Why outdoors groups don’t like a Forest Service proposal to end the roadless rule

The U.S. Forest Service wants to get rid of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

The 2001 rule prohibits building roads on millions of acres of national forest land nationwide, among other provisions. The Feds argue eliminating it will help treat forests to prevent wildfire.

Many environmentalists and outdoors groups oppose the Forest Service proposal. A report from the Center for Biological Diversity says getting rid of the rule will move 400 endangered species closer to extinction, among other findings.

Jamie Ervin is the policy director with Outdoor Alliance, which represents climbers, backcountry skiers, runners, mountain bikers and others. He joined The Show to talk more about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Jamie, give me your elevator pitch for why you don’t like the idea of doing away with the roadless rule.

JAMIE ERVIN: Sure. Well, just to to start, and for folks who aren’t familiar, the roadless rule is this policy that’s been in place since 2001 at the Forest Service. So this protects what’s called Inventoried Roadless Areas, and these are some of the last undeveloped places on our national forest.

So that law’s been in place since 2001, and it protects in total about 58.8 million acres of national forest land, and these include some of the best places to go do all types of outdoor recreation activities on national forest.

If you are the type of person that likes to get outside and go hiking, you’ll know that oftentimes the entire objective is to get away from the road and get to a scenic, natural, undeveloped place. And so these are places that recreationists, whether whether we know we’re in an inventoried roadless area or not — usually you don’t, there’s no sign or anything — these are places that we gravitate to because they are the very scenic, very beautiful, great to enjoy parts of our national forest.

Like lifting the rule doesn’t necessarily mean that these areas are developed on day one, but it does put us in a place where the Forest Service can now entertain proposals to develop these places, and we lose this certainty that that recreation experience and all the conservation values — clean water, healthy forest, wildlife, all that stuff — we lose the assurance that those things are are protected for the future.

MARK BRODIE: So, one of the reasons that the USDA is saying they want to change this is to help deal with wildfires in national forests and make sure that fire that is burning in areas where maybe we would prefer it not burning can be accessed and preserve the forests for for future generations. Is that an argument that you buy into?

JAMIE ERVIN: It’s not an argument that we buy into in terms of justifying a need to rescind the entire roadless rule. So what they proposed is to rescind the rule in all states where it exists except for Colorado and Idaho. Both of those states have their own roadless rules, so this rescission would affect 45 million acres, tons of outdoor recreation opportunities.

But, um on your question about fire, so it’s a little more complicated than the Forest Service has made it seem. I think like they’ve put this press release out, this announcement out in the middle of a very intense fire season. A lot of people are breathing smoke, a lot of people have been threatened by fire, are threatened by wildfires. It’s a very serious issue, um and the relationship between roadless areas and fire is complex.

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But having said that, so the science itself, wildfire science does not bear out that the roadless rule is this big impediment to effective fire management. We know that within and outside of roadless areas, wildfire extent is about the same, or the rate of wildfire is about the same. There’s not been documented a significant increase in the severity of wildfires in roadless areas versus roaded areas.

And actually, on top of that, we know that most wildfires start near roads. So, the idea that we’re going to build roads into these currently undeveloped areas raises the possibility that we’re going to see new ignitions of wildfires in times when conditions are extreme and fires are difficult to suppress. So, that’s one side of our thinking.

That said, where it becomes a little complex is that roads are pretty important infrastructure for fire suppression, and they can be important infrastructure for doing things like hazardous fuel projects that mitigate the risk of future wildfires.

Think about roadless areas: They’re unroaded, they’re remote, they’re far from communities. These are largely places where um if you were going to target a fuel reduction project or some kind of wildfire mitigation project that was intended to protect a community from fire, these are not the first places that you would look, right?

To the extent that roadless areas exist near communities, Outdoor Alliance, many of our partners in the conservation and recreation communities, wildfire scientists all submitted comments on this about a year ago and engaged with the Forest Service and offered our full support in designing: Is there some targeted, different regulation you could have that protects these remote areas and allows for the types of activities that might help protect communities in the event of wildfire?

The Forest Service has not considered that. They’ve moved ahead with this full rescission of the roadless rule, and that’s where we’re at.

One of the great things about the roadless rule, in terms of fire and in terms of everything else, it’s very flexible in the way that it’s worded, right? The basic prohibition is that you can’t build new roads and you can’t cut timber, but there’s exceptions to both of those things to deal with things like wildfire.

MARK BRODIE: So, am I hearing you correctly that you don’t necessarily oppose building roads in some places where there is some utility or a need to, or they’re near a particular community that needs protection from wildfire? You just don’t like the idea of the rule being taken away for everywhere. Is that a fair assessment of where you’re at?

JAMIE ERVIN: Yeah, that’s mostly fair. I think a way of thinking about it is like, if there are places where science shows or the wildland fire leadership shows that a road would help to suppress wildfires near a community or help to complete some sort of fuel treatment or other wildfire mitigation type project that has also been shown by data needs to happen, yes, we would be very open to targeted changes to the roadless rule that would accomplish those objectives.

But the onus is on the Forest Service to show that, and they’ve not done that here.

MARK BRODIE: Does this become maybe more of a complicated issue in a place like Arizona where what’s called the wildland-urban interface, where, you know, people are living closer and closer and into forests, like that line is blurring somewhat where people are now living closer to areas that are more prone to wildfires?

JAMIE ERVIN: Yes, absolutely. And that wildland-urban interface area would be the primary place that I’m talking about. If you were going to make changes to the roadless rule or any type of federal regulation to protect communities, that’s the first place you want to look is near where there are people.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that all of this points to changes or a rethinking in some way of the way that we deal with wildfire in this country, be it suppression or fighting or letting fires burn, that kind of thing?

JAMIE ERVIN: Somewhat. I want to push back on the roadless rule being primarily a wildfire policy a little bit. If you read the USDA’s announcement, I mean, yes, it talks a lot about wildfire up top, but then when you get a little lower down into what they’re saying, like it’s, you know, rescinding the roadless rule supports this list of executive orders, and they list off pretty quickly the uh executive order about increase about increasing timber production, the energy dominance executive order about doing more energy extraction on public lands, the energy from Alaska executive order.

All of those things, we feel are probably more their primary objective here is how do we increase like commercial uses of the of public lands. But, at the same time, I mean, this is a pretty serious wildfire season. It follows a number of pretty bad wildfire years in Arizona and throughout the West, and there are a lot of different things outside of the roadless rule that are also that are going on that people are certainly rethinking how we address fire.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Jamie Ervin, policy director with Outdoor Alliance. Jamie, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

JAMIE ERVIN: Thank you. Have a good one.