Sorry for the delay. After thinking about this for a few days and I came up with the following:
1) Fire-proof existing roads by thinning out thickets, removing snags, and cleaning up woody debris. This should be done at least 200' above and 200' below the road for a 400' wide "shaded fuel break". Trees to be left would be large and well spaced 25' - 50' apart...leave the best, remove the rest.
2) Start small, use local people, work on priority roads first. Involve boy scouts, church groups, rotary clubs. Gain public trust that what is being done is to protect, not harm, the forest.
3) Once a network of fuel breaks has been established, gradually impliment a thinning regime around towns. In our area, there is enough large dead and dying trees to subsidize the removal of the smaller, unmerchantable trees. The program should be self-sufficient -- the value of the trees removed should pay for the clean-up cost of the unmerchantable material.True, the public may not see any return on the trees logged, but they would save millions in firefighting costs.
4) Provide incentives to the biomass power generation industry to develope small portable, biomass electrical generation units. (ie ten years of free fuel to the first company that puts one to work in each national forest). Utilizing the previously unusable (small trees)to generate electricity becomes economically viable if we eliminate or reduce the transport costs (trucking). It is just a matter of setting these portable generators up along existing power lines and thinning the forest within a twenty or thirty mile radius. When that area is cleaned up, simply move the plant to the next area in need of thinning.
5) Ideally, thinning projects should be located in places that would expand areas that are already fire proof. For example, around here (northern California), the higher elevations have slower growth rates and thus less fuel build-up. Thinning next to these areas and then working down slope would expand the areas that could burn under a natural fire cycle (ie lightning fires every 7 - 12 years). Fire proofed areas near towns would be thinned in the same manner.
The goal of this program would be to reduce the past 90 years of fuel build-up, and get the forests back into a state in which they could withstand periodic fires. Utilizing dead and dying timber for lumber, and small trees for power generation would create jobs, and make the program self sufficient. It would take at least a decade or two to complete -- any quicker and the market would collapse due to the flood of federal timber.
Unfortunately, existing regulations implimenting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), National Forest Management Act (NFMA), Endangered Species Act (ESA), National Forest Planning regs etc, etc. would virtually ensure that this program would never get off the drawing board due to appeal by environmentalists. Congress has two options to fix this: A) overhaul the above laws to eliminate the "analysis paralysis" and political micro-management from Washington; or B) Exempt this program from the above laws.
Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and Representative Richard Pombo (R-California) have been working on option A. Option B was tried under the Clinton Administration (aka the salvage rider) and became a political nightmare for Gingrich and the Republican Contract with America group. The enviros claimed that congress exempted logging from environmental rules to enrich the timber industry.
Really, the best option is set up pilot projects that employ Carry_Okie's ideas of free market based environmental management. This stuff should be contracted out to the private sector under competitive bidding and monitored by independent third party scientific firms. Hope this helps!