Only you can prevent forest fires” is a phrase Smokey Bear made popular. We don’t mean to name drop here, but Smokey had it right when he first came along in 1944.

Only we can prevent forest fires — or wildfires, for that matter. Not only are a great many such fires caused by humans but public land managers can prevent and minimize wildfires by robustly managing forests and grasslands.

By thinning forests, plowing and mowing fire breaks and doing prescriptive burns to reduce the brush that accumulates, they can reduce the amount of fuel that’s available. That ultimately will mean fewer and smaller wildfires.

Add to that a rigorous program of logging key areas of the forests to create more fire breaks. While environmentalists may not like it, logging can and will minimize the likelihood of wildfires spiraling out of control.

This year, more 30,000 people were pressed into service to battle massive wildfires that burned more than 7 million acres of the West. In Oregon alone, about 2 million acres burned.

Clearly, managers must do more to prevent wildfires. The stakes are too high.

Gone are the days of state and federal forest managers kowtowing to environmentalists, who use poorly written federal laws to stop their efforts.

We’re not talking about wholesale clearcuts of old growth forests. We’re talking about strategically chosen stretches where fuels have been allowed to build up over time.

Some politicians call this “treating” the landscape. We call it logging. Whatever the terminology, it involves cutting down a significant number of trees to reduce the fuel for fires.

Federal agencies and others have tested those techniques to demonstrate that a forest that has been treated and subjected to prescribed burning is far less likely to be incinerated if a wildfire gets started. The fires are smaller and less intense.

We suggest that, in addition to such treatments, state and federal agencies should come up with a game plan to use timber sales to create a system of large fire breaks in public forests. Properly designed, they would have the ability to stop wildfires in their tracks.

In addition, logging more public land would provide timber for mills and sequester carbon in lumber and engineered wood.

The result would be a win-win-win for the forests, the timber industry and the climate through carbon sequestration and a reduction in the number and size of fires, which spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

Somehow, folks who are excited about climate change have decided that producing less carbon dioxide and methane by buying electric cars and using less fossil fuel will in some way reduce the number of wildfires. Over a period of centuries, they may be right, but in the here and now we need active, aggressive management of forests and grasslands.

Nothing is more frustrating than wildfires. Massive amounts of personnel, resources and money are expended to control fires that are started by lightning or human carelessness. If the wind kicks up, a wildfire can burn thousands of acres a day.

Smokey’s right. We can prevent wildfires. We just need the political will to do it.