Dear Secretary Brooke L. Rollins,
I am writing to demand that roadless areas remain protected. These areas are invaluable and cannot be restored once lost. Future generation deserve no less. Short-sighted greed cannot be allowed to take away our children's future.
I have visited the Canaan Valley for over 50 years.
The chance to be in roadless areas as a young person actually changed my life. I learned to listen, hear, see, and love. I learned how to be quiet and know what is good about this life.
The Canaan Loop is one of the most valuable recreational areas in West Virginia. The recreation economy is essential for the area. The chance to be in the wilderness is essential for both West Virginians and others (perhaps native West Virginians, like me) from surrounding states.
Regarding the Canaan Loop in the Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia:
Timber harvest, associated road construction, and vegetation removal directly alter roadless character and degrade habitat quality.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule would open the Canaan Loop, Monongahela National Forest to road construction and associated ground disturbance. The direct and indirect effects of that activity are precisely what makes a specific comment about this area necessary.
Although proponents of rolling back the Roadless Rule claim it is needed for wildfire management, the peer-reviewed science shows the opposite. A 2026 study in Fire Ecology by Aplet, Hartger & Dietz analyzed 32 years of wildfire data across all eight contiguous-U.S. Forest Service regions and found wildfire-ignition density was 7.99 fires per 1,000 hectares within 50 meters of roads, compared to just 1.97 fires per 1,000 hectares in inventoried roadless areas—a fourfold difference. A separate national analysis (Balch et al., PNAS 2017) found that 84% of all U.S. wildfires are human-caused. Roads are the primary vector for human ignitions, so building roads into roadless areas is likely to result in more fires, not fewer.
As the climate warms and species ranges shift northward and upslope, intact roadless areas are emerging as some of the most important climate refugia on the continent. Their unfragmented condition shelters cool microclimates, intact hydrology, and the connected habitat corridors that wildlife and plant communities need to adapt as conditions change. A growing body of peer-reviewed science identifies inventoried roadless areas as disproportionately important both as ecosystem-scale refugia — high-quality, undisturbed substrate that holds carbon and buffers temperature — and as species-scale refugia for cold-adapted, drought-sensitive, and otherwise climate-vulnerable populations. They also anchor portions of the Pacific, Central, Mississippi, and Atlantic migratory bird flyways, providing the unfragmented stopover and breeding habitat that hundreds of species depend on. Fragmenting these areas with new roads severs the very connectivity that climate adaptation requires.
“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)”
“Species-level modeling shows 57% of vulnerable U.S. wildlife species have suitable habitat in roadless areas. Adding unprotected roadless areas to protected areas markedly reduces poorly-represented species of conservation concern. — Dietz et al., 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2021.e01943)”
“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)”
“Tongass roadless areas contain very large biomass and soil carbon stocks, underscoring old-growth protection as a critical climate solution with global significance. — DellaSala et al., 2022 (https://doi.org/10.3390/land11050717)”
“On steep terrain, 21% of trees were damaged by excavators and 33% of trees were damaged by bulldozers during forest road construction, and on very steep terrain, 27% of trees were damaged by excavators and 44% of trees were damaged by bulldozers during forest road construction.”
The forests covered by this Rule are irreplaceable. The Rule itself should be treated the same way.
Yours truly,
CommentID: RLC-20261006-OCPMQB