The Roadless Rule is a U.S. Forest Service regulation that protects inventoried roadless areas from certain timber activities and construction within the national forest system, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The rule has been in effect since 2001, but U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced recently the Trump administration plans to rescind the rule. We learn more about how the regulation affects Oregon and its forests from Travis Joseph, the president and CEO of the American Forest Resource Council, and Steve Pedery, the conservation director of Oregon Wild.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the end of an era. The Roadless Rule has been in effect since 2001. It prohibits permanent road construction on nearly 59 million acres in the National Forest System, including about 2 million acres in Oregon. Last month, the Trump administration announced plans to rescind the rule, saying it’s been an impediment to responsible forest management. Conservation groups completely disagree. They see the rule as a crucial tool.
In a few minutes, we’ll get the perspective of the group Oregon Wild. First, I’m joined by Travis Joseph. He is the president and CEO of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association that represents mills and lumber manufacturers. Travis, welcome to the show.
Travis Joseph: Hey, thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
Miller: How do you describe the Roadless Rule?
Joseph: I think it’s really important to start with context. I think that’s missing from some of these conversations. Every acre of national forest in Oregon, every acre of every national forest throughout the country is regulated by a network of overlapping rules, regulations and laws. And this is with or without the Roadless Rule. So in Oregon, let’s make it more local … If you’re west of the Cascades in Oregon, our forests are regulated by what’s called the Northwest Forest Plan. If you’re east of the Cascades in Oregon, our forests are regulated by Individual Forest Plans, and those forest plans zone our forests. They tell us what you can and can’t do.
About 80% of Oregon’s national forests are in reserves. They’re protected. That means they’re off limits to ongoing forest management and logging. Even the remaining 20%, which is potentially available for active management, is highly regulated and overlaid with other restrictions if management occurs in those areas. And under our current forest plans, federal timber harvests in Oregon have decreased by 90% from the 1990s, and that continues today. So even if the Roadless Rule is rescinded, the baseline in the laws of the land remain the same. Every activity on federal lands is still governed by forest lands, the National Forest Management Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Quantum Conservation Strategy, survey and management of site greens, archaeological surveys. So all of those things still apply. And that’s why our federal forests are the most regulated lands in the world, with or without the Roadless Rule.
To me, in terms of your question about describing the Roadless Rule, the best analogy that I can come up with is the Roadless Rule being like wearing five life jackets on a boat. If you’re rafting the Rogue River and you’re afraid of going in the water or the rapids, does wearing five life jackets make you safer? No. It might make you feel buffered and protected if you’re in the boat. But it actually could put you at risk if you fall into the water and you have to swim to safety or try to get back onto the boat.
The Roadless Rule is the fifth or sixth life jacket that we’ve put on our forest and we’ve put on our land managers. It might make us feel more protected, when in fact it might be actually getting in the way of meeting our ecological goals because it takes away, it excludes, science-based management from our forests.
Miller: It seems like you’re saying two things … It doesn’t do anything that’s not already being done, so don’t worry environmentalists or conservationists because there’s all these other layers of protection. But at the end, you did say that something could change as a result of this being rescinded. So I want to understand both sides of that. But what are you saying will change or would change if this rulemaking rescission goes through?
Joseph: It simply gives additional flexibility, some additional flexibility, because I just named a bunch of federal laws, rules and regulations that remain in place that govern all federal forests. But it gives some additional flexibility and management tools to land managers, the experts on the ground, to make local decisions that make sense for that local forest. But those decisions must still comply with all other federal laws and regulations.
You nailed it. On the one hand, there’s this idea that by rescinding the Roadless Rule, you’re opening up 60 million acres to clear cut logging and road building. That’s just simply not the case. What it does do and what we’ve been essentially arguing about nationally for the last quarter century since the Roadless Rule was signed, is where those decisions should happen. Should they happen at the local level, based on the federal laws and regulations that apply to our national forest, or should those decisions be made in Washington, D.C.?
Another way to be thinking about the Roadless Rule is to ask your listeners, do they think that a road engineer, a biologist or a forester on, say, the Willamette National Forest, who lives in your community and who is better equipped and positioned to make the right decision for the Willamette National Forest, or is someone in Washington, D.C., who has never visited the Willamette or Oregon, in a better position to make a decision for the Willamette National Forest? That’s what’s at stake in this decision. It is not getting rid of all the rules and regulations that govern our public lands that we all care deeply about. It’s where the decision lies. And the Roadless Rule places strict, heavy-handed restrictions on local managers to make the right decision for their communities.
Miller: But the companies and organizations that are members of your trade group, would they be interested in getting rid of this rule if it were simply a question of where a decision is being made, locally or at the federal level, or if they thought different decisions in the end were going to be made? In other words, do they assume that more areas will be logged, there’ll be more board feet of lumber coming to their mills, say, as a direct result of this rule, say, over the next 20 years?
Joseph: Both. We want decision making to be local. And we do expect that when you do local decision making and you remove one of those five or six life jackets, the local decision makers will make decisions that lead to more active management. That’s what the science tells us. What ecologists are saying is that drawing lines around dynamic ecosystems and saying we’ve protected these forests, we’ve protected old growth, we’ve protected our water, our air, by just simply drawing lines and saying “thou shalt not do these things,” is somehow protection.
