The Road to Stewardship

In June, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins at the Western Governor’s Association meeting in New Mexico announced her intention to rescind a Clinton-era policy called the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. It's perhaps overshadowed by legislation like the Endangered Species Act, but the development of the U.S. Forest Service roadless rule is one of the most significant conservation achievements in American history, protecting over 58 million acres of the nation's forests.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, passed in 2001, emerged through the convergence of scientific knowledge, environmental advocacy, political dynamics, and the role of forests in clean water, wildlife habitat, and climate resiliency. The Rule was forged through the most extensive public participation process in federal rulemaking history—generating over 1.6 million public comments—that shifted forest management policy away from utilitarianism and towards ecosystem conservation that attempts to balance public land management, commodity use, biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, wildlife protection, and recreation. Simply stated, the rule prohibited road construction and timber harvest on protected national forests and grasslands.

The Trump Administration seeks to upend this dynamic, opening up areas for development and logging. A public comment period is currently open until Friday, September 19, and I would urge you to go leave a comment.

Some history may help. The roadless rule represents a century of forest policy evolution and one of America's most important conservation achievements.

From Utilitarianism to Stewardship

The nation's first chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, defined the early legacy of the Forest Service's philosophy. As Chief of the Forest Service in 1905, the agency emphasized "wise use" among its forests. This philosophy dominated the Forest Service, reaching an apex following World War II as commodity development drove the construction of 386,000 miles of roads to access timber resources that helped fuel America's post-war housing boom.

In the wake of this lumber bonanza, concerns about the conservation of natural resources began to grow in the 1950s and 1960s. In response, Congress passed the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 (MUSY) that formalized equal consideration for timber, rangeland, water, recreation, and wildlife. The law explicitly stated that "some land will be used for less than all of the resources," defining multiple uses as a combination of outdoor recreation, rangeland, timber harvesting, watersheds, and wildlife and fish protection that would best serve human needs. A seemingly modest provision, MUSY established precedent for protecting public lands based on ecological rather than solely economic needs. It also changed the Forest Service professionally as new specialists in soil science and wildlife biology helped make management decisions.

The Multiple Use Act would not be the only 1960 legislation that shifted the nation's priorities for its national forests. After nearly a decade of lobbying, drafting, and networking, Howard Zahniser and the Wilderness Society helped usher in passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 that, among other things, created the National Wilderness Preservation System that created an initial 9 million acres of wilderness land. The Wilderness Act formulated the legal concept of "untrammeled" lands, where humans are "a visitor who does not remain" and "shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness." The Act also authorized a systematic inventory of roadless areas that could become wilderness areas.

Road-building became an irreversible development: any place that contained roads, according to the new legal framework, disqualified it from being wilderness. As James Morton Turner notes, nearly half of the land advocates viewed as roadless the Forest Service classified as "commercial forest land." By the 1970s almost half of the National Forests were classified under this designation, a popular policy among local communities and the timber industry. Timber sales, after all, brought money into the agency while local communities saw employment, tax revenues, and a share of proceeds from timber harvests. Despite Congress insisting the Forest Service manage the land under multiple use, timber remained the primary policy.

The 1970s shifted the Forest Service towards a stewardship role. Clearcutting remained a common practice in National Forests but legal challenges found that the practice violated federal law. In response, Congress passed the National Forest Management Act in 1976 that required forest planning to consider roadless areas for their potential for wilderness designation while mandating non-timber considerations in all planning decisions. Importantly, NFMA created a systematic evaluation process that later informed comprehensive roadless inventories.

The Forest Service's Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE) sought to bridge wilderness law and forest management. RARE I, begun in 1972, conducted the first inventory of National Forest roadless areas larger than 5,000 acres. This inventory, however, faced challenges of insufficient analysis. The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and other wilderness advocacy organizations criticized the agency for a rushed and limited survey, culminating in a lawsuit by the Sierra Club. A more comprehensive review, RARE II, conducted between 1977 and 1979 inventoried 62 million acres of roadless areas across the National Forests.

Alongside these new laws and regulations, scientific understanding of the ecological impact of roads was also finding new purchase. The scholarly work of Robert MacArthur, Edward O. Wilson, Thomas Lovejoy, and others studied species diversity, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity to show how protecting large, intact forest landscapes helped flora and fauna. Roads upended this—they contributed to invasive species (deep into forests, even if roads were on the edge), restricted or fragmented habitats for wildlife, and harmed biodiversity.

Within the Forest Service, its management philosophy shifted in the 1980s and 1990s. The concepts of "new forestry" and "new perspectives" emphasized ecological relationships over commodity production. Led by Chief Dale Robertson's introduction of "Ecosystem Management," the Forest Service in 1992 began integrating biodiversity conservation and ecological integrity into its management decision-making, setting the institutional foundation for recognizing roadless areas as having conservation value independent of their wilderness designation. Alongside environmental organizations advocating for forest landscape protection, President Bill Clinton pushed the Forest Service to develop roadless protections. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck was the primary architect of this policy change, holding over 600 public hearings and receiving more than 1.6 million public comments during an 18-month period. On January 12, 2001, after three years of analysis and widespread public participation, the Forest Service adopted the Roadless Area Conservation Rule to protect 58.5 million acres of National Forests and National Grasslands from road construction and logging.

Passage of the roadless rule was not without its critics, especially across the American West. Idaho Governor Jim Risch filed a petition in 2006 to redesignate 85% of Idaho's 9.3 million roadless acres to allow development and logging. The state also negotiated its own state-specific rule in 2008 that protected 9 million acres while opening 400,000 acres to road construction and logging (these state-level regulations will remain in good standing, no matter what USDA decides). Colorado developed a more collaborative approach: beginning in 2005 the state solicited 310,000 public comments and, in 2012, the Colorado Roadless Rule created a two-tier system with 1.2 million acres receiving strong protections (stronger than the federal rules) while allowing ski areas, grazing, logging, and hazardous fuel treatment in other lands (these lands, also, will be unaffected by the USDA). Utah, confrontational as always, submitted an unsuccessful 2019 petition seeking the complete elimination of Utah's four million acres of roadless land, citing unhealthy forests and wildfire risks.

Alaska's Tongass National Forest became, and remains, a key battleground: 16.7 million acres of the world's largest temperate rainforest and 9.3 million roadless acres. Alaska has claimed the rule hurt the lumber industry, even as studies continue to show that hunting, fishing, and tourism employ nearly a quarter of regional workers compared to timber's one percent. On top of that, Tongass National Forest alone stores more carbon than any other U.S. National Forest, making the preservation of roadless areas an essential component in climate change resiliency. The Trump administration stripped Tongass of protections in 2020, which were restored under the Biden administration in 2023. The Trump administration is currently looking to reverse this yet again.

Overturning the roadless rule privileges short-term economic interest over long-term conservation. The achievement of the roadless rule—created through widespread democratic participation, unprecedented public input, and scientific study—is one of America's grand conservation achievements.