic fire by thinning the trees mechanically, removing them mechanically, and then apply prescribed fire into that system to reduce the fuel loading and the dense stand conditions. We're slowly moving towards that goal. There are things that seem to be holding us up, though. A lot of it is financial. It's going to be a very expensive effort to restore the ecosystems of the western states—very expensive. And that's why I don't have any short-term outlook on this. It's going to be at least a hundred years. And unless somebody comes along with some really innovative way to utilize the small diameter material that's out on the forest right now, I just don't see it happening overnight. We're looking at maybe 10,000 acres a year on a forest that we're treating with mechanical thinning and prescribed fire. We need to be closer to 100,000 acres, but we're not going to get there.
So fire management I think in concept has changed the way we look at fire and its role in the ecosystem. We've learned a lot about how fire can benefit ecosystem health through recycling of nutrients and healthy forage conditions and vegetation and actual tree growth and diameter of trees is enhanced by fire's role in the ecosystem. But we've also learned how powerful and how destructive fire can also be.