When some friends and I ventured into Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest near Yellowstone National Park this month, we found spectacular mountain scenery, elk and grizzly bears happily gorging themselves on moths that feed on alpine flowers. Grizzlies need huge areas to roam and are abundant in the Shoshone in part because of the combination of wilderness designated by Congress and adjacent roadless areas, where road building and other development are prohibited.
Under the 2001 Roadless Rule enacted by President Bill Clinton, millions of acres of roadless areas on national forests across the country are conserved, protecting vital habitats and watersheds and unique areas for backcountry hunting, hiking and camping. A “blank spot on a map,” in the words of the naturalist Aldo Leopold, is increasingly valuable in our urbanizing society.
But in June the Trump administration announced its intent to repeal the 2001 Roadless Rule, removing protections from about 44.7 million acres of national forest lands currently off-limits to road building. On Friday the administration published a notice beginning a process intended to result in a repeal by late next year.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has emphasized the need to provide the Forest Service with more leeway to manage forests in roadless areas to address “devastating” wildfires which would effectively give timber companies the ability to log roadless areas. A 2021 study of fires on Western national forests concluded that from 1992 to 2017, a larger percentage of roadless areas were subject to wildfires than lands with roads. Two of this summer’s larger fires — the Dragon Bravo fire on the Grand Canyon’s northern rim and Utah’s Monroe Canyon fire — have burned across roadless areas on national forests.
The administration is right to look for ways to address the growing wildfire threat in these areas. But instead of doing away with the rule, the White House should look to a simple way to make our forests more resilient to wildfire without compromising the other benefits.
Before the arrival of white settlers, Native Americans commonly managed forests with low-intensity fires to benefit wildlife and aid in hunting. These fires, along with ones caused by lightning strikes, meant the forests that greeted the settlers were far more open and parklike.
Beginning in the early 20th century, the Forest Service waged a campaign to stamp out all wildfires, even small ones that might improve the health of the forest. The result is that forests today are far more dense and fire-prone. With accelerating climate change, forests dry out faster and burn bigger, hotter and deadlier. Over the past decade, the average area subject to wildfire in the United States was more than 2.5 times as large as the amount that burned annually in the 1980s.
One way to allow forest thinning and prescribed burns to reduce the wildfire threat is to amend the roadless rule. Currently the rule allows new road construction only for forest management activities in cases of “an imminent threat of flood, fire or other catastrophic event that, without intervention, would cause the loss of life or property.” This standard is far too narrow and invites litigation over what qualifies as an imminent threat. The Forest Service is thus often reluctant to propose actions in roadless areas, given the high likelihood of delay and adverse court decisions that waste the agency’s time and resources.
But the Trump administration could update the rule to permit temporary roads in roadless areas that are near neighborhoods along the wildland-urban interface to allow for forest thinning or other ecological restoration.
Could such an exception be abused by timber industry allies in the administration? Not likely, since under current law, forest management projects are subject to public input and are required to be consistent with land management plans that use the best available science.
There’s also a legal precedent. After the rule was issued, governors from Idaho and Colorado initiated their own roadless rules for national forests in their states. Both rules supersede the 2001 rule and allow for limited forest management and road construction to address the threat of catastrophic wildfires in more populated areas while still protecting millions of acres for wildlife, water resources and recreation.
When I oversaw the Forest Service during the Obama administration, we defended the rule established under Jim Risch, Idaho’s Republican governor (and now senator), when it was challenged in court, and worked with John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s Democratic governor (and now senator), to design and defend his state’s rule. Bipartisanship and even consensus are possible on roadless policy.
The Trump administration isn’t much interested in either, but it has chosen to leave the Colorado and Idaho rules alone. Why not simply adopt the same approach in all states?
Friday’s notice has initiated a 21-day public comment period that will allow all of us to weigh in on the administration’s plans. We should demand that it end the attack on the 2001 Roadless Rule and instead amend the regulation to address the threat of wildfires while conserving the nation’s forests.
Robert Bonnie is a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship and a former under secretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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