Opposes rescissionA0 noneSubstance 5/24Posted September 17, 2026 On Regulations.gov
Scored directly — The comment's whole text was scored on its own.
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“building more roads would likely increase the amount of wildfires”
What it names
Works cited
DellaSala et al. 2011
The comment
I implore the United States Department of Agriculture to maintain the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule as it is for the foreseeable future. Removing the national protections of these areas from road development has the potential to negatively impact not only recreational activities that humans enjoy and habitat quality for wildlife inside inventoried roadless areas, but it is also likely to decrease water quality and increase wildfire risk, harming land and lives outside of these protected areas (Mildrexler et al., 2026).
Damage to the inventoried roadless areas with the development of new roads can include habitat fragmentation, where large swaths of old-growth forest that supported large animals like mountain lions are split into smaller sections, decreasing their capacity to provide for these bigger organisms. Splitting these protected forests could have tremendous impacts on the overall health of this ecosystem by making them uninhabitable for top predators. Long-term negative impacts of ecosystem health could also be exacerbated by the changes in human recreation surrounding these areas. The potential impacts listed on this rule include temporary closures of current recreational activities and further development of land for road-based recreation in the place of remote, self-reliant recreation. This change in human land use would likely increase noise pollution and change the behavior of wildlife that live near where new recreational structures are built. It would also further limit recreation opportunities for humans who value remote recreation surrounded by nature.
As for damage that new roads could pose to greater regions and peoples surrounding inventoried roadless areas, high quality drinking water could become substantially more expensive to come by if we open these areas up for development. Building roads increases sedimentation of water sources, which degrades water quality and increases turbidity, both decreasing the amount of water available for human consumption from a watershed and increasing the amount this water needs to be treated by municipal water supply departments (DellaSala et al., 2011). Inventoried roadless areas are providing us with clean, fresh water, and, especially in recent years where we have not seen adequate snowfall in some western areas of the United States, it would be unwise for us to further deplete what reliable water sources we do have. I live in Utah County, which received terribly little snowfall this past year. When June came around, the Provo River was so low that kayaking and paddleboarding at the Provo River Delta was very difficult. We are currently in a drought and, knowing that our watershed comes through inventoried roadless areas, if roads were built that reduced our water supply further, our water recreation would be even harder or maybe impossible to do and the wildlife depending on that water, like the June Sucker, would suffer immensely.
Concerning road usage in wildfire mitigation efforts, though wildfires can become larger in inventoried roadless areas because there are few breaks between trees, most wildfires are started close to roads, so building more roads would likely increase the amount of wildfires we experience (Aplet et al., 2026). In any case, the resulting damage to watersheds and habitat that come from building roads outweigh the potential benefits of having smaller but likely more wildfires that are easier to put out.
Citations
Aplet, G. H., Hartger, P., & Dietz, M. S. (2026). Three-decade record of contiguous-US national forest wildfires indicates increased density of ignitions near roads. Fire Ecology, 22(1), 8.
DellaSala, D. A., Karr, J. R., & Olson, D. M. (2011). Roadless areas and clean water. journal of soil and water conservation, 66(3), 78A-84A.
Mildrexler, D. J., Berner, L. T., Law, B. E., & Booth, M. S. (2026). Roadless rule rescission threatens highest integrity forest ecosystems in the United States. Biological Conservation, 321, 111950.