Read the headline. Those are our two choices. There are no others. And global warming has got nothing to do with it.

One learns in management that NOT making a decision is, in reality, making a decision. Regarding forests, it just means if we choose not to manage them, fire will be doing the job for us.

Take a walk through our western forests, and most are in a very sad state. Go off the trails, and you will find that deadfall makes hiking nearly impossible — for man or beast. Many of these areas are sparsely populated with wildlife since there is very little to eat in them, with the ground being covered in layers of deadfall and pine needles. All just waiting to burn.

A single typical thunderstorm in the mountains will have 100 to 500 air-to-ground lightning strikes and there are thousands of thunderstorms almost daily everywhere in the Mountain West. It is a certainty these sick forests will catch on fire. An absolute certainty. (RELATED: New York, 17 Other States Under Air Quality Alert As Canada’s Wildfires Rage)

Whether driven by pine beetle kill – which we allowed to fester and spread – or just the end result of old, unmanaged forests, these areas are tinderboxes just waiting to get lit up. And when nature does take its course, we fight the fires and don’t allow the natural processes to proceed. If we planned to be stupid, we couldn’t take a........

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