Wildfire management is not my area of expertise, but it is certainly a hot topic in Central Oregon and one connected to water and watersheds. One of the dominate narratives today is that we need to more actively “manage” our forests while the environmental / scientific community states this is misguided for a range of reasons. “First the savior, now the villain: Fire suppression is often overhyped in the American west“, was published today and is another argument that managing forests for fire suppression is more detrimental than beneficial. The line that caught my eye was, “According to tree-ring-based climate reconstructions, this was the wettest century of the past 2,000 years in much of the West.” What does this mean for our local ecosystems? If normal means drier, and global heating adds to that, what does that mean for us? Perhaps, rather than wildfire management, we should be focusing on water management.