More than 100 years of aggressive fire suppression has left federal forests overgrown as massive tinder boxes waiting to turn heavenly mountain towns into scenes from Hell at the first match. But there are a myriad of ways Washington can proactively reverse the consequences of a century’s-worth of disaster forest policy.

For starters Congress can roll back the Roadless Rule prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting across nearly 59 million acres of federal forests. The lack of roads block firefighters’ access to put out problematic blazes and hampers efforts to manage the land properly. Meanwhile the lack of timber harvesting contributes to the fuel buildup on Forest Service land.