Viewpoint: Roadless areas are great, and we can better protect them

Katie Bilodeau and Gary Macfarlane

In these coming days many in the environmental community will remind us why our roadless areas are great. And they are. While the National Wilderness Preservation System is 112 million acres, the nation’s roadless inventory adds about 60 million more acres of a secondary yet important level of national forest protection. Roadless areas connect Wilderness areas. Wilderness is the only statutory designation that protects natural processes and systems, but roadless areas provide important administrative protection for other areas, generally protecting old and mature forests, water sources, and countless other benefits.

Additionally, roadless areas help stitch together a larger wild landscape. Roadless areas could also be future Wilderness; in fact, many roadless areas are proposed for wilderness designation in the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act.

The U.S. Forest Service analyzed three alternatives for the future of the 2001 Roadless Rule in the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) it publicly released on August 20, and none are great. Two alternatives would entirely or partially eliminate protections for roadless areas—on brand with the administration’s nihilistic push for “development.” The third, “no-action” alternative would keep the 2001 Roadless Rule in place. Just because roadless areas are great does not necessarily mean the 2001 Roadless Rule works well. And we must not limit ourselves to the menu of choices the Forest Service is spoon-feeding us.

Here is how we can improve the Roadless Rule. While the following ideas may be controversial, even among some conservationists, protective measures like these are within the purview of administrative action and could greatly strengthen the Roadless Rule.

Eliminate the logging loopholes. In the 2000 EIS for what became the Roadless Rule, the Forest Service created exceptions to log in roadless areas. But the agency also considered an alternative that had no exceptions. The loopholes in the alternative adopted—explicitly listed in the rule itself—include logging “generally small diameter timber” to “improve” habitat for sensitive, threatened, or endangered species or to “maintain or restore” ecosystem structure to reduce “uncharacteristic” wildfire effects. These are absurd. Logging has never saved species by “improving” habitat, but it has destroyed enough habitat to cause the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list Canada lynx, grizzly bears, northern spotted owls, and bull trout (to name a few) under the Endangered Species Act. We are in a brave new world—a hot one—and cutting down natural solutions (yes, trees) won’t cool our planet but will contribute to the warming that is causing record drought and longer fire seasons. Science over the past two decades has debunked that we can improve roadless areas by logging them.

For at least a decade, the U.S. Forest Service Northern Region tracked logging projects it authorized in roadless areas in Montana (and Idaho, which along with Colorado, has a less protective national forest roadless rule not being considered by the Forest Service for change). According to the Forest Service’s own decade of accounting, it authorized 33,000 acres of logging in inventoried roadless areas in Montana under the 2001 Roadless Rule. When we cross checked those figures with the project’s actual environmental analyses, we found authorized logging in inventoried roadless areas in Montana was closer to 40,000 acres. In the 2000 EIS for the Roadless Rule, the agency predicted the US Forest Service would only authorize about 1,400 acres of logging in roadless areas across the nation annually. But instead, on average from 2008-2018, the agency averaged authorized 3,200 acres of inventoried roadless logging annually in Montana alone. The majority of this logging overreach—according to the agency’s corresponding environmental analyses—relied upon the loopholes described above.

Montana is not unique. In California in 2024, the Forest Service finally prevailed in the Ninth Circuit, convincing the Court that trees up to 21 inches in diameter were “small-diameter” trees and the agency could log into an inventoried roadless area. Such an interpretation is baffling, since a 16-inch diameter tree in a dry climate like California can be a mature tree, making a 20-inch-diameter tree old growth.

Eliminate livestock grazing in our inventoried roadless areas. Livestock grazing—which is pervasive on nearly 250 million acres of our public lands despite being four percent of livestock production in this nation—spreads invasive grasses that exacerbate wildfires, displaces wildlife, destroys habitat, and pollutes clean water. The U.S. Forest Service is clandestinely restocking vacant grazing allotments with cattle—including in roadless areas and Wilderness—without public knowledge or participation. The 2001 Roadless Rule doesn’t protect our national roadless inventory from this environmental degradation.

Restrict motorized and mechanized use in our inventoried roadless areas. Research shows that motorized and mechanized access—on roads, trails, or over the snow—harm wildlife, from elk to grizzly bears. Recent trends that conflate recreation with conservation and that see public lands, including roadless areas on national forests, as merely a commodity to exploit for a growing number of new recreational toys and experiences also present threats to wildlife and those seeking solitude. Additionally, the U.S. Forest Service also has the Travel Management Rule in its crosshairs, and wants to open all public lands outside of Wilderness to motorized use. The 2001 Roadless Rule won’t protect our national roadless wildlands from this environmental degradation, either.

Because all of these degradations can still happen if the 2001 Roadless Rule remains in place, advocating for the no-action alternative in the draft EIS becomes problematic.

If you comment on the Forest Service’s proposal, don’t order from their pathetic menu. Even the status quo loses our roadless wildlands inventory with degradation by a thousand cuts. Demand a better alternative that closes the industrial logging and livestock grazing loopholes that have existed for a quarter century, and will protect from the motorized and mechanized destruction on the horizon. While you are at it, ask that the less protective rules in Idaho and Colorado be made part of a strengthened national rule. This is how we protect our roadless and wilderness heritage.

Katie Bilodeau is Wilderness Watch’s Legislative Director and Policy Analyst and Gary Macfarlane is a former board member. Wilderness Watch is a national Wilderness organization headquartered in Missoula, Montana.