Last summer, catastrophic fires raged across the West, consuming 6 million acres of trees, not to mention people's homes. They turned forests into moonscapes, some of which will not fully recover for a century. This was a disaster from every standpoint -- economic, ecological and personal for the people and communities in the path of these blazes.

This disaster occurred because well-intentioned government regulations are having unintended consequences in our forests. Red tape and endless litigation have kept foresters from thinning forests, and the forests have become overgrown -- some areas have 15 times as many trees as when Lewis and Clark explored the West.

When a fire starts, it is not a healthy, low-intensity blaze that actually helps renew the forest; the dense trees fuel an inferno that destroys the forest.

It is easy to sit in an ivory tower and pontificate about forest management or a host of other equally complex environmental issues, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did in a June 8 editorial ("Environment has no friend in Bush," @issue). It is quite another matter to properly manage our land, water and other natural resources on the ground, where decisions have a real impact on people and our nation's future.

In the case of forests, we face the challenge of managing the 190 million acres of public land -- an area more than five times the size of Georgia -- that are at a high risk of catastrophic fires this summer.

President Bush has met the challenge with his "Healthy Forest Initiative," which proposes a variety of ways to allow professional foresters to supervise thinning of overgrown areas without having to fight through months, and sometimes years, of red tape and litigation.

Letting professional foresters restore unhealthy forests to health and protect them from catastrophic fires is common sense -- especially when the alternative is seeing them burn to ashes.

Likewise, we face an enormous challenge related to the allocation of water in the West. Demands on water in the West from a fast-growing population are taxing a water distribution system with its origins in the 19th century. A long drought has aggravated the shortages.

To deal with this challenge, the administration came up with "Water 2025," a cooperative initiative with states and local communities to promote conservation and efficiency in water usage while resolving disputes among competing users. Irrigation efficiencies can free up water for cities, and cities can encourage suburbanites to conserve.

For example, the Las Vegas Water Authority is offering residents $1 a square foot to replace water-guzzling grass lawns with alternative landscaping. Las Vegas saves 55 gallons of drinking water for every square foot of grass removed.

On another front, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a list of 280 imperiled species that need to be considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, but professional biologists are being prevented from this important work by a flood of litigation, forcing them instead to perform tasks that provide little or no benefit to species. Ironically, the litigation is filed primarily by groups purporting to support endangered species conservation.

We are proposing -- just as the Clinton administration did -- to work with Congress to fix the provision in the act that generates this deluge of lawsuits. This will allow biologists, rather than lawyers and judges, to run our endangered species program, including working with states, local communities and private landowners to protect the habitat of declining species.

These are common-sense solutions to on-the-ground challenges. Yet even as we take the necessary steps in Washington to address these challenges, we recognize that if we are going to succeed, we must empower the American people. We must embrace a new land ethic founded on the principle of cooperative conservation -- the government working hand in hand with the people in voluntary partnership to find solutions that can't be achieved by regulation alone.

A few weeks ago, for example, the Interior Department handed out 113 grants under the president's new Private Stewardship Program to help landowners conserve species ranging from the bald eagle in Washington state to the whooping crane in Nebraska. This year, we gave $34.8 million in grants to states under the new Landowner Incentive Program, allowing states to work with landowners to enhance habitat for imperiled species.

In addition, the president has proposed a 24 percent budget increase for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, which provides funding and technical help to landowners to conserve habitat.

Over the years, landowners have voluntarily restored 640,000 acres of wetlands, 1 million acres of upland habitat and 4,700 miles of streams under this program.

No one is going to yell, "Stop the presses!" over any one of these thousands of projects. But this kind of cooperative conservation -- acre by acre, project by project -- is becoming the future of environmentalism in America.

As Gen. George Patton once said, "Don't tell people how to do something, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their ingenuity." We will succeed in the 21st century only if we tap into the greatest conservation resource America has -- the people who live on and love the land they call home.