Fires rage out of control in the West, rampaging from national forest wilderness to the outskirts of cities. Hundreds of homes are destroyed, tens of thousands of firefighters are at great risk. In the midst of this devastation and danger, there is broad agreement that the problem is not merely one of nature, but of flawed federal forest policy that must be fixed.

It’s a story ripped from today’s headlines. And from the headlines of two years ago. And from the year before that. Ripped from congressional testimony of today – and of those yesterdays – is the observation by U.S. Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth last week that a decade of haphazard regulations and lawsuits have his agency in a state of “paralysis by analysis” – more than 40 percent of the service’s time is spent planning and assessing; even the most modest of projects take years to carry out, if they get carried out at all.

The reason these fires rage, such as the ones now scorching the suburbs of Denver and much of Arizona, is that they have the fuel to do so. Millions of acres of national forest are laden with dead trees and underbrush, as much as 400 tons per acre in places, time bombs of tinder that need only a bolt of lightening, a careless camper or a malicious arsonist to explode. It is there for many reasons, from logging cutbacks to logging that leaves debris and smaller growth – ideal fire starters. Chief Bosworth is more concerned with the latter. When he says more logging is needed on federal lands to prevent future forest fires, “What I’m really talking about is active management, and active management, to me, could be prescribed burning and [mechanical] thinning. And in some cases it may include some logging,” he told National Journal last year.

No reasonable person wants our national forests turned into manicured tree farms. No reasonable person believes loss of property – and, on more than a few tragic occasions, loss of life – is simply the price people pay for living at the forest’s edge. Surely all reasonable people can agree that there is a difference between true wilderness and suburbia and that with some 192 million acres of national forest on hand, management policies appropriate to the setting can be devised.

This agreement has not been reached because it’s easier to succumb to distraction than to make difficult decisions. After fire torched 90,000 acres – and a hundred or so homes – in Northern California in 1999, Congress and the Clinton administration quickly pointed to the storm a year earlier and the additional dead trees it dumped on an already clogged forest as the culprits. The 2000 fire in New Mexico briefly brought attention to forest policy but wandered into outrage over a bungled prescribed burn and missing computer hard drives from Los Alamos. The one good idea to emerge from that debacle – to put teams to work clearing forest floors near human settlements – got scuttled by an argument over whether the 8,000 workers envisioned should be employees of the federal government or of the timber industry.

President Bush was in Eastern Arizona the other day, shaking hands with grimy, choking firefighters, telling the distraught residents that the American people are pulling for them, declaring the Show Low region a disaster area. It all seemed so familiar, and for good reason – it’s federal forest policy.