Dear Chief Tom Schultz:
As someone who has been on public land in all kinds of conditions and has noticed which policies have held and made a difference. The impact is has made is now at risk, and I have to put my voice to this issue as someone who lives near and who loves to be an outdoor tourist.
As wildfire prevalence rises, more and more land is at risk for destructive fires. Doing all we can now to prevent the forests and roadless areas from being destroyed is important for our future on the planet. Furthermore, fires are costly to contain and can damage expensive infrastructure and take human lives when ignited.
Regarding the Mt. Olympus in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest, Utah:
For Pinyon Jay in Mt. Olympus, the connection between road construction and 7.1.1 - Increase in fire frequency/intensity is direct: roads deliver the disturbance vectors — sediment, access, fragmentation — that NatureServe identifies as driving Slight or 1-10% pop. decline severity impacts on this population.
The proposed rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule jeopardizes 44.5 million acres of undeveloped backcountry forestland managed by the U.S. Forest Service. These forests have only remained intact because of the Forest Service's nearly 25-year-old commitment not to build roads in these areas for harmful activities like major logging operations or oil-and-gas drilling.
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.
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz testified to the Senate that 24.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas are within one mile of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)—calling it "our primary concern." A GIS analysis by The Wilderness Society using the Forest Service's own data found the actual figure is just 2.8 million acres—a nearly ninefold exaggeration. Less than 5% of inventoried roadless area acreage is in close proximity to the WUI, not 42% as Schultz claimed. The administration has 23.3 million acres of non-roadless forest land already available near the WUI for fuel reduction—without ever touching a roadless area.
Building more roads in national forests would be a drain on taxpayers. Even with the Roadless Rule in place, the Forest Service already has a 380,000-mile road system that the agency cannot afford to maintain: the deferred-maintenance road backlog was estimated at $8.4 billion in the 2001 Final Environmental Impact Statement and is roughly $15.6 billion in today's dollars. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly flagged Forest Service deferred maintenance as one of the largest in the federal government, and the backlog has never dropped below $5 billion. Adding new roads to inventoried roadless areas would only deepen that hole.
The Roadless Rule is one of America's most popular conservation measures, and that support has not faded. Prior to its 2001 enactment, more than 600 public hearings were held nationwide and 1.6 million Americans weighed in to call for protection of these forestlands—more comments than any other federal rule had received at the time. When USDA announced its rescission proposal, the compressed 21-day public comment period in late 2025 drew approximately 600,000 additional comments. A detailed roadless.org analysis of the comment record found that more than 99.8% of submitters opposed the rescission. A February 2026 Pew Charitable Trusts national poll found that 76% of likely voters support the Roadless Rule compared to just 13% opposed, with bipartisan backing from 71% of Republicans, 80% of Democrats, and 80% of independents. More than 100 members of Congress have co-sponsored the Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2025 (S.2042 / H.R.3930) to codify the Rule so it could not be rolled back without an act of Congress.
Road building has been proven to increase wildfires, not lessen their risk. Roads bring in humans, equipment, and vehicles that all pose fire risk. 84% of wildfires are human-caused, meaning more roads built to bring in more humans to cause those fires. The Fire Ecology study done in 2026 by Aplet, Hartger, and Dietz proved that roadless areas have lower wildfire ignition density than those areas within 50 meters of a road. What really protects forests from fire is keeping them wild.
Yours sincerely,
Sydney Yoder