“I am writing in opposition to the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, docket…”

I am writing in opposition to the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, docket FS-2025-0001, and to ask the Forest Service to select the no-action alternative. The agency calls this wildfire policy, but its own 2020 research found roadless and roaded forests burn at similar rates, and fires are far likelier to start near a road than in roadless forest. About 91 percent of Oregon roadless forest, some 1.66 million acres, sits in municipal watersheds serving roughly 800,000 people, and roads send sediment into the cold streams that marbled murrelets and coho depend on. More than 625,000 comments came in during 2025, a 2026 Pew poll found 76 percent of voters want the rule kept, and the agency faces an 11.2 billion dollar road-maintenance backlog while proposing to build more. Roadless national forests are among the best remaining habitat for species already in trouble, giving refuge to hundreds of vulnerable wildlife species (Dietz et al., 2021). On the Oregon coast that means salmon, elk, and seabirds like the marbled murrelet, all of which depend on unroaded, unfragmented forest and the cold, clean streams that roads degrade. Roadless forests store carbon far out of proportion to their size. On national forest lands, inventoried roadless areas hold about 22 percent of the mature-forest carbon and 27 percent of the old-growth carbon (Birdsey et al., 2025). Logging them releases carbon we cannot afford to lose and cannot quickly get back. Outdoor recreation is a major Oregon industry, supporting about 192,000 jobs, 16 billion dollars in spending, and 12.4 billion dollars of the state economy (Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, 2022). Roadless backcountry is the setting for much of the hunting, fishing, and hiking that sustains it, and new roads and logging trade a recurring economy for a one-time cut. For these reasons I ask the Forest Service to withdraw the proposal and retain the 2001 Roadless Rule. Thank you for considering my comment. Sincerely, Steven Trotter Waldport, Oregon