“Roadless areas are some of the last places on public lands free from industrial development. In Washington…”

Roadless areas are some of the last places on public lands free from industrial development. In Washington, that means country like the Dark Divide in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Liberty Bell in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and Abercrombie-Hooknose in the Colville National Forest. They provide landscape connectivity for wide-ranging species like wolverine and Canada lynx, and clean, cold water for downstream communities. Much of the wildlife we work to protect lives in these areas and depends on habitat free from human development. They also support cultural and subsistence practices and some of the best backcountry recreation in the state. There are already more roads on national forests than can be affordably maintained. The Forest Service manages a 380,000-mile road system with a growing $10.8 billion maintenance backlog that has persisted for decades, and it receives funding to maintain only a fraction of that system. The proposal also misstates what the rule already allows. Restoration thinning and prescribed burning are both permitted in roadless areas. The rule limits commercial timber harvest, but hauling logs out of steep backcountry terrain was never going to pencil out for mills in the first place. The constraint here is economics and topography, not regulation. Roads fragment and degrade wildlife habitat, act as vectors for human fire ignitions, and dump sediment into fish habitat and spawning beds each year. In Washington, about 85% of fires are caused by people each year. We need our wild country more than we need new forest roads.