The Trump administration announced its intention earlier this week to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Policy, also known as the “Roadless Rule,” which restricts road-building, logging, and mining across 58 million acres of the country’s national forests.
The administration’s rationale was that the “outdated” Roadless Rule has exacerbated wildfire risks. In a statement announcing the policy change, U.S. Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins said that “properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.”
Fire ecologists agree that the U.S. needs to step up land management efforts to reduce the likelihood of dangerous conflagrations. But experts don’t think more roads penetrating the country’s protected national forests is the best way to do that. Most fires — especially those that significantly affect communities—start on private lands that aren’t affected by the Roadless Rule, and remote areas can usually be managed for fire risk using flown-in firefighters.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule “does not change our current federal land management capacity to improve management and stop wildfires,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, interim director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and an associate professor of forest management and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University. “What opening up currently roadless areas really does is allow for timber extraction.”
Before the Forest Service—an agency of the USDA—finalized the Roadless Rule at the very end of the Clinton administration in 2001, the agency struggled to pay for the maintenance of existing roads in national forests, let alone the construction of new ones.
But the policy has been controversial, facing multiple challenges from states, private companies, and GOP lawmakers who saw the rule as an impediment to commercial logging. It was repealed in 2005 by the administration of then-president George W. Bush, but reinstated the following year by a federal district court. Lawsuits from states including Alaska and Idaho have attempted to carve out exemptions for their forests, and some Republican lawmakers have facilitated land transfers from federal ownership in order to circumvent Roadless Rule protections.
Most recently, in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Forest Service rolled back the Roadless Rule for the 9 million-acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Republican Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska praised the repeal “fostering opportunities for Alaskans to make a living.” But that decision was reversed in 2023 under then-president Joe Biden.
This time around, the Trump administration is deemphasizing logging as a rationale for nixing the Roadless Rule. The USDA press release on the decision only briefly touches on the industry, saying that the Roadless Rule “hurts jobs and economic development” and that repealing it will allow for “responsible timber production.” The communication devotes more attention to the supposed wildfire risk that the rule creates, pointing out that 28 million acres of land covered by the rule are at high risk of wildfire, and arguing that repealing it will “reduce wildfire risk and help protect surrounding communities and infrastructure.”
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, in a column posted to the Forest Service website, said the amount of land lost to wildfire in roadless areas each year has “more than doubled” since the Roadless Rule’s inception, though he does not provide evidence that this is because of the Roadless Rule and not other factors like climate change and the hotter, drier conditions associated with it. Schultz did not respond to a request for comment.
The implication of the USDA and Forest Service’s statements is that roads can help get firefighters and equipment to remote forests to reduce their risk of fires, or fight fires when they break out. It’s true that land managers sometimes need access to densely forested areas to get rid of overgrown plants and dead wood that could fuel a small blaze and turn it into an out-of-control fire. They do this with practices known as tree thinning, which involves the removal of small shrubs and trees, and prescribed burns—intentionally set, carefully managed fires.
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