Foresters exhibit an amazing amount of agreement on the science and technology of fuel management in the West.

But distrust rages at the policy level where, for example, some environmental groups oppose many thinning projects as ruses to infiltrate loggers back into old-growth forests.

Other impressions embed as a bystander sorts through experts' comments about Oregon's wildfires:

• Forest green does not guarantee forest health. Much of Oregon's green forest is not in a sustainable condition to escape destructive wildfire: 39 percent of Oregon's forests are at high risk of catastrophic fire, and 45 percent are at moderate risk, says the Oregon Forest Resources Institute. The moderate-risk forests will move toward high risk if fuel management doesn't occur soon.
• Thinning and prescribed burning and combinations of both won't stop all wildfires. But the actions can reduce fires' range and intensity and improve the forests' resilience and ability to survive relatively intact with far less damage to soils, trees, fish and wildlife habitat, homes, communities and watersheds.
• Building defensible perimeters around communities that could be destroyed by wildfire should be a high priority to save homes, reduce firefighting costs and allow fire managers to use resources more effectively.
• Rehabilitating our forests will take decades. So, thinning and prescribed fire must be coordinated over large landscapes to break up fuel complexes and increase odds that firefighting efforts will be more successful.
• A study of the 1996 floods' effects on forestlands in Oregon has been critical for effective policy-making. A similar study is needed for the 2002 fires. For example, useful insights might be gained from studying untreated burned areas to see what actually happens compared to landscapes that have experienced aggressive salvage logging.
• In Oregon alone this year, forest firefighting consumed $344 million in 53 fires over 100 acres reported to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. The fuel-heavy state of many forests -- far different from their natural condition -- is a warning of more intense wildfires to come.

So, in terms of forest health and financial thrift, the message is to get into a more aggressive preventive mode. That suggests we need to be more willing to use federal dollars in national forests in the form of below-cost timber-thinning sales.

The same can be said of prescribed fires that aim to reduce forest fuels. They aren't cheap. They are more complicated than lighting fires willy-nilly with a drip torch. The cost of successful prescribed fires can run into the hundreds of dollars per acre for burn preparation to reduce chance of escape and to protect vegetation that should not be burned. But the alternative can be intense wildfires that imprint the landscape for a century.

Better to spend on prevention than to see hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned from other valuable programs to pay for fire suppression as environmental, commercial, aesthetic, wildlife and recreational values go up in smoke.

We need to find ways, outside courthouses, to reach site-specific compromises that allow cutting of some high-value older trees. That would help cover cover costs of thinning and burning in order to prevent overstocking as younger trees mature, to control brush, to minimize fuel laddering and to pay for replanting.

There are immense differences among the forest (and forest fire) ecologies of Pacific Northwest forest regions and the management needs to deal with them.

Still, public agencies, with citizen participation, can provide well for a diversity of forest values, as in the Northwest Oregon State Forests Management Plan, the Northwest Forest Plan and the Columbia Basin Forest Management Plan. But the plans need to be properly implemented, which means the agencies need to be funded and staffed to do so. Reach Robert Landauer, editorial columnist, at 503-221-8157, or 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201 or robertlandauer@news.oregonian.com