Dear Secretary Rollins and Chief Schultz:
The pollution becomes more deadly. The temperatures continue to rise. Animals are dying as their homes are cut down leading to potential ecosystem collapse. If they go, we go too.
As a citizen whose climate worry shapes how I vote, what I read, and now what I comment on, the 2001 Rule keeps a meaningful amount of carbon in trees. That's the version of climate action that does the math.
Regarding the Big Island in the Chippewa National Forest, Minnesota:
I want to Department to understand the long term effects and the world they are giving their kids and their kids kids. I want them to think of the future.
Intact roadless landscapes support functional soils, hydrology, and food webs that fragmented forests cannot replicate.
Most remaining forest is already fragmented. Globally, 70 percent of remaining forest is within one kilometer of a forest edge — within the zone where edge effects compromise interior conditions. The remaining intact interior, including roadless areas in the National Forest System, has become disproportionately important for sustaining the species and processes that require unfragmented forest (Haddad et al. 2015). — Haddad et al., 2015 (https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1500052)
Rescinding the Roadless Rule would open the Big Island, Chippewa 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.
The proposed action should be withdrawn, and the 2001 Rule allowed to remain operative.
With gratitude,
CommentID: RLC-20261002-Z54EVT