A Plan to Repeal the Roadless Rule Threatens Prime Habitat in National Forests

Nearly 45 million acres of the nation’s most intact forests—an area larger than Oklahoma—could soon open to logging and road building under a proposal from the U.S. Forest Service. The plan, announced last month, would rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, or the Roadless Rule as it’s generally known. The rule has protected vital watersheds and wildlife habitat for a quarter-century, and many conservation groups have come out strongly against scrapping it.

A public comment period on the proposal is now open through September 21. 

First issued in 2001, the Roadless Rule—which prohibits industrial logging and most road building on roughly one-third of Forest Service lands—is aimed both at safeguarding ecosystems and reining in the runaway costs of maintaining roads in national forests (an $8.4 billion backlog at that time now sits around $6.9 billion.) In Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, for example, roadless areas help support all five species of Pacific salmon and 40 percent of all bird species found in North America, according to Audubon Alaska. In North Carolina, some 144,000 acres that support Cerulean Warblers and federally threatened Red-cockaded Woodpeckers could see roads and logging if the rule is repealed.

“Protecting roadless areas can provide important strongholds for birds that are facing increasing pressure from fragmentation, development, and drought,” says Sara Brodnax, Audubon’s director of public lands policy. “We strongly believe that roadless areas are important, intact wildlife habitat and that the rule should not be repealed.”

The Forest Service asserts that repealing the Roadless Rule will lead to healthier forests and better fire management. “For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, in a statement announcing the plan.

But forest management experts say that argument doesn’t hold water. The rule already allows for crews to thin or burn overgrown woods that pose a wildfire hazard, and it permits limited road construction to protect public safety if fire poses an imminent danger. In fact, a 2020 analysis from the Forest Service itself concluded, “a lack of roads has not stopped fire prevention measures; fuel management activities in roadless areas have actually been more numerous on a per-square kilometer basis than elsewhere in the National Forest System.” 

What’s more, adding to the 370,000 miles of roads already crisscrossing Forest Service land—enough to circle the planet nearly 15 times—would almost certainly lead to more fire, says Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited. Most blazes in national forests start within half a mile of a road, often sparked by cigarette butts or a hot vehicle exhaust system parked over dry grass. “Roads actually equal fires,” says Wood, who previously worked for the Forest Service and was part of the team that created the Roadless Rule. Instead of building costly and controversial roads in remote areas, he says, the agency should focus on doing more forest thinning and prescribed burning where national forests abut towns at risk from wildfire. 

Wood’s comments echo the remarks that four former chiefs of the Forest Service—who worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations—made in a letter to the USDA’s Rollins a year ago, when the agency announced its intent to rescind the rule. “Based on our experience,” they wrote, “we believe a total repeal of the Rule will result in many more problems than it fixes and be more costly in the long run.”

Because of those costs, the nonpartisan fiscal watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense also opposes the proposal. “Repealing the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule in its entirety would recklessly expose taxpayers to billions in new liabilities from subsidized roads and money-losing timber sales,” said Autumn Hanna, a vice president of the group, in a statement.

For conservation advocates, keeping roadless areas unfragmented is an important way to protect large tracts of habitat where animals can roam free. “From a fish and wildlife perspective, it is the whole ball of wax,” Wood says. “If you looked at the map of inventoried roadless areas across the National Forest System, and you overlaid native trout and salmon habitat over that map, there is an almost one-to-one correspondence.” In Utah, Wood says, 99 percent of roadless areas are also designated as important habitat for mule deer, while 93 percent of Montana’s roadless areas provide summer range for elk. Roadless areas make up just 2 percent of the continental United States but contain habitat for 25 percent of animal species listed or proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act. 

Nowhere is the value of roadless areas to bird species more evident than in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, which at roughly 17 million acres—more than half of them roadless—is both the largest of the national forests and part of the largest intact temperate rainforest on Earth. Hundreds of thousands of shorebirds stop there annually during spring migration. Marbled Murrelets and Bald Eagles nest in the forest at higher densities than anywhere else on the planet. Subspecies found nowhere else, including the Queen Charlotte Goshawk and Prince of Wales Spruce Grouse, depend on its old-growth woods for habitat. 

The repeal would not affect Colorado and Idaho, which have similar state regulations, but bird habitat elsewhere would be at risk. In California, Western Tanagers find refuge in towering old-growth groves among the roughly one-third of the Sequoia National Forest that remains roadless. And while the rule mainly protects backcountry in the West, it has also helped to keep large tracts of eastern forests roadless, including substantial acreage in Florida, Virginia, New Hampshire, and other states. 

Conservationists say protecting roadless areas is good not only for wildlife, but also for people: Along with preserving wild places for birding, fishing, and hunting, the rule also helps to safeguard drinking water for 25 million Americans, according to a study published in July. Old-growth forests are also better than younger ones at storing carbon, and by one estimate roadless areas alone sequester some 445 million tons of it. The Tongass alone holds around one-fifth of all the carbon stored by national forests.

Groups that support the repeal say the Roadless Rule hasn’t kept up with the times as drought and disease have made wildfire a growing threat in much of the country. “We should continue to adapt and learn from failed policies to meet the moment, not continue to cling to positions and ideas that don’t serve the public’s interest,” said Travis Joseph, president of The American Forest Resource Council, a trade association for forest products companies in the West, in a statement.

Wood says there is room for public debate about tweaking the Roadless Rule if the Forest Service has new information that suggests change is needed. “But to throw it out wholesale, as is being proposed, doesn’t make sense,” he says. For all the benefits of keeping roads out of remote forests and the steep costs of maintaining more of them, “permitting new roads in roadless areas just seems like folly.”