Revisiting the Roadless Rule

When my family moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to Portland, Oregon, in the mid-1980s, it was a significant culture shock. In a city affectionately known as "Stumptown," this was the height of the timber wars, a decade-long series of skirmishes between industry and environmentalists. The conflict, which dominated local news, pitted the region's historic economic reliance on logging against the competing need to protect endangered species and the region’s few remaining old-growth forests.

The battle lines weren't always theoretical for me. I attended a private high school where my father was an administrator. Due to its small size, we played sports in a rural district where our largely liberal student body competed against more conservative small-town high schools in the Coastal Range, where families' livelihoods depended on the timber industry. Before basketball games in places like Jewel, Vernonia, Seaside, and Scappoose, a lumberjack mascot might warm up the crowd by revving a four-foot-long chainsaw. After the game, you'd likely encounter a sign at the local diner reading: "HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR SPOTTED OWL—BOILED OR FRIED?"

During my senior year, in 1992, our student body president circulated a petition to change our school mascot from an eagle to a tree. A majority of students signed on, including me. I still cringe when I think about it. We all thought it would be amusing to have some of our games feature the Lumberjacks versus the Trees. We weren't old enough to be conscious of our extreme privilege; or to respect the way pride in the timber industry was woven into the fabric of these towns we competed against; or to understand the existential crisis that the collapse of logging jobs represented for their local economies. Our school administrators knew how much our proposed mascot change would inflame the urban-rural tensions already in play, and they wisely rejected it.

Two years later, the Clinton administration brokered the Northwest Forest Plan, which designated 24 million acres of federal land for spotted-owl and ecosystem protection, dramatically reducing approved timber harvest levels and effectively ending the timber wars. Before the plan, between four and five billion board feet per year were being hauled out of the Northwest's verdant national forests. Targets dropped to just over one billion board feet after the plan went into effect—a 75 percent reduction.

The logging industry never really recovered. Some of those same Oregon communities where I played basketball were so hollowed out that their high schools no longer have enough students to compete in the same division.

That was a long way of saying: I try to come at these issues with more humility as an adult than I did as a naive teenager. The timber wars were much more complicated than a simple fight between industry and environmentalists, but the result wasn't nuanced at all. The decline of the timber industry devastated communities throughout the Pacific Northwest, and many still have not recovered. Some of these towns still hold out hope that, with a little help from federal regulators, the local mills and larger industry can mount a comeback.

That kind of hope is what the USDA is now selling to justify its recent decision to rescind the Roadless Rule. The Clinton-era policy was created in 2001 to protect another 58 million acres of inventoried areas in our national forests from additional road building and logging.

In an August press release touting Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins' decision to rescind the rule, the USDA stated that ending the 25-year-old roadless policy "will remove prohibitions on road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest on nearly 59 million acres of the National Forest System, allowing for fire prevention and responsible timber production." Later in the release it added that keeping the rule "hurts jobs and economic development across rural America."

I understand the desire to bring back the timber industry and the jobs that come with it. And I'm open to the idea that there may be new ways to log sustainably and in coordination with the need to preserve wildlife habitat and clean watersheds. But rescinding the Roadless Rule is not the pathway to achieve either of those outcomes. A close examination of the facts undermines nearly every justification for its cancellation:

The Roadless Rule is not what "killed" the timber industry. The decline of U.S. logging was already underway long before the Roadless Rule was adopted. Logging on national forests peaked in the 1980s, but then plummeted due to a combination of factors: court rulings on endangered species (like the northern spotted owl), public backlash against clearcutting (thanks to photography campaigns from environmental groups), and changing economics (cheaper Canadian imports and overseas competition). By 2021, national forest harvests were already a small fraction of what they'd been two decades earlier.

Most of the 58 million acres that are currently designated for protection aren't of high value to the industry. Much of the remaining roadless land is remote, steep, and costly to log. An industry giant like Weyerhaeuser would only propose new roads if the timber was valuable enough to cover costs, so it's unlikely that repealing the Roadless Rule will result in more jobs any time soon.

Building new roads is not sound fiscal policy. What proponents of the rescission rarely mention is that we taxpayers pay for the roads to be built. And the cost of building them often exceeds the amount of revenue the government receives for the logging rights. A GAO study concluded that nearly half of all Forest Service timber sales in the 1990s were below cost. From 2004 to 2008, due to the expense of road building, the Forest Service lost $130 million on timber sales in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.

