Washington’s forests are appreciated by us all, for their beauty, ecological values, jobs, recreation, and the forests and wood products they provide. We don’t often think about the health of our forests because they look so green from a distance. Those who recreate, hunt, live or work in forests, have a different vantage point, and can see when unmanaged forests are unnaturally overstocked and unhealthy. With too many trees per acre, these dying, diseased and dead trees and brush are fueling today’s wildfires, which burn hotter and are more damaging to the environment. We should all want to support healthy, productive, forests across our landscape. While there are 9.2 billion live growing trees in our forests, did you know there are also 651 million dead trees standing in our forests? (USDA-FIA) Even though the US Forest Service manages 37% of our forestlands, more than half (55% or 359 million) of all standing dead trees are located in USFS national forests. If we don’t bring our federal forests into balance and protect the health of our federal forests by removing dead and dying trees and brush, wildfires will burn hotter than nature intended, turning our federal forests into carbon sources instead of sinks. Having a healthy balance of young and old forests is important and we can only achieve that by active forest management. The misguided effort to simply set aside more old trees without a plan for managing them takes us further away from our goal of healthy, productive forests across the landscape.