The U.S. Forest Service is proposing a rule to rescind in its entirety the national 2001 Roadless Area Conversation Rule.

Opposition to Tuesday's move was immediate.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the following when the move was made: “Our forests can’t afford another decade of inaction. Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions – overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease – turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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. It’s time to turn the page on the failed roadless rule and return our forests to health and productivity.”

A press release accompanying the news said that the 2001 Roadless Rule restricted road construction and limited the Forest Service’s ability to carry out critical active management work within inventoried roadless areas for 25 years.

Today, that includes more than 44 million acres of the 193-million-acre National Forest System. In Florida areas in the Apalachicola National Forest, Osceola National Forest and the Ocala National Forest are in the Roadless Rule zones.

The rescission is intended to prioritize local agency decision-making over regulatory rules that are the same across the country, regardless of specific land management issues and needs.

But opponents of the move said the proposal will lead to scrapping the country’s most significant tool for protecting national forests. It would open nearly 45 million acres of wild, unfragmented forest across 37 states to road construction, logging and other development.

“Trump is pushing for the largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history and against what Americans want,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These are some of the last truly wild forests left in the country, places that shelter endangered wildlife and protect our drinking water. Once you start bulldozing roads for commercial logging and industrial development, there’s no getting them back. Americans love their public lands and want them protected. We’re going to fight like hell to safeguard these wild places for future generations.”

Today’s announcement from the U.S. Agriculture Department will be followed by Wednesday’s release of the draft environmental analysis, giving the public until Sept. 21 to comment on the proposed Roadless Rule recission.

The Center for Biological Diversity listed several reasons why the Roadless Rule is needed:

• Forests free of roads and logging provide crucial and connected habitat for animals and plants, protecting them from noise, pollution and other human-caused harms.
  
• The forests at risk — from Oregon to North Carolina — are home to scores of threatened and endangered species, including American wolverines, Canada lynx, grizzly bears and northern spotted owls. Rescinding the Roadless Rule would not only push these species closer to extinction but threaten countless others, including Alexander Archipelago wolves and Queen Charlotte goshawks.
  
• More than 370,000 miles of roads already fragment U.S. national forests, with a maintenance backlog in the billions of dollars. Most wildfires are human caused and occur near roads, with a decades-long, nationwide study finding human-caused wildfires are four times more likely in areas with roads than in roadless forests.
  
• National forests are the headwaters of many of the country’s major rivers and the largest source of municipal water supplies, serving more than 60 million people in 33 states. The Roadless Rule protects rivers and streams from roads, a major source of water pollution because of erosion and sediment.

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