“hold up better through drought and fire than fragmented, heavily managed timber land”
The comment
To the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture:
I am writing to strongly oppose the proposal to fully or partially rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (Docket FS-2025-0001).
I live in Southern Oregon, and the wild country here is a big reason why. I spend my free time in so many incredible outdoor sites that deserve our protection: the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, the Trinity Alps, the Marble Mountains, the Russian Wilderness, and the Redwood National Forest, to name just a few, where I hike, backpack, camp, fish, snowshoe, cross country ski and deeply feed my soul. These are the places I go to reset. What makes them worth the trip is exactly what this proposal puts at risk: quiet, intact forest with no roads and no machinery.
I am also a nurse practitioner, so I see this as a health issue as much as a recreation issue. The headwaters inside roadless areas feed the rivers and reservoirs that downstream communities drink from. Clean water, clean air, and time in wild places are basic to human health, and they are far cheaper to protect than to restore once the damage is done.
Roads change a forest permanently. They cut habitat into pieces, break up the corridors wildlife depend on, and push sediment into the streams where salmon and steelhead spawn. Intact forests store carbon and hold up better through drought and fire than fragmented, heavily managed timber land.
What troubles me most is the reasoning behind this proposal. These lands belong to all of us and to the people who come after us. They should not be stripped and sold off so a few can turn a short-term profit. Once a roadless area is roaded and logged, it will not come back in my lifetime or the next generation's. No dollar figure makes that a fair trade.
Handing these decisions to individual forest plans without a national safeguard would open millions of acres of backcountry to industrial logging and road construction. I urge the Forest Service to select Alternative 1 (No Action) and keep full, nationwide protections for all inventoried roadless areas.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment.
Sincerely,
Andrea Giachetti, Nurse Practitioner, lover of all the wild and scenic places that exist in this country
Phoenix, OR 97535