I strongly oppose the U.S. Forest Service's proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
I am a hiker, lover of the outdoors. Having spent time in Superior National Forest in MN, in the White mountains near Joubildunk region in New Hampshire and most recently living near Balsam Cove in the Black Mountains in North Carolina, I value protected roadless spaces.
I go to the forests to recharge and to ground. It is where I feel most connected to the divine and to spirit. As someone who regularly spends time in these protected areas, these are not abstract areas. I know first hand that the roadless run e matters. I'd like to see it left alone.
The Federal Register Notice initiating the rescission states the goal explicitly: to "facilitate domestic production" of "timber, energy and mineral production... to the maximum possible extent." The proposal is being advanced under Executive Orders 14192 (deregulation), 14225 (timber expansion), and 14154 (energy unleashing), and follows other administrative actions calling for a dramatic increase in logging and oil and gas drilling on federal lands. An increase in these industrial activities would worsen climate change, destroy recreation areas, put the lands at greater risk of wildfire, destroy wildlife habitat, and threaten drinking water sources.
I am concerned that the building of roads in these protected areas will lead to the destruction of the forests that I love so much.
Road networks bring a number of secondary impacts -- opening previously inaccessible areas to extraction via logging and wood harvesting. These activities would bring machinery, chemical inputs and intrusion into the pristine habitats that I love. The roads themselves would compact the soil, reroute surface and subsurface water flow, create impervious surfaces....disturbing wildlife..
I am particularly concerned about the increased risk of forest fires as areas along the roads, with human activity .
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.
Logging and wood harvesting results in the cutting down of the largest trees that are most resilient to fires, and which are most beneficial in terms of carbon storage, which is essential in the face of climate change.
Road construction and logging also adversely impact on water quality, biodiversity and habitat integrity. Runoff from roads add contaminants and sediment to streams, degrading water quality and impacting aquatic wildlife.
I urge the U.S. Forest Service to withdraw this proposal and maintain the protections provided by the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule.