U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins this week announced the U.S. Forest Service has filed a proposed rule to rescind the national 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, a motion that, if passed, would open nearly 45 million acres of forest across 37 states to road construction, logging and other development.
Supporters of the proposed revocation argue that the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule has served as a barrier to wildfire risk reduction work across large swaths of America’s national forests.
“Our forests can’t afford another decade of inaction. Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions — overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease — turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” Brooke Rollins said in a news release. “For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities. Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule argue that doing away with it would “be the largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history,” according to Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“(Revoking the rule is) against what Americans want,” Spivak said. “These are some of the last truly wild forests left in the country, places that shelter endangered wildlife and protect our drinking water. Once you start bulldozing roads for commercial logging and industrial development, there’s no getting them back. Americans love their public lands and want them protected. We’re going to fight like hell to safeguard these wild places for future generations.”
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, more than 370,000 miles of roads already fragment U.S. national forests, with a maintenance backlog in the billions of dollars. Most wildfires are human caused and occur near roads, with a decades-long, nationwide study finding human-caused wildfires are four times more likely in areas with roads than in roadless forests, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
Additionally, the center states that national forests are the headwaters of many of the country’s major rivers and the largest source of municipal water supplies, serving more than 60 million people in 33 states. The Roadless Rule protects rivers and streams from roads, a major source of water pollution because of erosion and sediment, the center stated in the release.
The American Forest Resource Council (AFRC) has announced that it welcomes the U.S. Forest Service’s proposed rescission of the rule, saying in a news release the action would give professional land managers greater flexibility to address wildfire risk and declining forest health on millions of acres of national forest system lands.
“The Forest Service is right to take a hard look at a policy that was written for forest conditions that looked very different 25 years ago,” AFRC President Travis Joseph said in the release. “Our national forests are experiencing severe wildfire, drought, insects and disease on a scale that few anticipated when the Roadless Rule was adopted. Forest professionals need the flexibility and access to respond to those conditions before we lose more forests, watersheds and wildlife habitat to catastrophic wildfire.”
The AFRC is a regional trade association representing over 50 forest product businesses and forest landowners whose purpose is to advocate for sustained yield timber harvests on public timberlands throughout the West, its news release stated.
For 25 years, the 2001 Roadless Rule prevented road construction for more than 45 million acres of the 193-million-acre national forest system, over 95 percent of which are located in 10 Western states. According to the Forest Service, the rescission of the rule is intended to prioritize local agency decision-making over regulatory rules that are the same across the country, regardless of specific land management issues and needs.
More than 95% of inventoried roadless areas are in 10 Western states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The proposed rule does not apply to national forests in Colorado and Idaho because those lands are under separate state-specific roadless regulations.
The rescission removes national designation of roadless areas but does not mandate timber cutting or road construction, the Forest Service stated. The action removes regulatory burden and sends decisions about roadless areas to the local national forest managers, such as states, tribes and communities, according to the feds.
The agency will seek public comment on the proposal and on a draft of the environmental impact statement filed in the federal register.
To comment on the proposed rule and draft environmental impact statement, go to Regulations.gov. Public comments must be received by midnight on Sept. 21. Information will be available Aug. 19 on the Forest Service Roadless Areas webpage.
