Please DO NOT rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule (66 FR 3244) at 36 CFR 294 Subpart B!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is a terrible idea that will lead to wholesale destruction and development of millions of acres of wilderness, destroying ecosystems and critical habitat for plants and animals for whom that landscape is HOME. It's not a negotiable commodity subject to prerogative management, it is their food and shelter and their survival depends upon keeping it intact. Furthermore, research shows that increased roads and human accessed areas actually INCREASES wildfire risk, as the vast majority of wildfires are human caused. As someone who lives in an area increasingly ravaged by catastrophic fires, doing anything to heighten that risk is not only poor management, it's outright reckless and incompetent.
I'm so tired of politicians and corportations seeing natural landscapes as something on a commodities balance sheet. Roadless places are not unused or empty, they are being used by the thousands of plants, animals, and insects that have called them home for eons longer than humans have even been around. The idea that we are somehow set apart from nature and do not rely on keeping this places intact is sheer hubris, ignorance, and arrogance. We destroy wild places to not only their peril, but our own.
I vehemently oppose rescinding the Roadless Rule, as do the vast majority of Americans. Please do your job and represent OUR voices, not those of corporations who stand to profit from the destruction of some of the last remaining intact wild places we have.