Proposed Roadless Rule rescission could hurt rural economies

The Roadless Rule applies to around 59 million acres of public land across the country, concentrated in the Western U.S. and Alaska, but also including public land in New England and Appalachia. Colorado and Idaho have their own state protections in place, so any federal change would not affect the land in those states. 

As part of the Draft EIS, the USDA created a map of inventoried roadless areas across the United States. Light green areas are National Forest System Lands; dark green areas are inventoried roadless areas.

While this rescission has been a goal of the Trump administration since 2025, the filing of the new proposed rule started a 30-day public comment period on Aug. 18, 2026. In a USDA press release, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that the reason for the rescission is to better manage the forests for wildfire risk and bring control back to local management.  

But opponents of the rescission say that wildfires are more likely to break out near roads, and local management doesn’t have the capacity to manage the roads that already exist or create policy to protect delicate ecosystems and watersheds that the Roadless Rule currently protects. 

Despite its name, the Roadless Rule doesn’t just protect land that doesn’t have any roads at all. 

In fact, there are plenty of primitive roads in what is known as inventoried roadless areas, or the land that is protected by the Roadless Rule. What the Roadless Rule does is prevent any additional development, road building, or logging in those areas. Inventoried roadless areas are still accessible for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and many more outdoor activities. 

The Roadless Rule has received overwhelming bipartisan support and received over 1.6 million public comments during the original 2001 public comment period, more than any other rule in history.

Fire Danger in Washington

In the Methow Valley in north-central Washington state, wildfires have become the norm. The valley, nestled into the eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains, has been touched by some of the largest fires in Washington’s history. 

And if it’s not fire, it’s smoke. “Our valley’s been spared the worst of the big fires this year, but they’re all around us, and so we’ve been smoked in for most of the summer,” said Lorah Super, program director for Methow Valley Citizens Council. 

That’s a big issue for a community whose economy depends on summer tourism from the Seattle area being able to cross the North Cascades Highway, which closes during the winter. “Nobody’s trying to come here because it’s too smoky,” Super said. 

But Super doesn’t see more roads as the answer. In fact, she said that more roads would add to the wildfire risk. “If the fire is caused by humans, it was caused adjacent to a road, and it spreads from there,” she said. Alexandra Syphard, director of science for the Global Wildfire Collective, agreed, saying that “the most common place for fire ignitions by humans to occur is along roads.”

A number of research papers also support their claims. A 2026 Headwaters Economics study showed that between 1992 and 2024, 77% of wildfires were ignited by humans. Another recent study found that fires were more likely to ignite near roads; however, the authors also acknowledged that roads are a critical firefighting tool, providing firebreaks, a location to stage fire crews, and take other preventative measures. 

One of the biggest arguments in the draft environmental impact statement for rescinding the Roadless Rule is to better access land at risk of fire to manage the forests through fuel treatments before fires and as access points for firefighters during fires. 

But Syphard said that the claims about fire reduction through road building “are not supported by any evidence.” 

Syphard said that in addition to fires being caused near roads, more road-building activity is a disturbance to the landscape and can bring in invasive species that are “often more flammable than the native vegetation.” 

And in the Methow Valley, “They’re not maintaining the roads that they have,” Super said about the Forest Service. This lack of maintenance causes dirt and gravel roads to erode and add excess sediment to local streams that support endangered salmon, she said. Super’s concern about road maintenance is real — the Forest Service road maintenance backlog for the whole agency was over $8.6 billion in 2023.

But Super added that the Methow Valley is actively involved in forest management and planning for wildfires. The community has completed a community wildfire protection plan that shows which areas are most vulnerable to fire, and the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest has also done a landscape-level assessment to plan forest management that includes thinning in inventoried roadless areas, said Super. 

“We don’t need to rescind the Roadless Rule in this area in order to be able to properly manage our forests,” she said. “We’re already invested in managing our forests, and we don’t need additional roads.”

Mining in New Mexico

In New Mexico, in the Gila National Forest, the Roadless Rule protects more than 700,000 acres of public land from development. While the rule does not inhibit mining, it does “make your job a lot more difficult if you’re a mining company,” said Luke Koenig, a Silver City, New Mexico, resident who works for New Mexico Wild, a statewide environmental advocacy group. 

Silver City is a mining town. There have been copper mines in the area since the mid-1800s. But the community, even those who work in mining, is opposed to proposed new mines that overlap with inventoried roadless areas in the Gila National Forest. 

Koenig said that the community cares about “preserving its heritage,” which includes mining but also being able to recreate in the national forest. “The new mining threats would directly conflict with that heritage,” said Koenig. 

Koenig sees extractive industries as a big reason driving the rescission of the Roadless Rule. Logging and mining companies are “interested in taking away the protections that are preventing them from developing public lands for extractive purposes,” he said.

