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The Trump administration announced this week that it will take formal steps to rescind the Roadless Rule, loosening longstanding environmental protections for nearly 45 million acres of federally managed public lands, including 150,000 acres of pristine backcountry in the Six Rivers National Forest. 

In a press statement, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins claimed the action would “create healthy, resilient and productive forests” by removing “burdensome, outdated, one-size-fits-all regulations that not only put people and livelihoods at risk but also stifle economic growth in rural America.” Environmentalists and fire ecologists argue that removing protections would have the opposite effect.

“Roadless areas are some of the most wildfire-resilient landscapes in North America because they are the least degraded by industrial logging and road-building that would have converted fire-adapted native forests into fire-prone tree farms, and provided road access for human-caused ignitions from careless recreationists and sociopathic arsonists,” Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), wrote in a prepared statement. “Tearing open roadless areas to industrial logging and road-building will do wildland firefighters no favors — just the opposite.”

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted by the Clinton administration in 2001, established a prohibition on new road construction/reconstruction and commercial logging across 58.2 million acres of designated roadless areas within the National Forest System. The rule applies to approximately 44.7 million acres of undisturbed public lands in 38 states and Puerto Rico, excluding 9.3 million acres in Idaho and 4.2 million acres in Colorado, which are under state-specific roadless rules.

California has the third-largest inventory of roadless areas in the United States, with 4.4 million acres listed in its National Wilderness Preservation System. Northwestern California’s roadless areas are depicted in the map below.

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What does this federal action mean for roadless areas in our neck of the woods? 

Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), told the Outpost that rescinding the Roadless Rule would remove immediate environmental protections for hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness areas in the Six Rivers, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath National Forests.

“Should the Forest Service want to try to log, there are going to be fewer protections available for those forests,” Wheeler said. “The Trump administration has imposed various mandates, one of which is increasing timber production from federal lands, and the Forest Service has set itself a goal of increasing production by 25 percent by the close of this term. I think one way to do that — if we’re thinking about timber in terms of board feet, which is often how the Forest Service does it — is to get bigger trees. … There is a potential that [the Forest Service would] try to log older forests.”

There is no guarantee that that will happen, Wheeler said, but if the rule is rescinded, the “most significant protection for these areas will be gone.”

“What that means for a group like EPIC is we will continue to fight projects using other tools, such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy ACT (NEPA),” he said, adding that the Roadless Rule has been litigated numerous times over the last 25 years. “When this does pass, it’s assuredly going to be the subject of litigation, and we are going to fight over roadless areas again, as we fought over roadless areas for decades.”

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz claims the conservation policy has “limited wildfire suppression and active forest management” in roadless areas. 

“The forests we know today are not the same as the forests of 2001,” Schultz said in a prepared statement. “They are dangerously overstocked and increasingly threatened by drought, mortality, insect-borne disease, and wildfire. It’s time to return land management decisions where they belong – with local Forest Service experts who best understand their forests and communities.”

The Six Rivers National Forest declined to comment on the recent federal action but directed our inquiry to the USDA office. An unnamed spokesperson provided the same quote from Chief Schultz and emphasized that increasing the number of roads in densely forested areas will “improve access for wildland firefighting when timing is critical, and lives are at risk.”

Wheeler and Ingalsbee, the wildfire ecologist we quoted earlier, argued that building new roads will drive traffic to remote wilderness areas, increasing the likelihood of human-caused wildfires.

“Roads are a vector for fire [because] most fires are caused by humans,” Wheeler said. “The Trump administration says [the rule] is hampering our ability to do fire suppression activities, but I would say that roadless areas are not the areas where we need to have aggressive fire suppression in the first place. … These areas are generally out in the backcountry where there aren’t structures, there aren’t human habitations, there isn’t the same kind of risk. There is a greater tolerance for fire in these areas, and natural wildfires are good for the landscape.”

It’s important to note that forest management practices are often reflective of the communities and culture surrounding the forest itself. The Six Rivers National Forest, for example, has often taken a more progressive approach to land management than other national forests, adopting prescribed burning practices that thin overgrown sites and benefit natural resources to prevent large-scale wildfires in the future.

The Klamath National Forest, on the other hand, is headquartered in Siskiyou County, under a different administrator.

“We might see differences in implementation, but one thing that might get in the way is pressure from the Forest Service to ‘get out the cut’ and increase their board footage,” Wheeler said. “If you’re a forest supervisor … and your job depends on hitting your timber targets in a conservative administration with pressure coming from D.C., that’s going to be important. I do think agency culture … means a lot, but these are folks that also get orders from above and they have to implement them to the best of their ability.”

Today, the USDA opened a 21-day public comment period to allow people to share their two cents as the federal government prepares to revoke the Roadless Rule. Written comments must be submitted to the USDA by Friday, Sept. 19. 

You can submit comments online at this link or via snail mail to: Director Econsystem Management Coordination, 201 14th Street SW, Mailstop 1108, Washington, DC 20250-1124.