Trump Administration Moves to Axe Protection for Undeveloped National Forests

The Trump administration moved Tuesday to end 25 years of restrictions that protected the country’s wildest and largest undisturbed forests from construction and logging.

The Agriculture Department announced that it plans to rescind what’s known as the “Roadless Rule,” which prohibits building new roads through the nation’s remaining untouched forests.

President Bill Clinton put the Roadless Rule in place in 2001 after two problems became untenable for the U.S. Forest Service. Most pressing at the time, the agency was failing to maintain the roads that already existed, putting taxpayers on the hook for an increasingly large maintenance backlog bill.

Additionally, new timber and logging projects in untouched areas of national forests were increasingly unpopular with public lands advocates, hunters and conservationists, who warned that many of the country’s iconic ecosystems could fall apart with further development.

The Roadless Rule now protects about 45 million acres of forests, or about one-third of all national forest land managed by the Forest Service.

If the rescission is finalized, it will be easier for the timber industry to push to develop new logging projects in currently untouchable areas that contain millions of acres of valuable, old-growth trees.

USDA said rescinding the Roadless Rule would make it easier for wildland firefighters to build roads to fight fires.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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. Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement announcing the rescission.

The federal government already grants some exceptions to the Roadless Rule’s prohibition specifically for fire mitigation near areas where people live.

Many firefighting experts argue that a full rescission of the rule for firefighting reasons does not make sense, because the construction of new roads can lead to an increase in human-caused wildfires. Wilderness areas have the lowest number of wildfire ignitions compared to other types of forested areas, a group of wildland fire experts wrote in a letter to Rollins last year.