Public meetings held to hear Roadless Rule testimony

Laura Lundquist

(Missoula Current) Even though the U.S. Forest Service may not be listening, Missoulians turned out to let the Trump administration know that they support the 25-year-old Roadless Rule.

In the third of seven meetings being held across the state, a coalition of organizations calling themselves the Public Lands Defense Coalition took on the role of the Forest Service and offered Montanans the opportunity to testify on a federal proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule. In Missoula, where more than 200 people gathered in the Missoula Public Library's Cooper Room, the commenters were resoundingly opposed.

“Punching roads into our roadless areas will degrade the habitat for big game animals and it’s going to wreck a lot of our clean, cold waters for our native fish species. But another thing that we haven’t really talked about is how it’s going to ruin our uncrowded, pristine, Montana wildland experiences,” said Josh Liljedahl, a Backcountry Hunters and Anglers representative. “With roads, we’re going to see more and more people in these places that we all love, and they are not going to be the same, and we will not get that back.”

In June, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced she was rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule, which had prevented road-building on 58.5 million acres of remote Forest Service land. During the public comment period in September, almost 656,000 people commented, and more than 99% opposed the rule’s repeal, according to a Center for Western Priorities analysis of around a third of the comments.

The Public Land Defense Coalition petitioned the Forest Service to have public meetings on the proposal but was met with silence. So they organized the seven meetings in Montana and will send the comments to the Forest Service, which has said a final decision is expected in the fall.

Hosted by Wild Montana, the meeting started with a three-person panel that addressed the various issues that led to the creation of the Roadless Rule and how its repeal could change a number of characteristics for the 6 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in Montana.

James Burchfield, former University of Montana School of Forestry dean, said the roadless areas are roadless for a reason: the timber isn’t that valuable and the terrain makes logging difficult and expensive. That also made it more expensive to build roads there, especially when the Forest Service can’t maintain the roads that it has. So creating roadless areas was actually a cost-saving measure.

However, Rollins says she wants to eliminate the Roadless Rule to build more roads to, among other things, reduce wildfire risk and help fight fires. Burchfield called those reasons “tenuous,” because people are the cause of around 75-85% of wildfire starts, so building new roads increases the risk of wildfires starting in more places. Plus, logging in the high-elevation forests of roadless areas doesn’t contribute to forest health because trees in those environments don’t respond well to such treatment, Burchfield said.

Greg Munther, former Forest Service district ranger and fisheries biologist, agreed with Burchfield that roads bring more people into wild areas, and that increases the risk not only of wildfire but also the risk to wildlife such as elk and grizzly bears that need secure habitat. In addition, roads bring in other invasive species such as knapweed and Canada thistle.

“Roads equal mortality. The judges have said that over and over again when the Forest Service has tried to soft-pedal existing roads on the landscape and said they weren’t important because they had a gate on them. But roads, whether they’re closed or open, are conduits for humans to penetrate the heart of whatever landscape is out there,” Munther said. “I spent 12 years on the Lolo (National Forest) as a fisheries biologist. I have a lot of experience with roads and fish, and it isn’t positive.”

Among the 19 people who gave public testimony, Chris Servheen, former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator, echoed Munther, saying that roadless areas protect secure wildlife habitat and migration corridors that allow grizzlies to move between recovery areas to establish new populations and keep other populations genetically healthy. For that reason, the Fish and Wildlife Service based the grizzly bear recovery plans partly on the protections of the Roadless Rule. So rescinding the rule creates a problem, Servheen said.

“The fact that the Forest Service wants to rescind the rule without any public meetings doesn’t mean the Forest Service wants to do that. That’s the politicians that are making that decision,” Servheen said. “But if the roadless rule is rescinded, that means that thousands of square miles of grizzly bear habitat will be open to roading. And if that happens, the management plans that are necessary to delist grizzly bears will be invalid. We’ll need to start over, and grizzly bears can never be delisted.”

Brian Riggers, former Forest Service Region 1 roadless coordinator, said most local Forest Service employees might not support rescinding the Roadless Rule, but he disagreed with Servheen that it was only politicians pushing the agenda.

“In large part, that’s accurate. But I want people to know that we have people higher up in the Forest Service who don’t necessarily represent what I would say the majority of the people in the Forest Service or the majority of the people in the public want,” Riggers said. “There are way fewer local Forest people now, and most of this stuff, from my experience, isn’t stuff that local Forest Service people wanted. So what we need to do is talk to the folks in the Forest Service internally, and our representatives and government officials, and say, ‘Represent us. Don’t represent what people above you want you to say.”

A few other commenters said the Roadless Rule should remain in place to benefit wildlife species that are being squeezed into smaller and smaller pockets of habitat as more people move in. A few others support the Roadless Rule but want to take it one or two steps further by reducing some of the uses that are allowed under the rule, such as logging or motorized trails.

“I think we should ask for more. If anything, this has shown how tenuous the roadless protections actually are, and you can see how a lot of these roadless areas are to wilderness areas,” said Ryan Rock. “In the comments, suggesting that some of these areas get absorbed into wilderness areas, designated as wilderness areas, will strengthen those protections. Let’s push for those areas to be permanently protected to avoid something like this happening in the future.”

The two previous meetings in Kalispell on Wednesday and Libby on Thursday reportedly had a different tone with several representatives of the logging industry arguing in favor of rescinding the Roadless Rule. The event moves to Hamilton on Tuesday night starting at 6 at the Rocky Mountain Grange. The rest of the week will see meetings in Butte, Bozeman and Helena.

The Public Lands Defense Coalition includes Wild Montana, Business for Montana’s Outdoors, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Trout Unlimited, Montana Backcountry Horsemen, Wilderness Society, Montana Wildlife Federation, Mountain Mamas, National Parks Conservation Association, Sierra Club and Montana Audubon.

Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.