Over the last year and a half, the Trump administration and its congressional allies have taken aim at a significant amount of the infrastructure protecting the country’s public lands—but a recent proposal from the US Department of Agriculture stands out for the threat it poses.
“It’s all very concerning,” Sami Godlove, Central Oregon Field Coordinator at Oregon Wild, said. “This Roadless Rule repeal is, at least for us in Oregon, really one of the most concerning things we’ve been seeing.”
The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, commonly known as the Roadless Rule is relatively simple in its design: It prohibits the construction of new roads through some 45 million acres of national forests and also prohibits logging on much of that land.
Of those 45 million acres, which are managed by the US Forest Service, roughly two million are in Oregon. They include some of the state’s best-known and loved public lands, including areas around Mt. Hood, the Oregon Dunes, areas of the Columbia River Gorge, 10 percent of the state’s portion of the Pacific Crest Trail, and more.
When the Roadless Rule was enacted a quarter-century ago under the auspices of the Clinton administration, it served multiple purposes: it was, first and foremost in the minds of many Americans, a tool to preserve some of the oldest, wildest forest land in the country for exploitation by industry.
There were also practical concerns at play: the USDA and the US Forest Service had a substantial backlog of road maintenance that they lacked the funding necessary to catch up with.
According to Kai McMurtry, senior communicators coordinator for the Oregon chapter of the Sierra Club, the rule has worked exactly as intended.
“The roadless rule has been one of the most successful conservation rules of this century,” he said.
But the Trump administration, which initiated the process of rescinding the rule in June of last year, has framed its commitment to rescission as a matter of public safety—arguing the rule has made it more difficult to prevent forest 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“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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,” US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said last month. “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.”
But there is little agreement about the science the administration is employing. In fact, some activists and scientists have insisted that rescinding the rule could instead increase fire risks.
“The more roads you build in the forest, the more likely wildfire emissions [are],” Godlove said. “There have been some studies that have shown that wildfire emissions are four times more likely to occur near a road than in a roadless area. That’s just because most wildfires are human-caused, and most humans are near the roads.”
There is no widely circulated scientific support for the idea that increasing logging helps to prevent forest fires; in fact, even disregarding the danger of introducing more human activity into forests, recent research suggests that forests subjected to logging activity are at an increased fire risk.
There are other reasons to doubt the Trump administration’s total dedication to fire prevention.
Last year, when she announced her agency’s intention to repeal the Roadless Rule at a press conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Rollins argued that, in addition to fire management, ending the rule would also get more “logs on trucks” and aid “timber production.”
Boosting timber production has been a consistent emphasis of the Trump administration’s environmental policies, including its decision to repeal the public lands rule and its reported support of an ultimately unsuccessful Congressional proposal to sell off public lands.
“They’re going after every avenue they can to increase logging, to increase oil and gas drilling, to increase mining across public lands—to put public lands in the control of corporate interests,” Godlove said.
McMurtry noted that the Trump administration has also slashed jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency and shuttered research laboratories studying wildfire risks.
“This administration is essentially gutting the agency and the career professionals who would be best positioned to actually do something about how fire is moving, especially in the West, in this era of climate change,” he said.
Repealing the rule and opening protected forests up to logging, meanwhile, might have other serious effects on the health of Oregonians and the animals and plant species whose habitats lie in roadless areas.
“In Oregon, over a million people rely on these protected forests for clean drinking water,” Godlove said. “The Trump administration, in their own draft environmental impact statement… even states that this would significantly impair and degrade drinking water services for millions of Americans.”
Residents of Bend, for instance, get their drinking water from a watershed in the Tumalo Mountain Roadless Area. Residents of Eugene, Ashland, and LaGrande get their drinking water from areas protected from contamination by the Roadless Rule as well.
Meanwhile, now as then, the Forest Service cannot adequately maintain the 380,000 miles of roads they are responsible for, blaming a combination of insufficient resources, aging infrastructure, and increased public use for the state of the road system.
According to a Forest Service estimate, the cost of deferred maintenance on existing roads was $8.6 billion as of the 2023 fiscal year.
“We don’t have the budget for it, there’s a huge maintenance backlog, and a lot of these areas are areas that are higher elevation, or in canyons that would be really expensive to build roads into,” Jeremy Austin, the Wild Lands & Water Program Director at Central Oregon LandWatch, said of the prospect of road expansion. “So I think there is a big question on whether it’s even economically feasible to add to our road network.”
But that is not stopping the Trump administration. Neither, to this point, has been a deluge of public comments opposing the rescission. McMurtry said he expects the Forest Service to ultimately rescind the full rule, even though it has proposed a compromise version of the repeal that would leave some 13 million acres of roadless area intact.
With the rule hanging in the balance, a number of House Democrats have signed onto a Congressional effort to protect Roadless areas. The Roadless Area Conservation Act, which is sponsored by Rep. Andrea Salinas of Oregon, would permanently codify into law the inventoried roadless area currently protected by the rule.
That bill is highly unlikely to become law while Trump is president. If a Democrat retakes the White House in two years, however, the political landscape for environmental legislation could change.
In the meantime, it may be possible for Oregon to take action at the state level. Colorado and Idaho both passed state-level Roadless Rules to cover the areas protected under the federal rule, which could offer those lands protection even if the federal rule is rescinded.
Oregon could, theoretically, do something similar. McMurtry said he’s not aware at this point of any move in that direction, but that the land and the people who value it need help from their lawmakers.
“The long-term solution is we need legislative protection, and to build the support for that legislative protection, we need to demonstrate public commitment and engagement now,” he said.
