Trump to Rescind Roadless Rule, Ending Protections for 58 Million Acres Nationwide
USDA plan to rescind 2001 Forest Service policy on Inventoried Roadless Areas leaves Greater Yellowstone with more questions than answers
By Robert Chaney, Mountain Journal
Revoking “Roadless Rule” protection from 58 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land could leave the agency wandering without a map, according to forest policy observers.
The proposal announced Monday could open road construction and logging to about 30 percent of Forest Service land, including about 37% of Montana’s U.S. Forest Service acreage, 45% of Idaho’s and 35% of Wyoming’s. But it could also leave the Forest Service in a quagmire of interlocking policies and plans that have shaped everything from local economies to hunting and snowmobiling access.
“It’s not automatic that by lifting the Roadless Rule, all those lands go to meeting timber goals,” said Mary Erickson, recently retired supervisor of the Custer Gallatin National Forest. “A lot of roadless lands are roadless for a reason. They’re steep and rugged and don’t necessarily have high-value timber. Some may have timber or minerals, but in the Custer Gallatin that’s typically not the case. I remember this because I wrote a lot of it.”
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced Monday that she was rescinding the federal Roadless Rule during a meeting of the Western Governors Association in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Rollins said getting rid of it would allow for better management of wildfire risk, boost local timber economies and eliminate “overcomplicated, burdensome barriers that hamper American business and innovation.”
“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive Roadless Rule,” Rollins said in a June 23 press release. “This move opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests. It is abundantly clear that properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.”
The announcement glosses over at least three complicated issues, according to Erickson and others interviewed by Mountain Journal. First, over a quarter-century, the Roadless Rule has woven itself into forest management, endangered species listings, hunting and fishing seasons, and motorized recreation access. It has also spawned two state-specific roadless rules for Idaho and Colorado. “Rescinding” it will be no simple process.
Second, it tangles the fate of Alaska’s arctic rainforests with the far different circumstances of dozens of national forests in the Lower 48. At just under 15 million acres of inventoried roadless Forest Service land, Alaska has a quarter of the Roadless Rule’s entire purview. Idaho is second on the list with 9.3 million acres, followed by Montana at 6.4 million acres. Wyoming is seventh with 3.2 million acres.
But Alaska’s roadless debates have focused more on access to old-growth timber and tribal sovereignty, while Rocky Mountain state roadless arguments revolve around wildfire suppression, wildlife management and recreation access.
And third, the history of Inventoried Roadless Areas has both limited commercial interest and high deferred maintenance costs. Few places in the Lower 48 have seen development stalled due to a Forest Service IRA designation, Erickson said. Much of Trump’s recent executive order calling for a 25% increase in timber production could be handled by existing, accessible forest stocks. On the other hand, the Forest Service estimates it has $8.4 billion in deferred maintenance backlog for the roads it’s trying to maintain, at a time when both its budget and staffing face deep cuts.
Nevertheless, Republicans in Congress have supported the move. Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman told the Cowboy State Daily three days before Rollin’s announcement that the Roadless Rule was to blame for the state’s wildfire damage as well as reduced logging activity, and fixing it was among her top priorities. Montana Senator Steve Daines on Facebook called Rollins’ announcement a “huge win for Montana, forest management and wildfire mitigation.”
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz on Tuesday said in a statement the Roadless Rule had failed to reflect modern forest conditions, such as overstocked tree stands, increasing drought and insect impacts, and wildfire. Removing the rule would allow decision-making to revert to local Forest Service experts.
“For nearly 25 years, this rule has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action — prohibiting road construction which has limited wildfire suppression and timber harvesting on nearly 60 million acres,” Schultz said. “Including Wilderness designations, the acreage amounts to nearly half of our national forest and grasslands.”
Schultz said more than 8 million acres of inventoried roadless areas have burned in wildfires since 2001, adding “the rule has trapped them in a cycle of neglect and devastation.”
Records from the National Interagency Coordination Center, a division of the National Interagency Fire Center, show that since 2000, an annual average of 70,025 wildfires have burned about 7 million acres a year through 2023. The 2001 rule specifically allows road-building in IRAs for “reducing the likelihood of uncharacteristic wildfire.”
LONG-RUNNING PROBLEM
The Roadless Rule grew out of decades of controversy within the Forest Service and Congress following the Wilderness Act of 1964. Conservation and industry advocates sparred over how to designate the parts of the Forest Service’s 193 million public acres that hadn’t been already transformed by logging, mining and grazing. Some places with deep scenic or cultural value drew intense debate as potential wilderness. The resulting federal wilderness areas account for 36 million acres of Forest Service land.
In the 1970s, two Forest Service studies called Roadless Area Review and Analysis I and II attempted to categorize the remaining fuzzy spots on the maps. The results coalesced into Inventoried Roadless Areas, which were codified in the 2001 Roadless Rule.
The Federal Register notice offered three main justifications for the rule: Development of roadless lands would fragment landscapes and lose their ecological benefits, the Forest Service already couldn’t keep up with its existing road maintenance duties, and the legal fights over roadless area management were getting too costly and time consuming.
That set off its own series of courtroom battles. One of the biggest issues was whether a national rule could be specific enough to respond to local forest conditions. Idaho and Colorado succeeded in acquiring their own federal land roadless rules in 2005. Both those rules addressed topics not explicitly mentioned in the 2001 Rule, such as wildland fire, fish habitat, surface occupancy, and energy and mineral development. Idaho’s state rule specifically covers road construction for energy and mineral development, as well as its own rules for timber harvesting in IRAs.
But other states, including Montana and Wyoming, remain subject to the national policy. In 2018, Alaska and Utah submitted petitions to the Forest Service for their own roadless rules. The first Trump administration approved a rule for Alaska, but it was challenged in court and later revoked by the Biden administration.
Another major question was whether roadless inventories were essentially wilderness designations in disguise. A 2011 10th Circuit Court decision rejected that, observing that roadless areas allowed motorized access, commercial activity, mining, forest management and other activity prohibited in federal wilderness. Therefore, they were not “de facto wilderness,” the court ruled.
But they are popular places for public land users to hunt, fish, snowmobile, mountain bike, and otherwise recreate across the Rocky Mountains. They also tend to be more ecologically diverse and physically accessible than wilderness areas.
For public lands expert Martin Nie at the University of Montana, that shows the complexity of the Roadless Rule’s mission. And, as he put it, “just like you can’t Executive Order away heat, drought or wind, the President and Secretary cannot order away the Roadless Rule without following the rule of law and the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.
“Lots of things are connected here, and you can’t rescind the Roadless Rule without impacting all the forest plans that have been revised since its promulgation in 2001 with extensive public participation and local input,” Nie continued. “Nor can you avoid the connections to the [Endangered Species Act] and all the species that were viewed as protected by the [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] because of the security afforded by inventoried roadless areas, including grizzly bears and bull trout. Remove that protection and watch the game of Jenga come crashing down.”