To the USDA Forest Service:
I am writing to strongly oppose the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, and to ask that it be kept in place in full.
I am an engineer and a father, and I want to be clear about where I stand. I do not believe any of our public lands should be taken away. These places belong to all of us, and most of all to our kids. Taking them back now, acre by acre, is something I cannot support.
I will be honest: the outdoors is fairly new to me as something I lead my own family into. For much of my life it was not a big part of what I did. Over the last couple of years my wife and I have started taking our two kids out into the woods ourselves, and it has changed us. This coming summer we are planning to head out west and spend real time in our public lands and national parks. As an engineer, I plan things carefully, and the single biggest reason those plans are even possible is that this land is public, open, and undeveloped. I am trying to give my kids everything I can, and some of the best of it costs nothing and cannot be bought — it only has to be protected.
Last year our family took a trip through the Black Hills National Forest and down into Colorado, and without question the time we spent in the forests was our favorite part of the entire trip. Being in nature was what we all remembered most. The Black Hills is one of the most beautiful places we have ever seen, some of the finest country in all of South Dakota, and it holds roughly 13,000 acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas. It is one of the forests specifically named as losing protection under this proposal, and we do not want it stripped. Standing among those granite spires and pine forests, it is impossible to understand how anyone could look at that place and decide it needs more roads instead of more protection. That backcountry is exactly the kind of land this rescission would open to road building and logging, and we are saving for a small travel trailer for one reason: to reach more places like it while our kids are still young.
I have looked at the reasons given for this change, and as someone who works with evidence for a living, they do not hold up. The wildfire argument is the one that bothers me most. A 2026 peer reviewed study of more than thirty years of national forest fire records found that ignition density was about four times higher within 50 meters of roads than in Inventoried Roadless Areas, and concluded that building roads into roadless areas is likely to result in more fires (Aplet et al., 2026). That matches plain common sense: most human caused fires start where people and vehicles can go. The current Rule already allows fuel reduction work where it is genuinely needed. What it stops is new road building and commercial logging. Calling more roads a fire solution gets the engineering backwards.
There is also the matter of cost and water. Research found that watersheds shaped by roadless areas supply drinking water to at least 25 million Americans (Olden et al., 2026). At the same time, the Forest Service already carries a multibillion dollar maintenance backlog on roughly 370,000 miles of existing roads. Building more roads the agency cannot afford to maintain is not a responsible plan. No engineer would sign off on expanding a system that is already failing its upkeep.
Sincerely,
Luke Weber
Apple Valley, Minnesota
References
Aplet, G. H., Hartger, P., & Dietz, M. S. (2026). Three-decade record of contiguous-U.S. national forest wildfires indicates increased density of ignitions near roads. Fire Ecology, 22, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-026-00450-2
Olden, J. D., Postel, S. L., Dombeck, M. P., Kesting, H., Freeman, P., & Comte, L. (2026). Assessing the value of the U.S. Roadless Rule for people and nature. PLOS Water, 5(7), Article e0000538. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000538