US Plan to Revamp Forest Protections Panned for Focus on Logging

The Trump administration plans to roll back roadless area protections in national forests because the existing rule places an “undue burden” on the timber industry, which natural resources attorneys say makes the revamp legally vulnerable.

The US Forest Service’s rationale to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, posted to the Federal Register Thursday, cited President Donald Trump’s desire to cut down forests, boost domestic wood products, and reduce wildfire risk across the US as primary reasons to roll back the rule.

The rollback reflects the USDA’s new focus on expanding logging, boosting rural economic opportunities, and cutting regulations, the notice says.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the plan in June and the Forest Service said Wednesday it would prepare an environmental impact statement on the rollback. The plan is open to public comment until Sept. 19.

The rule protects more than 44 million acres of federal forests from road-building and logging from Alaska to Puerto Rico. Federal rules that protect about 14 million acres of roadless areas in Colorado and Idaho will remain in place, according to the notice.

The ban on road-building didn’t anticipate a need for forest thinning to reduce wildfire threat for at least 20 years, the notice says.

Insect and disease infestations and wildfire risk near towns and other developments call for local forest managers to determine whether increased logging access to roadless areas is needed without national-scale regulations getting in their way, the Forest Service said in the notice.

But natural resources attorneys say the Forest Service’s rationale doesn’t clearly justify the rollback.

More Evidence Needed

The Forest Service is ignoring the flexibility the Roadless Rule grants local forest managers to address wildfire risk, and it is making an unpersuasive case for its repeal, said Timothy Preso, managing attorney at environmental law firm Earthjustice.

Preso was on the Earthjustice team that successfully defended the Roadless Rule in court, first when Wyoming sued to challenge it, and again when the George W. Bush administration tried to replace the rule with one that allowed individual states to craft their own.

“The administration continues to insist that repealing the Roadless Rule is necessary to reduce wildfire risk, but they fail to grapple with the fact that wildfire ignitions are far more common in roaded landscapes,” Preso said.

Forest Service research published in 2020 shows that more wildfires ignite near roads, wildfire mitigation efforts have been more common in roadless areas than in the rest of the national forest system, and roadless areas have no effect on wildfire burn rates.

The agency is overlooking the 1976 National Forest Management Act and trying to justify ending roadless area protections based on an early 20th century vision for the Forest Service in which the local forest manager was “king,” said Murray Feldman, partner at Holland & Hart LLP in Boise, Idaho.

The NFMA imposed national environmental standards and processes that were responses to widespread clearcutting, and it’s unclear how the Forest Service intends to comply with them in its rollback proposal, he said.

“When an agency seeks to rescind a prior policy, it must provide a record-supported basis” that satisfied a “reasoned analysis” standard, but it offers no hint in the Federal Register notice of how it might do that, Feldman said.

“Although the administration may have valid policy reasons behind the proposal, that alone may not be enough to support the proposed revocation in the face of the inevitable future litigation challenges,” he said.

But ending roadless area protections is important because it does not reflect a modern, science-based approach to manage forests, which are still subject to a maze of complex federal laws, said Nick Smith, spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council, an Oregon-based timber industry group.

“If it’s legal for a President to take Executive action to establish the Roadless Rule, it’s hard to argue that another President can’t take Executive action to rescind the Roadless Rule,” Smith said in an email.

Focus on Logging

The Forest Service is planning to rescind the rule after Secretary Rollins declared a timber emergency to “get more logs on trucks” and Trump signed an executive order in March calling for expanded forest cutting to avoid importing wood products and reduce wildfire threats.

“All of these rationales are legally suspect,” Sam Evans, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in an email. “The Forest Service is about to run headlong into the reality that propaganda (like what we see in this notice) is hard to defend in a science-based analysis.”

Rescinding the Roadless Rule will affect tribes, but they are not included as cooperating agencies in the process, said Susan Jane Brown, chief counsel at nonprofit environmental law firm Silvix Resources.

“We’ll have to wait to see the EIS to determine whether the Forest Service can sufficiently make its case for repeal,” though the Roadless Rule is likely to be upheld in court as it was after Wyoming and other states challenged more than 20 years ago, she said.

The Roadless Rule was finalized in 2001 as a way to protect drinking water and endangered species.

Among the places the rule has preserved are parts of the world’s largest coastal temperate rainforest in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, vast mountain ranges in central Idaho, the peaks and plateaus above Utah’s contested Bears Ears National Monument, and the Appalachian forest in Virginia.