Logging in Montana and Alaska

Bruce Vincent is a third-generation logger from northwest Montana. For the past couple of years, he’s been working on a project focused on managing forests for grizzly bear habitat adjacent to an inventoried roadless area in the Kootenai National Forest near Libby, Montana. 

“We’re using it as a control area,” Vincent said about the roadless area, to see if bears are more likely to visit their plot of forest, which has now been logged intentionally to create areas where bear food, like salmonberries and thimbleberries, are more likely to grow. 

But for Vincent, the places that don’t have roads in the Kootenai National Forest “were not roaded for a reason.” If a road hadn’t been built by the early 2000s, he said, it was because there was no commercial value in the area, at least not enough to justify building infrastructure. 

As far as forest fires, Vincent said they have enough roads in the areas that are most likely to produce destructive wildfires — the wildland-urban interface. “We can achieve some fireshed protections using the existing roaded area,” he said. 

In Alaska, in the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the U.S., Nathan Newcomer, with the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, said that the logging industry “is gone,” after the pulp mills went out of business in the 1990s. Now, he said, Southeast Alaska relies on tourism. 

A 2020 Taxpayers for Common Sense report found that the Forest Service had lost $1.7 billion since 1980 on timber sales in the Tongass National Forest. “Your and my taxpayer dollars have been subsidizing the logging industry to clear-cut the Tongass National Forest,” Newcomer said. 

“This idea that we’re going to bring back a decades bygone era of clear-cut logging to revitalize the rural economy of Southeast Alaska again is a false narrative,” Newcomer said, adding that he’s “not opposed to logging,” for restoration and cultural purposes. 

“The Tongass is the northern lung of the planet,” said Mike Jones, president of the organized Village of Kasaan, a Haida Alaska Native tribe headquartered on Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska. The island’s old-growth forests have all been logged, Jones said, but there’s still lots of forest that needs to be protected. 

“It really boils down to the health of our people. Healthy salmon runs and healthy forests go hand in hand, and so much of our old growth has been logged. We have to do everything we can to protect it,” Jones said. 

Water and Recreation in Appalachia

While most of the acreage of inventoried roadless areas exists in the western U.S. and Alaska, there are more than 700,000 acres of public land that would be affected by the rescission of the Roadless Rule across the southeast. Kristin Gendzier grew up in rural West Virginia and now works as an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC). 

“It would be a huge error to say [that] because most of the acres are in Alaska and out west, it’s not that big a deal here in Appalachia,” Gendzier said about the potential Roadless Rule rescission.  

In parts of Appalachia, drinking water comes from land protected by the Roadless Rule. In both Georgia and North Carolina, more than 1 million people receive their public water supply from Roadless Rule-protected land, a number only met by Colorado, Arizona, and California out west.

“We’ve got rural communities who are relying on drinking water that comes right out of these roadless areas,” said Gendzier, who now lives in Virginia, the state with the largest amount of inventoried roadless areas east of the Mississippi.  

Gendzier pointed to a recent Forest Service report that showed that forested areas in the south are important to keep water treatment costs down. If the Roadless Rule is rescinded, “Small communities are most vulnerable to land use changes affecting their water quality,” she said.  

She added that many Appalachian communities are outdoor recreation-based economies, far more than logging or mining at this point. In Virginia, outdoor recreation brought in more than $14 billion in 2024. But unlike in the western U.S., much of the forested land in the eastern U.S. is privately owned, which Gendzier said means that the public land needs to be protected that much more. It doesn’t mean she’s anti-logging. “It’s not either/or,” she said.  

The Southern Environmental Law Center is currently preparing public comments to submit for the draft environmental impact statement for the Roadless Rule rescission, and Gendzier said they’ll “be prepared to take it to court if that’s what makes sense.”

Outreach for Public Comment

All of the people across the country who were interviewed for this story echoed the sentiment that the 30-day public comment period with no public hearings was unacceptable. “It’s a slap in the face and insulting to the democratic process,” said Luke Koenig with New Mexico Wild about the lack of public input. 

For the original Roadless Rule, enacted in 2001, over 600 public meetings were held across the county and a 120-day public comment period.  On Aug. 26, groups including Earthjustice requested an extended public comment period. 

To fill in the lack of federally hosted public meetings, groups like Methow Valley Citizens Council, Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, and New Mexico Wild are holding meetings to collect public comments. Koenig and Lorah Super, in the Methow Valley, have both been getting the word out however they can in their local areas, from radio ads to flyers around town to talking to elected officials. 

“We’re trying to make sure that no stone is left unturned, to make sure that people are aware of this and have an opportunity to come out and submit a comment,” said Koenig. 

The public comment period for the proposed rescission of the Roadless Rule and the draft EIS closed on Sept. 21.

This story was produced by The Daily Yonder and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.