Action Alert! Speak up in support of the Roadless Rule!

Under direction from the Trump Administration, the Forest Service has announced plans to repeal the Roadless Rule on National Forests across the US. 

The proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule jeopardizes nearly 58 million acres of undeveloped backcountry forests. For over two decades, the Roadless Rule has been essential for protecting mature and old forests, biodiversity, clean drinking water, and carbon storage. 

Speak up now! Urge the Forest Service to abandon misguided efforts to rescind the Roadless Rule. 

You can submit comments HERE on the Forest Service’s online portal. The deadline to submit comments is September 19th at 8:59pm PST. Personalized comments are most effective, but even brief or general comments are helpful. 

We are also asking the public to contact their elected representatives and ask them to oppose the Forest Service’s proposed rollback of the Roadless Rule. You can find your elected representatives here. 

Wiping out Roadless Rule protections would devastate ecosystems and imperiled species— especially those that are already struggling to survive in the face of climate change and habitat loss. Roadless areas provide unfragmented habitat for many imperiled species across the country such as California condors, grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, native salmon and trout, migratory songbirds, and more. 

Rescinding the Roadless Rule would put clean drinking water at risk for millions of people in downstream communities. National Forests provide clean drinking water to millions of people, and Roadless areas are strongholds for the cleanest, coldest water. 

• 180 million people in over 68,000 communities rely on drinking water filtered by forests and grasslands on National Forests.
• The clean, cold water originating in National Forests supports municipal water supplies for over 60 million people in 3,400 communities in the US. 
• 90% of people in the west are served by public drinking water systems that rely on water from National Forests and grasslands. 
• The Forest Service itself notes that “a century of research has demonstrated unequivocally that forested lands provide the cleanest and most stable water supply compared to other land types”. 
• Logging and roads are well-documented to have negative effects on water quality, while Roadless and Wilderness areas consistently provide clean, cold water and support strongholds of sensitive aquatic species. (Citations and more info can be found here).

Roads already dominate the landscape, with very few unfragmented forests remaining. 

• Inventoried Roadless Areas cover only 3% of the land base in the continental United States. Roads are ubiquitous on National Forests, which encompass over 386,000 miles of roads– enough to circle the globe over 15 times. (Congressional Research Report on Inventories Roadless Areas, 2020)
• The Forest Service has acknowledged that the size of the forest road system, coupled with budgetary constraints, prevented the agency from managing the road system to required safety and environmental standards. There are also billions of dollars in deferred maintenance and reconstruction on National Forest roads. (Congressional Research Report on Inventories Roadless Areas, 2020)
• Across Oregon and Washington, the USFS manages approximately 90,000 miles of roads. The agency notes that it is “a challenge to maintain all roads to proper safety and environmental standards due to increased use, aging infrastructure, and decreasing budgets.
• Additional citations and information can be found on BMBP’s webpage Roads are a Widespread Threat to Streams and Water Quality. 

Increased logging and roads in Roadless Areas will not keep communities safe. 

• Most fires are started by human activity. Recent research found that human-started wildfires account for 84% of all wildfires. Further, these human-started fires “tripled the length of the fire season, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lighting fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned”. 
• Increasing road access– which is an essential part of logging– will further put large swaths of forests at risk for the most common fire ignitions– human-caused fire starts. 
• Instead, increased logging and roads may make forests more vulnerable to fire by drying out forests and increasing wind penetration. 
• The Forest Service promotes logging as “restoration” and “thinning”. However, the logging we are finding in our field surveys in eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington all too often includes clearcuts and logging of mature and old forests. You can see more info about our post-logging field surveys here and here. 
• Check out our webpage Logging is a False Solution to Wildfire and Community Safety.

The Roadless Rule has been instrumental in curbing or stopping many thousands of acres of logging and protecting large blocks of intact habitat on National Forests. The rollback re-opens these forests to logging and other industrial development as the Trump administration calls for dramatic increases in logging and oil and gas drilling on federal public lands.

The Forest Service is fast-tracking the process. The agency is rushing the proposal through on an abbreviated timeline, which limits public participation. When the Roadless Rule was enacted, over 1.6 million people submitted comments in favor of these protections. The Forest Service is ignoring the will of the public as well as decades of bipartisan support for Roadless protections.

We are asking that the Roadless Rule be strengthened, not eliminated. We need stronger protections for intact forests, not more loopholes for logging. 

Additional resources:

https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/roadless-rule-rollback-comment-period/

https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2025/08/2m-acres-of-oregons-wilderness-could-lose-protection-if-trump-rescinds-roadless-rule.html?outputType=amp

https://www.vaildaily.com/news/former-supervisor-of-most-visited-national-forest-shares-concerns-about-deliberate-dismantling-of-public-lands/

https://www.hcn.org/articles/how-to-comment-on-the-planned-roadless-rule-rollback/

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/trump-administration-moves-to-kill-national-forest-roadless-rule-2025-08-27/

https://www.backcountryhunters.org/usda_rescinds_near_quarter_century_old_protections_for_58_5_million_acres_of_national_forest_lands

https://www.tu.org/press-releases/usda-to-roll-back-roadless-protections-for-58-5-million-acres-of-public-land/