USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins recently announced the effort to rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Not surprising, considering recent executive orders and proposed federal legislation to ramp up logging and clear-cutting on our national forests.
With logging comes road building, hence plans to peel back the rule. When it passed 20 years ago, the rule had garnered over a million comments from the public and was the most commented-on rule ever. The public spoke unequivocally that the close to 60 million acres of roadless wildlands left on our national forests should remain that way. Safe to say if elk, grizzly bears, and other wildlife that depend on the habitat security of these landscapes could have participated in the rule making, they would have agreed.
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz supports efforts to claw back the rule, but don’t let his rhetoric fool you. He claims that more road building and logging will “build a stronger, safer future for our forests and communities.” To the contrary, research indicates that more road building and logging exasperates the drying out of our forests, and with a warming climate and more extreme weather events, this can produce more wildfires, not less.
The agency currently manages over 370,000 miles of roads. This is eught times the amount of our Federal Interstate Highway System. And yet the Forest Service wants to keep building more roads at the detriment to our forests, watersheds, and taxpayers. The chief should keep his chainsaws, bulldozers, and road graders out of our remaining roadless wildlands.
Brett Haverstick
Missoula