1 file. Counts as 1 — Counts as one: The attachments enclose no one else's submissions; the comment counts as one.
Own letter
The comment
I oppose the proposal to fully or partially rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
My name is Andrew Moore, I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I am an environmental journalist and the author of two books of natural history, The Beasts of the East: The Fall and Rise of America’s Eastern Wilderness (Mariner Books, 2026) and Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit (Chelsea Green, 2015); and I am a member of the Pennsylvania Native Plant Society and the Wild Ones Western Pennsylvania Area Chapter. In my personal life, I am also an outdoor enthusiast and frequent Roadless Areas in both Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Areas that are especially important to me include the Clarion River Inventoried Roadless Area and the Hearts Content Inventoried Roadless Area, within the Allegheny National Forest; and the numerous and irreplaceable Roadless Areas of West Virginia, including Canaan Loop, Cheat Mountain, Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, Dolly Sods Roaring Plain, Gauley Mountain, and the Seneca Creek Inventoried Roadless Area, among so many others. I have also visited and backpacked in Roadless Areas in the Sierra Mountains of California, and I credit experiences in those wild, roadless mountains for teaching me about the vastness and the irreplaceable beauty and biological heritage of the United States of America. Furthermore, I place immense value on roadless areas in the West and other parts of the United States, places I may not have been to yet, but which I had planned to visit in the near future. The preservation of these landscapes by previous generations of Americans are among our most noble national achievements. We must honor that work and maintain our Inventoried Roadless Areas.
I am also the father of a six-year-old boy, a Tiger Cub in Scouting America, and I look forward to taking my son into Roadless Areas so that he, too, can experience the value and wonder of a wild, roadless America. And it is my hope that in the preservation of these Inventoried Roadless Areas, future generations of Americans will be inspired to become the land stewards we so desperately need.
Roadless Areas are our National Heritage and Must Be Preserved
From Alaska’s vast Tongass to the red spruce forests of the West Virginia highlands, our national forests are an invaluable inheritance, providing innumerable benefits: Habitat for wildlife, including threatened and endangered species; safeguarding the water of farms, aquatic wildlife, and human communities; and unmatched and irreplaceable opportunities for hunters, anglers, hikers, and other appreciators of nature. The 58 million acres within inventoried roadless areas provide these opportunities and services like no other landscapes, while also supporting millions of visitors each year. These places unite all Americans who value the natural world, across the political spectrum.
For more than two decades, inventoried roadless areas have helped the U.S. Forest Service meet its statutory mandate to “improve and protect the forest[s]” under its control. The Forest Service introduced the Roadless Rule in 2001 to implement a National Forest System management approach that would allow it to consider the "whole picture" of landscapes across the country, in order to protect the nationally significant ecological and social values of roadless areas. The Forest Service has previously warned that managing inventoried roadless areas on a forest-by-forest basis could allow incremental road construction and timber harvest, leading to the erosion of roadless qualities nationwide, while increasing the agency’s maintenance, and fiscal burdens. As such, the Roadless Rule advances essential goals of forest management: protecting wildlife, preserving clean water, and preventing wildfires.
Opening inventoried roadless areas to development jeopardizes our natural heritage without providing the means to address potential harm. Road construction scars forest ecosystems: as Forest Service ranger Elers Koch has said, “Roads are such final and irretrievable facts.” When roads cause contribute to the local extinction of wildlife, those species may never return. When roads increase sedimentation in our waterways, they may remain “dirty” indefinitely. Roads can induce wildfires, and when those road-attributed fires burn through our national forests, old-growth trees, which have grown for thousands of years, can be destroyed in flash. And as we’ve seen, forest roads can only be removed with heavy machinery—and even decommissioned roads can persist for decades, or indefinitely.
The protections inherent to the Roadless Rule are more pressing than ever: Megafires, accelerating habitat loss, and diminishing water supplies have heightened the need for coordinated forest management across the national forest system and increased the value of inventoried roadless areas.
(COMMENT CONTINUED IN ATTACHED FILE)