Comment Opposing Roadless Rule Rescission
Robert Henry
Davenport, California
Sept 28, 2026
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service
Re: Special Areas; Roadless Area Conservation — Proposed Rescission of the 2001 Roadless Rule (91 FR 53827; Docket FS-2025-0001)
To Secretary Rollins and the U.S. Forest Service:
I am a California resident writing to oppose the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I urge the Department to withdraw the proposal and keep the Rule in place. My family is deeply connected to roadless areas and have hiked, backpacked, fished, hunted in roadless National Forests across the Siera Nevada to the Shasta Trinity and Montana to Alaska. The experiences we have had in these areas embody our core values and our fundamental identities.
California has a great deal at stake. The Roadless Rule protects about 4.4 million acres across 20 national forests in California, from Mount Shasta and the Trinity Alps to the Sierra Nevada and Tahoe region, the Los Padres on the Central Coast, and the San Gabriel, San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains in Southern California. For 25 years these lands have safeguarded clean water, wildlife habitat and some of the best recreation in the country, at lower management cost than roaded land.
These forests are California's water supply. National forests provide nearly two-thirds of the state's water, and roadless lands anchor the headwaters of the Smith, Eel, Sacramento, San Joaquin, American and Kern Rivers. The water from California's national forests is valued at roughly $3.2 billion a year and underpins our farms, cities and industries. Opening these headwaters to new roads and commercial logging puts that supply at risk.
Rescission would likely increase wildfire risk, not reduce it. The proposal leans on the claim that the Rule stands in the way of wildfire protection, but the Rule already allows thinning, brush clearing, prescribed burning and temporary emergency roads where the Forest Service finds a threat to public safety. More than 240,000 roadless acres in California have already been treated to reduce fire risk; fuels work in the Caples Creek roadless area helped protect communities during the 2021 Caldor Fire. Meanwhile, a 2026 study in Fire Ecology (Aplet, Hartger & Dietz) found ignitions are far more concentrated near roads — roughly four times more likely than in roadless areas. Most fires that threaten California communities are human-caused, and roads bring the cars, equipment and campfires that start them. Building new roads into remote country invites more fires, not fewer. The recent Timber and Plaskett fires in Big Sur demonstrate the link between roads and costly wildfires.
The Forest Service cannot afford more roads. The existing national forest road network already carries a large maintenance backlog, and the budget pressures described in the 2001 Rule have only grown. Adding new roads adds long-term liabilities to an agency that cannot maintain what it has, on top of the higher firefighting costs that more ignitions would bring.
Roadless areas support rural economies. California's outdoor recreation economy generates more than $81 billion and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. The state's national forests draw about 33 million visits a year, and the lodging and sales tax revenue from those visitors pays for services in rural counties that could not otherwise afford them. Roadless areas protect thousands of miles of trails used for hiking, hunting, fishing and mountain biking, and hundreds of miles of paddling and rafting runs. Opening them to logging, mining or oil and gas leasing would undermine the very places that draw visitors.
The public has already spoken. The 2001 Rule was adopted after extensive public involvement, and according to the California Natural Resources Agency, 99 percent of the roughly 600,000 comments submitted on the initial rescission announcement supported keeping it. A rule that has worked well for 25 years should not be undone on a short comment period and over such broad public opposition.
I ask the Department to select the no-action alternative and retain the 2001 Roadless Rule in full. If there are specific obstacles to fuel reduction work, they can be addressed with targeted guidance or clarification, not by removing protections from millions of acres of California's forests.
Thank you for considering my comments.
Sincerely,
Robert Henry