When new roads are completed, the expenses keep piling up. Even if the timber industry is willing to take on the cost of road building going forward (quite a stretch, given that that would almost assuredly wipe out their profits), what happens after all the timber is harvested? The Forest Service already has 370,000 miles of forest roads to manage—more than the U.S. interstate highway system—and has thus far been overwhelmed by the responsibility. There is currently a backlog of more than $3 billion in deferred maintenance for our current forest roads. How does rescinding the roadless rule represent "common sense management," as Secretary Rollins claims, if we can't manage the roads we already have?

Even if logging expands, mechanization has eliminated many of the best timber jobs. In the 1970s and 1980s, crews of 10 to 20 men with chainsaws and skidders harvested most of our timber, and dozens of workers ran the industrial saws at timber mills. These days, the field work is done by massive machines—feller-bunchers and harvesters—run by just one or two people. Meanwhile, computer-guided saws and scanners have reduced the need for human workers inside the biggest mills. Timber industry jobs have fallen more precipitously in the last two decades than the fall in timber production over the same time period.

Forest Service roads don't make wildfires easier to manage. Building more roads in national forests won’t make a meaningful difference in fighting the large, destructive wildfires that threaten communities. Fires are driven primarily by weather, drought, and fuel conditions, not the absence of roads, and fast-moving blazes regularly jump highways, rivers, and existing firebreaks. The real bottleneck in wildfire response is resources and conditions on the ground, not access to remote backcountry.

In fact, new roads can make things worse by increasing human-caused ignitions, since most fires start near roads. Fire scientists emphasize that the most effective fire mitigation strategies are fuel reduction near communities, defensible space around buildings and other structures, and fire-resistant construction—not cutting roads into pristine areas.

Creating the Roadless Rule wasn’t just about conservation. It was also about ending a cycle of taxpayer-funded subsidies for uneconomic logging roads. Repealing it risks reviving an outdated, costly system that burdens both the federal budget and America’s last wild forests.

It also represents an outdated way of thinking about land use. Every new road threatens to cut into the value of some of these pristine landscapes for recreation and tourism. Backcountry hunters and anglers seek out roadless areas precisely because they are remote and wild. Outfitters, guides, and rural communities increasingly depend on these values for sustainable income.

Shifting from a resource extraction economy to one built on recreation isn't a pipe dream. In the last 50 years, towns like Leavenworth, Washington; Bend, Oregon; and Whitefish, Montana have all successfully transitioned from logging and railroad towns to thriving meccas for outdoor recreation and tourism. And they were able to do it by protecting the incredible ecosystems right outside of town. Rescinding the Roadless Rule won't just fail to deliver jobs. It will eliminate them if it undermines the local recreation economies that are far more important to rural prosperity in the 21st century.

Use Your Voice

If you're concerned with the fate of the Roadless Rule and would like to weigh in with your thoughts, today is your last chance. Submit a comment here. For inspiration, go here.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Every Friday, our team shares critical stories about public lands from around the internet. This list could be exhaustive and exhausting, but our intent is to inform, not overwhelm. Instead, we choose three to five important stories you should be aware of—including at least one piece of good news.

The Good: Public land sale proposal "won't happen" says GOP appropriator "Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson on Monday warned that any legislative effort to sell off millions of acres of public lands would fail. 'It won’t happen, I can tell you that,' Simpson said of potential moves by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Mike Lee (R-Utah) to reintroduce language to sell large swaths of public lands in the western US to create more housing on federally-owned tracts. Simpson’s comments came during an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Government that covered a range of topics, including public lands, the likelihood of a government shutdown, and federal firefighting."

The Bad: The dwindling Colorado River can’t wait for states to cut water use, experts say "The Colorado River’s massive reservoirs are now so depleted that another dry year could send them plunging to dangerously low levels, a group of prominent scholars warns in a new analysis. The researchers are urging the Trump administration to intervene and impose substantial cutbacks in water use across the seven states that rely on the river — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming."

The Ugly: Decades of public lands planning overturned in a day "On Sept. 3, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to overturn three Bureau of Land Management plans, including Miles City, under the Congressional Review Act, the first time the law has ever been applied to land-use planning. Legal experts and conservation groups warn that the consequences could be far-reaching, enabling Congress to unravel decades of environmental protections and management decisions on public lands.”