The wildfires raging throughout the Southwest provide a sobering reminder of the power of Mother Nature. This issue hits close to home because of the widely recognized forest health issues we face in North Central Washington.

Experts say that the conditions in our forests are ripe for catastrophic fires. We so far have been unwilling to manage that risk effectively by removing forest fuels through prescribing burning and selective logging.

You don’t have to turn back the clock that far to see what happens when wildfires rage out of control. In 1994, North Central Washington was ablaze with wildfires driven by dry conditions and high winds, and helped along by years of fire suppression that had allowed fuels to build up to dangerous levels.

Last week at Barn Beach Reserve in Leavenworth, research ecologist Dr. Paul Hessburg and photographer John Marshall presented a sobering presentation on the state of forest health.

Marshall pointed out that the oft-used newspaper headlines of fire destroying the forest is not at all accurate. “Fire is an agent of change,” he said — it changes the scene rather than destroys it. Over the past 17 years, Marshall has documented the recovery of the forest from the 1994 wildfires. New life sprouted within days and weeks of the fire. Some areas that burned very hot have not recovered, however.

Hessburg, who has spent three decades working for the U.S. Forest Service, described how significantly fire suppression and other human-caused factors have changed the forests. The result has been changing a landscape dominated by grassland and patches of trees into forests that are much more dense. This has led to “an epidemic of trees,” said Hessburg, and has made catastrophic fires much more likely.

Or perhaps inevitable.

Furthermore, warming temperatures have provided better habitat for forest pests like the mountain pine beetle, bark beetle and the spruce budworm. The bug kill on Blewett Pass is readily apparent to travelers and that’s not an unusual situation. Hessburg guessed that as much as 50 percent of the forest has health issues of one type or another.

And efforts to improve the health of the forests have run smack dab into air quality issues that the state Department of Ecology worries about. So the window to perform prescribed burns is extremely narrow, making that tool virtually worthless.

Air quality is very important, particularly for those who have breathing issues, but what is needed in these circumstances is a wider perspective and a more thoughtful approach to risk management. If we minimize smoke from prescribed burns only to significantly increase the risk of catastrophic blazes that destroy homes and result in serious air quality issues for weeks at a time, is that a smart tradeoff?

Politically, that may be easier to digest but it doesn’t seem to be in our long-term best interests.

We need to develop pragmatic and thoughtful approaches to managing that risk for the long-term benefit of the region. We humans have mucked up a system that was very effective by successful stamping out fires for 50 or 60 years. What we saw in 1994 is a harbinger of things to come. We’d be better off aggressively managing the forests rather than letting nature take its course.