In considering the potential rescission of the Roadless Rule, which was enacted in January 2001 by the Clinton administration, one thing should be very clear: the federal government cannot afford to maintain the 380,000+ miles of road that currently exist within the National Forest system. This is eminently obvious to anyone who has hopped in a 4x4 vehicle to brave something that the local USFS map says is a road but turns out to be a pitted, overgrown path that was probably last traveled by a vehicle thirty years ago. Indeed, it is obvious to the USFS itself, whose own fact sheet following the introduction of the Roadless Rule cited a growing $8.4 billion deficit in road maintenance and claimed it only receives up to 20% of the annual funding that would be necessary to maintain the entire system:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/eng/road_mgt/qanda.shtml
I am struggling to understand under what circumstances it makes sense to put even more taxpayer money toward constructing new roads when we cannot maintain the roads we have.
Another argument in favor of rescinding the Roadless Rule is that new road access will improve wildfire preparedness by making it easier for USFS to conduct forest management in remote areas. Again, USFS simply cannot afford the increased cost of road construction, maintenance, and forest management that would come with this endeavor. Moreover, USFS acknowledges that the vast majority of human-caused fires begin within half a mile of a road. Increasing access to these remote parts of the National Forest system will only increase chances of humans causing the deadly fires that the Forest Service seeks to prevent. I'd also like to point out that the forest ecologies within many of the inventoried roadless areas evolved to require periodic fire to clear undergrowth, cycle nutrients, and release conifer seeds from their cones. Forests become less healthy and more dangerous when their natural fire cycles are suppressed.
This is not to speak of the value of wilderness itself, which is beyond measure. Our public lands are our greatest treasure, and the wild areas within these lands are unlike nowhere else on Earth. The very idea of wilderness is integral to the American ethos (what is the "wild West" if not wild?). In 1960, Wallace Stegner closed his famous Wilderness Letter by remarking that just knowing the wilderness is there is enough: "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope." I am proud to live, work, and recreate in Utah—the vast majority of whose land is federally owned and operated—which makes it easy for me to do exactly as Stegner suggests and just drive to the edge of the wilderness and peer in. Whether I'm in the lake-studded coniferous forests of the Uinta Mountains (Uinta-Wasach-Cache and Ashley National Forests) or among the sharp red hoodoos that mark the boundary between the Great Basin and the Colorado River (Dixie National Forest), the very act of contemplating the depth and breadth of the landscape around me is a profound experience that connects me to the past, present, and future of the land. It is an experience I hope every lawmaker in the room has the chance to partake in someday. Thank you for your time & consideration in reading my comment.