The federal administration announced a proposal to roll back protections on more than 4 million acres of undeveloped U.S. Forest land in California.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced on Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule, which prohibits road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting on 58.5 million acres in the National Forest System (NFS).
According to the announcement by the USDA, the rule covers 30% of National Forest System lands, including nearly 60% of the Forest Service land in Utah, 58% in Montana, and 92% in Alaska’s National Forest, the largest in the country.
Rollins said rescinding the rule would help with wildfire prevention and allow for “responsible timber production,” adding that Utah “estimates the roadless rule alone creates a 25% decrease in economic development in the forestry sector.”
This announcement comes as a controversial mandate by Utah Senator Mike Lee to sell off millions of acres of federal lands has been ruled out of Senate Republicans’ budget bill, though its supporters are pushing to keep it alive.
What is the Roadless Rule?
Enacted in 2001 by the Clinton Administration, the Roadless Rule establishes prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting on 58.5 million acres in the National Forest System (NFS).
The rule was created after more than 600 public hearings were held across the country, generating more than 1.6 million public comments in favor of adopting it—more comments than any other rule in the nation’s history, according to Earthjustice,
California, which has nearly 21 million acres of national forest, more than any other state except Alaska, has 4,416,000 acres of inventoried roadless land.
The state’s roadless acreage stretches from the “dense coastal forests in the far north, to alpine conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada, to Southern California’s great expanses of brush in the Cleveland, San Bernardino and Angeles national forests” according to reporting by CalMatters, and are “considered important for providing habitat for more than 200 threatened or endangered species of wildlife, including owls, salmon and frogs, and for protecting vital watersheds.”
Analysis from The Wilderness Society (TWS), which looked at wildfire data from 1992 to 2024 and is in the peer-review process, found that wildfires are nearly four times more likely to start in forest areas that have roads, in comparison with roadless areas. TWS concluded that “building roads into roadless areas is likely to result in more fires.”
Roadless forests also protect clean drinking water that ultimately flows into the faucets of millions of Americans, according to Earthjustice, which has vowed to fight the Trump Administration in court if they move forward on the proposal.
Austin Corona and John Leos of the Arizona Republic contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Salinas Californian: New proposal could rollback protections for 4 million acres of U.S Forest in California
Reporting by Roseann Cattani, Salinas Californian / Salinas Californian
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
