As a hunter, angler, and someone who cares deeply about our public lands, I urge the U.S. Forest Service to keep the 2001 Roadless Rule in place.
Before addressing the more serious and practical matters of why I believe the roadless rule is important, I’ll start by saying why they’re important to me. I grew up and currently live in Oklahoma. We are a state with few public land options, but my hunting journey began on them. I was an adult onset hunter who spent my first years hunting in the Ouachita National Forest in southeastern Oklahoma until I moved to another part of the state. This is an area that is currently protected by the Roadless Rule but would no longer be if this proposal to rescind is accepted. This area provides Oklahomans—those in a particularly poverty stricken area of our state—land to hunt for food, fish, and recreate when they cannot afford private lands. This area was critical in the reintroduction of black bears, first on the Arkansas side which eventually led to repopulation in Oklahoma as well. Being roadless was a huge part of what has allowed these populations to thrive.
Beyond my own experience, I also believe the Roadless Rule makes practical sense. The rule doesn’t mean these lands can’t be managed. Hunting, fishing, grazing, recreation, habitat restoration, wildfire mitigation, and other management activities can still happen in roadless areas. What it does provide is some protection against building new roads and fragmenting some of the most intact public lands we have left.
As someone who loves to hunt and fish, keeping those large, connected landscapes matters to me. Wildlife need them too. Roadless areas provide habitat for elk, deer, native trout, black bears, and countless other species. They also protect headwaters and watersheds that provide clean water for both people and wildlife.
The Forest Service already manages roughly 370,000 miles of roads and has a maintenance backlog of about $10.8 billion, with more than half of that tied to roads. I have a hard time understanding why we would prioritize building more roads into currently roadless areas when we already struggle to maintain the roads we have.
More roads also mean more fragmentation, more maintenance, and more long-term costs. Once we put a road into an intact landscape, we can’t really put that landscape back the way it was.
I also think it’s important to remember that these lands belong to all of us. Public land is one of the few places where someone doesn’t have to have a lot of money or a lot of land to experience the outdoors. For hunters and anglers especially, public lands provide opportunities that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise.
I’m not opposed to responsible forest management, and maybe every roadless area should be treated exactly the same, but I do think there is a big difference between making thoughtful, locally informed improvements to how these lands are managed and removing protections from millions of acres.
The Roadless Rule has been in place for more than 20 years. We should be asking how we can take care of these places, improve the public lands infrastructure we already have, and keep these opportunities available, not how quickly we can build roads into some of the last intact landscapes we have left.
For me, this comes back to something pretty simple. I want other people to have the same opportunity I had to discover hunting, fishing, and public lands. I want the wildlife and wild places that made that experience possible to still be here for them.
I urge the U.S. Forest Service to keep the 2001 Roadless Rule in place.