Will we ever change the way we approach wildfires?

It’s certainly not the same kind of encore I cheered for a little over a month ago at a Jackson Browne concert.

Unfortunately the front and center return to the stage that has had everyone talking and tearing up lately has been a ravaging wildfire season that leaves last year’s suddenly pale in comparison.

Just 13 months after the Carlton Complex blackened a record 252,000 in Okanogan County, two lightning-caused blazes, the Okanogan Complex Fire covering the hills north of Omak and the North Star Fire, which has threatened the town of Republic for days.

Combined these fires destroyed over 715,000 acres as of last weekend

And there are others, too many to list, burning across Washington, Idaho and Montana.

A year ago the Washington State Department of Natural Resources came under fire from a number of directions for their handling of the Carlton Complex. There were charges of slow — or no — response and subsequently many structures and large amounts of timber and grazing land were lost.

One would have thought that considering the region is in a drought, and with record low snowpacks this past winter, that every effort might have been made by the many agencies — the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management among them — to do their best to make sure 2014 was not a repeat.

Sure, in the state of Washington, we can all point at the Legislature for not giving DNR the money they need in their budgets. That’s an easy target.

But once again, with resources seriously lacking, the hands of many a heavy equipment operator have been waving in the air offering to help, only to be told they do not have the proper training, nor the right color of card the feds say.

Didn’t we see this fire season coming way back in December, and was there a siren sounded for training volunteers? Please, if that was the case and I missed the call I know someone will let me know.

But the real issue here is not being reactive, but rather proactive. It’s the way in our daily lives we’ve tried to help cut the exorbitant and ever-rising cost of healthcare by trying to take better care of ourselves.

What about applying that same concept to forests that have become seriously ill over the past half-century?

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell says much of our national forests — up to 42 percent or 82 million acres — are at risk and need to be restored by different management practices.

If that were to be done, perhaps his agency would not spend more than half of its yearly budget — in excess of $1 billion — fighting fires. According to the National Interagency Coordination Center, in 2014, $1.52 billion was spent fighting fires, down from $1.74 billion in 2013 and a record $1.9 billion in 2012.

The number of dollars lost each fire season is not just what it costs to put them out, but the real cost to the economy, estimated at up to $100 billion when one tosses in property, wildlife habitat, health issues, water pollution and more.

Ironically, while touting the need for more and better management, Tidwell recently editorialized in many major newspapers asking yet for more money for suppression.

But of course there are plenty of roadblocks to that effort to make our forests healthier so that they don’t burn at the scary rate they do now.

An Aug. 17 story on northerag.net, spoke of efforts of the Public Lands Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to convince the federal government to put the focus of changing how public lands are managed by the USFS and BLM.

Where once the natural occurrence of wildfires helped properly manage the health of forests, that job now belongs to humans who have chosen to live where fires burn. Thus the huge costs now associated with fighting fires.

Unfortunately, lawsuits from environmental groups and red tape and regulations from within governmental agencies hogtie efforts from everyone involved to improve the health of our public lands.

And that unfortunately makes me fear what an encore to this year’s encore may bring.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.