FS-2025-0001-601593

I am just one of millions of Americans lucky enough to have walked in a wilderness, in land that is part of our National Forest and protected by the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Act. The wilderness in my back yard is the Sandwich Range where intrepid locals banded together in 1898 to form trails that they made available to everyone. They were followed by others who fought to protect the forest with the Weeks Act in 1911 and still later who assembled mountains of documents and gave testimony to establish it formally -and they hoped finally -as Wilderness in 2006. The Roadless Area Conservation Act itself was a triumph of human cooperation that was achieved with the input of 1.6 million letters and hundreds of meetings over many years. I consider it an act of reverence- an acknowledgement that the natural environment we have been given deserves respect and protection from human interference. The forest itself embues a sense of generosity, at once it belongs to no one and still to everyone. It fills me we awe as it does almost everyone who enters it. So the announcement that the U.S. Forest Service plans to rescind the Act that protects the roadless forest fills me with dred and outrage. The building of roads to facilitate commercial development would destroy the value of these uninterrupted ecosystems as habitat for precious and endangered flora and fauna, eco-systems that function in beneficial ways we have barely begun to understand. Rescinding the Roadless Act to facilitate development is short-sighted, prejudiced to serve narrow commercial interests and simply immoral. Keep the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Act. Respectfully submitted,