Forest Management

National forests are governed by forest plans — long-term management documents prepared under the National Forest Management Act of 1976 that direct how each national forest is managed for the multiple uses Congress assigned to the system: timber, watershed protection, range, wildlife, and recreation. Plans are revised periodically. Each plan assigns management prescriptions to different parts of the forest, and those prescriptions determine what activities are permitted where. The Roadless Rule does not replace forest plans. It supplements them — adding a layer of protection against road construction and most commercial timber harvest across all 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless area, regardless of what the underlying forest plan would otherwise permit (USDA Forest Service 2001).

The relationship between forest plans and the Roadless Rule is most consequential for a specific subset of acreage. Of the 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas, roughly 24 million acres — about 41 percent — are covered by forest plan prescriptions that already prohibit road construction. For these acres, the Roadless Rule is a secondary protection; the underlying forest plans provide the primary one. But for the remaining 34 million acres — about 59 percent — forest plan prescriptions permit road construction. For these acres, the Roadless Rule is the only protection. Over the past two decades, even with the Rule in place, roads have been constructed on roughly 2.8 million acres within this 34-million-acre subset (USDA Forest Service 2000; USDA Forest Service 2001).

A separate administrative reality complicates the case for expanding the road network. The Forest Service's own road-management strategy documents an $8.4 billion capital improvement and deferred maintenance backlog across the more than 386,000 miles of National Forest System roads that already exist. The agency has estimated it would take 20 years at $900 million per year — a level of funding it has not historically received — to reduce that backlog. Building new roads, including in roadless areas, would add to a road system the agency cannot currently maintain. Research on conservation value also shows that adding inventoried roadless areas to the protected-area system would substantially increase the representation of underprotected ecosystem types and improve protection of vulnerable species, indicating that the existing roadless network already provides conservation benefit that forest plans alone do not capture (USDA Forest Service 2001 EA; Talty et al. 2020; Dietz et al. 2021).