Dear Department of Agriculture Leadership:
Greetings,
I am writing in support of maintaining the Roadless Rule. For more than 3 decades, I have been a back-country hiker and camper in many of the wilderness areas of our beautiful country, from the forests of North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, California, Arizona, Colorado and Utah. I spend as much time as possible outdoors and I have seen all variety of conditions of forests, parks and public lands. The forests and undeveloped areas are cherished.
I have hiked and camped in these lands and there is NOTHING like being in the healthy and undivided forests that are teeming with biodiversity and healthy trees and clean water. In places where roads are built, development always follows. These undeveloped lands are precious to maintain drinking water, biodiversity, and climate stability. You can SEE the difference in the biodiversity and the health of forests that have been reduced to mere strips of a few trees. All life begins to disappear.
I want my children to be able to witness the wild places that I have seen. I want them to know that the animals in their story books are NOT extinct. We need our country's wild places left without roads to preserve the spirit of American land and freedom.
Regarding the Three Sisters in the Deschutes National Forest, Oregon:
Rescission of the Roadless Rule exposes the Three Sisters IRA, Deschutes National Forest, to road construction that will convert a zero-road-sediment watershed into one with chronic, irreversible non-point source pollution. The Forest Service has not demonstrated that any management objective justifies this degradation.
"Clean water is most closely linked to undisturbed natural ecosystems. When undisturbed watersheds in roadless and protected areas are fragmented by roads, logging, and intensive recreation development, both water quality and biodiversity decline as hydrological integrity is lost. The roaded, intensively managed landscapes of other national forest lands have been closely correlated with heavily sediment-laden streams and dramatic changes in flow regimes."
— Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 2011
The Three Sisters IRA, Deschutes National Forest, currently has no impervious road surfaces, no exposed cut or fill slopes, and no stream crossings delivering sediment to channels. This is what "roadless condition" means in hydrological terms: the watershed functions as if roads do not exist, because they do not. Every road mile constructed subtracts from this condition permanently.
The U.S. National Forests are the headwaters of our great rivers and the largest source of municipal water supply in the nation. According to DellaSala (2011), national forests supply drinking water to at least 124 million people in more than 3,400 communities across 33 states—roughly a third of all national-forest runoff originates in inventoried roadless areas. Roads are a major cause of water pollution: erosion rates from logging roads have been documented as much as 850% higher than from undisturbed forest. Because the 2001 Roadless Rule protects these headwaters, it is vital for maintaining clean drinking water for communities across the country. Major U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, and Atlanta receive a significant portion of their water supply from national forests.
“Klamath-Siskiyou case study mapped ~500 roadless areas and found roadless tracts bolster habitat representation and landscape connectivity, including smaller roadless patches. — Strittholt & DellaSala, 2001 (https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1523-1739.2001.99577.x)”
“National-scale analysis found 77% of roadless areas have potential to conserve threatened & endangered species, with strong concordance with grizzly recovery zones. — Loucks et al., 2003 (https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-00528-070205)”
“Builds the first national forest-fragmentation database using high-resolution land cover data combined with road density. Demonstrates a methodology for assessing forest intactness across the U.S. and quantifies how few large intact forest patches remain, strengthening the case that the remaining roadless tracts are disproportionately valuable for biodiversity and ecosystem function. — Heilman et al., 2002 (https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2002)052[0411:FFOTCU]2.0.CO;2)”
“A national analysis of two decades of wildfire data found that human-started wildfires accounted for 84% of all wildfires, tripled the length of the fire season, and were responsible for nearly half of all area burned. Because roads are the primary vector for human ignitions, the finding directly bears on the wildfire consequences of opening roadless areas to road construction. — Balch et al., 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617394114)”
With appreciation,
CommentID: RLC-20261006-93YZ3Q