FS-2025-0001-576537

I support the Forest Service's Roadless Rule. I urge you to keep the Roadless Rule! The rule reflects the best available science, the popular support for our public lands, and the global need to protect our planet. The Roadless Rule protects our public watersheds, an original purpose of the creation of our forest reserves and later national forests. The Roadless Rule provides habitat for our public wildlife, native plants, even our microbes, insects and other invertebrates, animals, and birds. The Roadless Rule enable forests to store carbon and to return carbon and nitrogen to the soil. The Roadless Rule enables us as an apex species to coexist with other life forms, such as beavers that help protect water on the surface and in the soil of our public lands. And the Roadless Rule keeps lands eligible for Wilderness designation, the gold standard of conservation and a model being adopted around the global. Furthermore, the Roadless Rule enables us to walk in nature, something that is not safe given the large population of mechanized recreationists on trails of other lands. The Roadless has proven practical, useful, effective in its more than twenty years of application. No. My state's congressional delegation does NOT reflect public opinion in Montana, where our local and state economies depend upon PROTECTED public lands and where our quality of life depends upon PROTECTED public lands. The delegation consists of people who shamelessly — and openly — bought their seats in Congress. Alas, Montana has long history of money paying for political positions, mostly famously when William A. Clark so blatantly bought a U.S Senate seat that the Senate refused to seat him! The problem of roads has been long known. Vehicles introduce invasive species, cause erosion and sedimentation, compact the soil, and harm the soil biome, as well as introduce pollution from the exhaust and from the tires shedding chemicals and microplastics, and noise pollution. Roads are a human construct. People use roads. People cause widespread disruption of animal movement, affecting fitness, survival, and population viability — of terrestrial and aquatic species. Tim S. Doherty, Graeme C. Hays, and Don A. Driscoll documented negative impacts on birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and arthropods, and reported the same in their article in Nature Ecology & Evolution (2021). A road is a divide, a barrier, were connectivity is what native species require. Roads carve up any landscape and create barriers in ecosystems, barrier to wildlife migration, a barrier even in microecosystems. Constructing a road and providing motorized and mechanized has proven to be harmful to the road verge. Roads degrade wildlife habitat and degrade the wilderness characteristics of our public wildlands; for a little example: "Roads pose a significant threat to bee movement," according to an article of that title, by Gordon Fitch, Chatura Vaidya, and Lori Lach, in the Journal of Applied Ecology (2021). Roads mean tires. Vehicle tires shed a chemical additive (6PPD-quinone) that turns streams toxic for many fish, and tread wear particles are a significant source of microplastic pollution, both facts document in an article by Zhenyu Tian and his colleagues in the journal Science (2020) and by Bibai Du and his colleagues in Environmental Science and Technology Letters (2022). Roads negatively impact the scenic, interpretive, recreational, and paleontological values of our wildlands. Roads are permanent scars. Stephen Rostain and his colleagues recently reported in Science (2024) on an Amazonian agrarian-based civilization more than 2000 years old. They found that roads were "the most notable elements of the landscape" The "straight-dug" intersite routes were dirt roads through damp jungle. Enough is enough! More than 80% of the United States lies within less than a mile from a road. That's more than enough! The Forest Service has 300,000 miles of roads, much more than can be properly maintained given the budgets appropriated by Congress year after year. Additionally, roads reduce fire resiliency; one source on that is James D. Johnston and his colleagues in the refereed journal Environmental Research Letters (2021). Furthermore, since most wildfires have a human cause, roads increasing human access increase fire danger. As Edward Abbey famously said in his book Desert Solitaire (1968), "Let people walk." The quality of experience of access on foot is better for the users, the native plants, the wildlife, the watershed, and the soil biome. Also, the absence of motorized and mechanized access contributes toward meeting the national and global goal of 30-30 to mitigate climate change and the accompanying climate chaos. PLEASE KEEP THE ROADLESS RULE!