That paradigm doesn’t work. We’ve been trying that for a quarter century. So by changing this restriction, by changing this policy that overlaid all other federal laws and regulations, and letting those decision makers make those decisions, it will lead to more active management. And yes, I do believe that it will lead to some additional timber supply to support existing infrastructure.
Miller: Travis Joseph, thanks very much.
Joseph: Thanks for the opportunity.
Miller: Travis Joseph is the president and CEO of the American Forest Resource Council. We’re talking right now about the Trump administration’s plans to do away with the Roadless Rule, which currently prevents permanent road construction on nearly 59 million acres in the national forest system.
For a very different perspective on this, I’m joined now by Steve Pedery. He is the conservation director of the group Oregon Wild. Steve, welcome back.
Steve Pedery: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: Let me first just give you a chance to respond to what you heard from Travis, in particular, the overall point he was making in a number of different ways that this only gets rid of one aspect of federal regulation and a whole bunch of layers of regulation are still in effect.
Pedery: I was really struck by the list that he rattled off of environmental protections that are all either under attack or being repealed by the Trump administration. And I think that is an important thing to remember here. This isn’t a time where we have a federal government that’s just tinkering around the edges of public lands and conservation policy. We’re really seeing a presidential administration that’s trying to rip the engine out.
Miller: What specific effects do you envision if this change goes through and if this rule is removed?
Pedery: I would start by saying it’s important to remember when we talk about Roadless Rules, we’re really talking about the last undeveloped wild places we have in the national forest system, [which is] about 60 million acres nationally, about 2 million acres here in Oregon – places along the Pacific Crest Trail, Mount Hebo and the Coast Range, areas around Hell’s Canyon out in Northeast Oregon. These are really the best we have left, in terms of lands that are places where natural processes and nature still gets to do its thing with minimal human interference.
And I think the reason the Trump administration is doing this, and what I fear will come out of this if they’re successful, is that we will see new roads punched into those places, new development, new logging. And then along the line, we’ll see more human-caused fire starts, we’ll see more invasive species, we’ll see fewer salmon, fewer opportunities for elk and mule deer to find winter range and calving habitat. The whole host of values these roadless areas provide being diminished is really a loss for all Americans.
Miller: What is the problem with roads?
Pedery: Roads fragment habitat. And at a very basic level, if you think about the conservation movement internationally, whether we’re talking about trying to conserve tigers in India, or we’re trying to talk about elephants in Africa, or grizzly bears in the United States, what you find is areas that have been heavily eroded and fragmented provide poorer habitat.
Over time you get additional habitat losses and more pressure for development comes in. There’s greater and greater logging, mining and other development. And as that habitat is diminished, those species decline. Other species decline. There’s direct human impacts as well. Some of our cleanest sources of drinking water here in Oregon are found in roadless areas on public lands. Cities like Bend get their drinking water out of creeks that flow off of inventoried roadless areas.
And then for those of us who are hikers or fly anglers or backcountry hunters, roadless areas are really some of the best wild landscapes we have left to get outside and enjoy those activities in a setting that hasn’t been crisscrossed and degraded by logging and development.
Miller: One of the arguments made by the Trump administration, and I think Travis Joseph mentioned it in passing in our brief conversation, was that getting rid of the Roadless Rule will provide wildfire responders more options to deal with increasingly catastrophic wildfires on public lands. What’s your response?
Pedery: Well, I would say, first, we should go back to your initial segment and that conversation about 80% of wildfire starts around the country being caused by humans. And what we see on the landscape in Oregon is where you have roads, you have things like illegal shooting ranges, you have people using ATVs irresponsibly, unattended campfires, the kinds of things that cause fire starts that we all have to deal with and live through. Then the second piece …
Miller: I just want to understand. Then the argument would be that if there are more robust, more permanent roads in places that currently don’t have them, then more humans are likely to go to them. And then by bringing their humanness there and their carelessness, they are more likely to set fires. That’s your argument?
Pedery: Exactly. I would say it’s not an unreasonable view, given that the timber industry in the summer generally locks their own gates and shuts the public out to keep the public off of private timber roads and reduce the risk of fire to their own forests.
Miller: How much fire response can currently happen in these roadless areas?
Pedery: Quite a bit, I think. Travis described the Roadless Rules as a straitjacket and it’s a really pretty flexible tool. It was developed to allow a whole host of activities that preserve the roadless character of the landscape, that sort of primitive backcountry character of it, but allow for restoration activities like prescribed fire, like thinning. You can actually go in and thin a forest that’s protected by the Roadless Rule, if there’s a good ecological justification for it. If it’s at risk of catastrophic fire and Forest Service managers feel like a thinning would help with that, the Roadless Rule allows for it. What it doesn’t allow for is bulldozers, log trucks and big heavy commercial logging treatments.
And back to what we’re concerned about here … We don’t have a problem with thinning around homes and communities. We’re very supportive of that. And that’s really what we need to focus on in a world of limited resources, when we’re trying to deal with wildfire risk and protect people’s lives and property. Punching a bunch of new roads into the backcountry and then spending resources, first to log those lands, then trying to suppress fires on them that are going to result because of that logging just doesn’t make any sense. It’s not logical at all if your goal is really to reduce fire risk. Now, if your goal is to promote commercial timber and get as much logging volume off the land as you can, that might be different.
Miller: Steve Pedery, thanks very much.
Pedery: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Steve Pedery is the conservation director of the nonprofit Oregon Wild.
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