FS-2025-0001-601492

To the USDA Forest Service Chief Schultz and rulemaking team, I am asking the USDA Forest Service to maintain the 2001 Roadless Rule, both nationally, and within my home region of the Tongass National Forest. Beginning in 2002, I worked as a research assistant, then wildlife biologist and graduate student on the Tongass National Forest, often working within designated roadless areas across the Tongass. I also served as a professor at the University of Montana for eight years, where my students, and staff, participated in wilderness stewardship efforts across roadless areas (and wilderness study areas) on USFS lands and BLM lands (WSAs). Not only do I know roadless areas personally, as a recreation enthusiast and for subsistence hunting, fishing and harvesting, but my professional positions often rely on intact federal public lands, or advocating for these lands. My students benefit from learning about these lands while traveling across roadless areas to understand the different kinds of land management. These lands, first identified in part by the Wilderness Institute in the 1970s, where I served as director, are lands destined for protection from fragmentation, and therefore, they have become important, default habitat areas for wildlife in some cases. On the Tongass, roadless areas also represent places where mining access is not currently allowed, and roadless areas have prevented some of the worst, half-baked state of Alaska projects (e.g. Road to Juneau) from moving forward because of roadless designations on the Tongass. I realize this, in part, is why the Trump administration would like to remove these protections. However, I would like the administration to know that myself, and many other Alaskans who stand to lose the most in this rulemaking, overwhelmingly do not support rescinding the roadless rule. There are many legal inaccuracies and hasty decisions that create a faulty rulemaking process. I have attached supplemental letters that illustrate both the legal issues and inaccuracies with the roadless rule decision-making process, and its implications for the near-term Tongass Land Management Plan revision process. Again - I continue to live and work on the Tongass National Forest. Though these are national public lands, important for everyone, I think it is very important to also listen to those of us who live, work, and reside adjacent to these roadless areas, as your decisions from Washington, DC will very immediately impact our lives in local, rural and remote communities across Alaska. All the best, Dr. Natalie Dawson Haines, Alaska