Rich Fairbanks is standing on a hillside in the Willamette National Forest near Diamond Peak in western Oregon talking about fire. “To me, this is the key to the whole thing,” he says. The forest around him is one in transition between management regimes and natural progression. It’s a mix of Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine where the wet side of the Cascade Mountains dries in the eastern rain shadow. It’s a forest highly sensitive to change: more light, more rain, fire. This forest used to be open and dry—a few white oaks hold out at the edges of small meadows and huge tawny-barked ponderosas are spread between smaller Douglas-firs. Many of the larger Douglas-firs have dead branches low to the ground, indicating that their trunks were exposed to sunlight earlier in their lives.

Much of it burned a few years ago in a mostly low-intensity, “cool” ground fire. The forest floor is open and walking is easy. Fairbanks shows off the scars on trees where this fire came through. The big trees shrugged off the fire. He stops at a bent specimen that’s a few inches in diameter; it’s dead. Fire spares the strongest, stoutest trees. Much is a matter of physics: trees that lean or have knobs or bumps or low branches expose more to the heat of a low-intensity fire. Ponderosa pines have fire-resistant bark and a mechanism for healing deeper fire scars. “Trees aren’t very smart, but they’ve had a lot of practice,” he says.

At the edge of a small meadow, he describes how the forest is squeezing in around it. The oaks, which grow well in patches like this, are barely hanging on. They can’t keep up with the straight-and-tall-growing Douglas-firs looming nearby and eclipsing the sunlight that once fell in this meadow.

This is a forest that, perhaps, is out of practice, adapting to the false security of all-out fire suppression. The recent fire helped, but it was allowed to burn because another, much larger fire consumed firefighting resources on the other side of the valley. It had been a century or more since fire had moved through this landscape, an interval longer than the span that fire would typically return to this forest, Fairbanks, a forester and twenty-nine-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service, says. At the agency’s request, he completed a fire management plan for the Willamette National Forest, one that shows the different types of forest, takes into account terrain and fire history and logging and other uses. In essence, it’s a map of what the forest will likely do in a burn. Fairbanks is a former firefighter, and he knows that this information would be invaluable on the ground for firefighters. Even more, forest managers could plan for fire, even, perhaps, letting some burn.

Fairbanks calls himself a “feral” employee of the Forest Service—an outsider within—and understands the agency’s inertia. Managers face intense pressure to conform, and slowly a hopeful new generation adopts much of what the old generation did, Fairbanks says. “Getting the fire thing figured out could be the next big thing,” he says. The agency—adrift in the post-timber era—is sitting on a congressional appropriations “gold mine” but favoring the short-term fix of fire suppression, he says.

So his fire plan gathers dust.