This is the first in a series of conversations with experts on the science and policies regarding fires.

Mike Lester, Colorado’s state forester and director of the Colorado State Forest Service at Colorado State University, views the East Troublesome fire and the others that have devastated Colorado this fall as an investment.

“We need to invest in our forests,” he recently told Colorado Politics. “When we total up the bill for this fire season, that’s an investment,” but maybe not the kind most people would want to make.

Nobody plans to have wildfires like this, and the choice is to invest in forest health or invest in fighting the wildfires. “Nothing is free,” he said.

What should be the investment: getting the “fuel load” — millions of trees ripe for fires — down, and getting forests back to their natural state.

“We’ve become so effective at suppressing wildfires” that the fuel load just continues to build. Instead of a light- to moderate-intensity fire, Colorado ends up with catastrophic fires.

There’s no question that fire seasons are getting longer and the opportunity for those catastrophic fires is growing. “If you had told me five years ago we’d have fires this big in October, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Lester said.

He noted that 64% of Colorado’s lands are federally managed. Over the last dozen years, the feds — everyone’s “favorite whipping boy, but they don’t deserve it” — have been as aggressive as they can be with a limited budget to manage forest health. “I have a lot of admiration for them. They’re asked to do the job with both hands tied behind their backs,” and that’s regardless of who sits in the White House or who controls Congress.

Those efforts also come despite the growing integration of people into wildlands. Those lands aren’t far from civilization anymore, with decent-sized towns in the middle of forests, Lester said.

Another problem: a lack of a sound forest products industry — a fancy way to say timber mills — and that’s not easily solvable. Colorado has just one, in Montrose, and the cost of transporting timber devastated by beetle kill is not profitable. “You have to pay people to take the timber off the land” rather than someone wanting to buy that timber, he explained. The only other nearby mill is in southern Wyoming, but it’s not large enough to cover the volume of timber that could come from Colorado forests.

Lester said there are lots of arguments about what causes these wildfire events, which he says is kind of silly. “We know why”: changes in the distribution of trees and insect species.

Take the mountain pine beetle, which eats ponderosa and lodgepole pines. That’s the insect that has destroyed 5 million acres of trees since the mid-1990s. Winter weather and cold temperatures in the 30- to 35-below-zero range used to keep the beetles in check, Lester said. But Colorado no longer gets that cold at the elevations where the beetles live.

What’s to be done? Lester said that collaboration among a lot of agencies — not just between the state and the feds — is the best solution at hand for now. That now includes the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities, Northern Water and even some non-agency groups like the Coalition for the Upper South Platte.

That kind of collaboration is essential, given the shortage of financial resources, even before the economic downturn due to the pandemic.

There’s also the issue of climate change. “It’s very real,” Lester said. In the wildfires, climate change has manifested itself with a longer fire season and greater propensity for drought.

“This is what grabs us by the throat,” he said.

What Lester and his team will be watching for once the fires are out is what happens to the soil. There will be a lot of it sliding down hills, and that will take two to four years to stabilize, he said.

The danger is that some of that sliding soil will head toward reservoirs, hence the involvement of water utilities and providers. Lester said that silt and debris will cover roads and fill reservoirs, which becomes an expensive problem to mitigate.

Regenerating the forests will also be difficult. When hundreds of thousands of acres of trees burn, that also burns the seeds that would help the forests rebuild on their own. As a result, people have to step in, and it will take centuries for those trees to come back.

Lester pointed to the Hayman fire from 2002, which burned more than 138,000 acres. The US Forest Service has been replanting in the area, at about 1,000 acres per year. “You’re talking hundreds of years to regenerate these forests,” Lester said.

The other impact is to the species that call those forests home, and their native habitat is now gone. “Clean air, clean water, habitat, all the things that forests do can’t happen if the trees aren’t there.”

“We’ve known for quite some time” that these wildfires weren’t going to hold off forever,” Lester said. He likened it to Hurricane Katrina and the failure of levees to hold back the floods. “They knew the levees had problems,” but there were a lot of other things that got the priority for funding.

“Fire is a part of our ecosystem” and it’s not necessarily a bad thing when the forests are in decent health. But the wildland-urban interface makes the stakes higher, Lester said.