I am writing to oppose any recision or reduction in the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
I live within a couple of hours drive of Mount Hood National Forest and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and I hike, hunt, and fish in both places as well as further afield in Oregon and Washington. More roads are bad for everything I value in my public lands.
Roads help predators chase down prey, like the birds and ungulates that I hunt. Roads increase predator effectiveness by giving predators easy travel routes to find and chase down prey. Anyone who has seen coyotes trotting down roads, and who has followed deer or antelope in a vehicle as they continue to follow the path rather than escape into the woods has seen how roads benefit predators. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.1049
Roads increase erosion and the silt from roads runs into waterways. Turbidity and sedimentation negatively impact salmonid habitat by filling in gravel beds (reds) where anadromous fish lay their eggs, smothering the eggs, or simply destroying the habitat.
Roads destroy the quiet, remote character of the places that I want to visit. It is very difficult to find five contiguous miles within a day's drive where I can walk in any direction without encountering a road. Roads only provide access in the sense that a person wants to access a roadbed. There are plenty of roadbeds in urban, suburban, exurban, and rural areas, and the forest service alone has 380,000 miles of road, the majority of which it is already incapable of maintaining. We hear a lot about enforcing laws on the books, how about fixing the roads we already have rather than destroying more habitat to build more roads we will be incapable of maintaining?
Roads invites heavy travel and heavy travel leads to trash, invasive species spread, and fire. Studies find that wildfires tend to start near roads. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-026-00450-2
The last thing our wild places need is more roads. Fire suppression and prevention is a dishonest pretext. Homes are not located in roadless areas, and these areas are relatively small compared to roaded areas. The administration is hostile to conservation, and this rule change is just one more example of that.