Healthy, intact landscapes – home to the natural systems that produce our clean water, clean air, and livable climate – provide humanity’s life support system. Only 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, and we cannot afford to abuse what little remains. It’s common-sense ecology many of us understood in fifth grade: If we don’t treat Mother Earth with respect, she will stop providing and we will suffer. And now, of course, the Trump administration wants to trash one of our best tools for protecting relatively unspoiled public lands, replacing protections with the heavy machinery of extraction.
Following one of the largest efforts in American history to engage the public, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a rule in 2001 to limit road building and logging on some of the country’s wildest and most remote national forest lands with its wildly popular Roadless Rule. More than 95% of the 2.5 million public comments supported the move. That overwhelming public support continues today, with a 2019 Pew poll showing only 16% oppose the rule.
Why is road building bad for ecosystems? Because roads fragment habitat, disrupting wildlife and watersheds; increase pollution; facilitate damaging extractive industries; and worsen the spread of invasive species. In this way, the Roadless Rule protects not just Montana’s roadless areas, but 58.5 million acres of our national forests nationwide. That’s habitat for 1,600 at-risk species. That’s clean drinking water for 60 million Americans. That’s trees, still standing today, that grew hundreds of years before Lewis and Clark.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule would open the door not only for loggers to clearcut swaths of Montana’s national forests, but also for the mining and fossil fuel industries to blast through 6.4 million acres of cherished public landscapes in our state. There are plenty of lands available to these industries without threatening Montana’s critically important roadless areas, the wildlife within, and the state’s $3.4 billion (in 2023) recreation economy. Hikers, backpackers, mountain bikers, paddlers, wildlife watchers, hunters, fishing enthusiasts, backcountry equestrians: The Roadless Rule probably protects places special to you in Montana. In the Flathead. The Gallatin. The Helena. The Kootenai. The Lewis and Clark. The Beaverhead Deerlodge. The Lolo. The Bitterroot. A Roadless Rule rescission would place every national forest in the state at risk.
U.S. Department of Agriculture Sec. Rollins claims rescinding the Roadless Rule will help combat devastating wildfires, presumably due to all these prospective new roads. She is wrong. First, 84% of wildfires are started by humans, and roads will facilitate more human movement, deeper into these areas. While more roads may facilitate firefighting, they also facilitate more fires started by people. Second, the Roadless Rule does not prohibit all fuels treatment and in fact, as of 2020, more fuels management activities had already occurred per square kilometer in roadless areas than in roaded ones. Third, roads create pathways for invasive plant species that pose a long-term threat to forest health and may well exacerbate forest fires. Fourth, fuel treatments and fire prevention measures should focus on areas in the wildlands urban interface, where people and human infrastructure are most likely to be impacted. Moreover, studies show forest roadless areas that have experienced multiple fires, are recovering and are less likely to experience stand-replacing fires. These remote areas will be better served by allowing adaptation back to a more natural fire regime. Besides, the national forest system already has 368,102 miles of roads and a $10.8 billion backlog for road maintenance. With additional budget cuts, the Forest Service cannot afford to build and maintain even more roads.
Our roadless areas in our national forests are not disposable. Many are mature or old-growth forests, and thus irreplaceable – a non-renewable resource, protecting plant and animal diversity, clean drinking water, clean air, cultural sites, and more. Logging, mining, and drilling for fossil fuels in these areas is an assault on our life support system. The only scant benefits of rescinding the Roadless Rule’s smart public lands policies – to private industries’ bottom lines – are overwhelmingly outweighed by the costs to our essential national forests and future generations’ quality of life. This move by the Trump administration is just as bad as selling public lands to the highest bidder. Scale your outrage accordingly.
Sarah McMillan is a public interest environmental attorney with decades of experience and directs the Western Environmental Law Center’s Wildlands and Wildlife Program.