COMMUNITY NEWS
Goodbye, Roadless Rule Ecosystems, recreation, rural communities, and retailers rely on 45 million acres in the balance. By Doug Schnitzspahn
I t’s not hard to find a road in the United States. We have over 4,000,000 miles of roads, with about 1.3 million of those unpaved, often in rural areas. On National Forest lands, there are over 380,000 miles of roads. The only places we can’t have roads in the U.S. are in legal Wilder- ness Areas created by Congress, thanks to the 1964 Wilderness Act. Visionary legislation, it preserves places of spectacular beauty and wildness for their own sake. There are 803 federally designated Wilderness Areas in the U.S., covering more than 111 million acres (5% of the land in the country) on National Park, Forest Service, Bureau of Land
Management, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lands (57.8 million acres of this is in Alaska). In the lower 48, the farthest you can get from a road is in a place in Yellowstone National Park dubbed “The Thorofare,” where you’ll hike at least 30 miles to the nearest road and grizzly bears roam the night. But there is still land that is roadless yet not protected by the Wilderness Act. These places are no less spectacular or worthy of preservation. In 2001, then-President Clinton acted to preserve roughly 58 million acres of roadless areas in the National Forest system. Known as the Roadless Rule, this measure—which took
four years to implement with 430 public meetings and 95% approval in 1.6 million public comments—effectively stopped most new road building. There is a practical element at play here, too, since road building and upkeep is costly and the Forest Service is already facing a $10.8 billion maintenance backlog including existing roads as of 2024. By restricting the building of roads in these areas, the rule preserves ecosystems and water- sheds—and, just as importantly, recreation opportunities that stoke local rural economies. From Crescent Mountain in Oregon to the Green Mountains of Vermont these are landscapes
support not wildlife and natural ecosystems—and complex economies of guides, outfitters, and retailers whose livelihoods depend on them. Now, 45 million acres of those roadless areas are about to be opened to new road building, which would forever change them (lands in Idaho and Colorado are not included due to state-specific roadless rules). In August, the Forest Service, as di- rected by the Trump Administra- tion, began the process to rescind the Roadless Rule with an initial MULTI-USE PARADISE: Road- less areas are open to more human-powered activites, including mountain biking, than designated Wilderess areas while remaing remote and wild.
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