My future and my health depend on Roadless Rule protection. I am in graduate school, getting my master's degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. I dedicate my life to helping others, so I have a tremendous amount of work to do. It is threatened by the climate crisis and by people who are supposed to uphold environmental protections instead of destroying them. On behalf of humanity, especially the next generation, the Roadless Rule must remain as is. As the future generation and a human.
Regarding the Mt. Baker West in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington:
Roadless areas store carbon, buffer temperature extremes, and provide intact refugia where species can shift in response to a warming climate.
Cold-water fish habitat is shrinking. Climate warming has reduced cold-water habitat in western U.S. streams, and modest additional warming would shrink it further. (Isaak & Young 2023; Mejia et al. 2023). — Isaak & Young, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfas-2022-0302); Mejia et al., 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16844)
Rescinding the Roadless Rule would open the Mt. Baker West, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest to road construction and associated ground disturbance. The direct and indirect effects of that activity are precisely what makes a specific comment about this area necessary.
Building more roads in national forests would be a drain on taxpayers. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly flagged Forest Service deferred maintenance as one of the largest in the federal government, and the backlog has never dropped below $5 billion. Adding new roads to inventoried roadless areas would only deepen that hole.
The Roadless Rule is one of America's most popular conservation measures, and that support has not faded. Prior to its 2001 enactment, more than 600 public hearings were held nationwide, and 1.6 million Americans weighed in to call for protection of these forestlands—more comments than any other federal rule had received at the time. When USDA announced its rescission proposal, the compressed 21-day public comment period in late 2025 drew approximately 600,000 additional comments. A detailed roadless.org analysis of the comment record found that more than 99.8% of submitters opposed the rescission. More than 100 members of Congress have co-sponsored the Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2025 (S.2042 / H.R.3930) to codify the Rule so it could not be rolled back without an act of Congress.
“A national analysis of two decades of wildfire data found that human-started wildfires accounted for 84% of all wildfires, tripled the length of the fire season, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned. Because roads are the primary vector for human ignitions, the finding directly bears on the wildfire consequences of opening roadless areas to road construction. — Balch et al., 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617394114)”
I can not fathom losing the forests I've hiked in throughout my life, and that should be enjoyed by future generations.
The Forest Service should know how essential complex forests are to our climate, aka our future. This impacts everyone who breathes air, drinks water, and eats food. These roadless areas are what save us from the worst of these 4 disasters: fires, flooding, droughts, and landslides. As the Forest Service should know, trees sequester a significant amount of carbon, with young trees absorbing 22 lbs of CO₂ annually and mature trees absorbing an average of 48 to 55 lbs of CO₂ per year, sequestering more as they grow. This cools our environment, which is crucial, and prevents devastating wildfires. The cooler environment aids more precipitation, allowing more water to settle deep in the ground where trees store the water in their roots. When it's overly dry due to the heat from global warming, and it hasn't rained substantially for prolonged periods of time, the water, when it does rain, runs off the dirt's dry surface (instead of absorbing in like a sponge when the dirt is properly watered), causing flooding. Again, we need more trees to sequester more carbon so there is less heat, causing more fires. These complex forests also help prevent landslides by holding dirt in place with their roots. Areas with roads experience all these issues in high severity. Countless studies prove this. The Forest Service should know that these roadless areas are priceless and irreplaceable. No amount of money is worth the amount of harm and life-threatening devastation it would cause. Not even close.
The forests these rules protect aren't hypothetical. They're real places with real ecological function. Don't open them up to road construction.
In earnest,
Shira Williamson - Age 27