In late August, the U.S. Forest Service proposed rescinding the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits new road building and logging in certain areas of national forests.
The Forest Service is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In a release, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said the “roadless rule” has led to increased wildfire risk, turning “healthy landscapes into tinderboxes.” But Ellen Montgomery, the Great Outdoors campaign director with Environment America, takes issue with that assessment.
The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Montgomery and Stephanie Wein, clean water and conservation advocate at the group PennEnvironment, about what this proposed change would mean for the Allegheny National Forest in northwestern Pennsylvania.
LISTEN to the interview
Kara Holsopple: What is the Roadless Rule and why was it enacted?
Stephanie Wein: The Roadless Rule was enacted in 2001 after over 600 public meetings, in response to 1.6 million public comments. It defined that these 45 million acres would be protected from future road building and then all the extractive industries that building these roads into our national forests would enable — things like commercial mining, additional logging, or drilling.
And by doing that, it created these areas that would be protected in perpetuity, not only for forests to mature, to be these intact ecosystems for our wildlife, and to be this rich habitat. But then also, these are some amazing places for recreational opportunities. There’s great fishing, hiking, and backcountry camping. A lot of families’ favorite hunting spots are in these inventoried roadless areas across the country.
Ellen Montgomery: I think the biggest motivations for people to support the roadless area in the late ’90s, early 2000s was about protecting wildlife habitat and clean drinking water. Those are still the two most important reasons that people support protecting these wild forest areas.
Kara Holsopple: Why is the U.S. Forest Service now proposing to rescind the rule?
Ellen Montgomery: The stated reason from the U.S. Department of Agriculture press release is that it will make it easier for the agency to fight wildfire. We don’t think that’s true. The Roadless Rule already has built-in exceptions that allow the agency to both manage for future fires and to fight existing wildfires.
When you dig into the proposed rule, they also reference a set of executive orders that are more about increasing U.S. timber production and increasing the economic value of our forests. We think that these forests are worth more standing. They’re worth more as wildlife habitat, sources of clean water and places that we can be outside than they are whatever you’re going to make out of these trees once you’ve logged them.
Kara Holsopple: And recreation is an industry too, right?
Ellen Montgomery: Yes, it’s a huge industry, and it’s significantly larger than it was in 2001. More people are spending time outside, and there are more hobbies, things that people are passionate about. Of course, Americans have always gone fishing, but outdoor climbing has become a huge thing. There are more people who mountain bike. There are people who hike. There are more who camp. With that comes all of the gear and equipment and all of the apps that you download and all the different pieces that go along with that.
Stephanie Wein: Here in Pennsylvania, especially Western Pennsylvania, it is a huge part of the economy. It’s one of our biggest industries. The last number I remember seeing was $9.5 billion in recreational output. So it’s just a huge piece of the Pennsylvania economy, the Pennsylvania identity.
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Kara Holsopple: What have opponents of the rule said in the past?
Ellen Montgomery: Honestly, there aren’t very many opponents of the rule right now. In the comment period last fall, which was on just the notice of intent, they didn’t give details. They just said you can comment on our idea that we want to rescind this. Ninety-nine percent of commenters said, please don’t. But I’ve heard arguments that roads will allow for more access.
The roadless areas are, and you can look at a map, some of them are way in the backcountry, and you’d have to be a pretty hardcore hiker to get into them. But a lot of them are actually adjacent to areas that you can drive in and park, and the great thing about the roadless areas is that they actually are not that restrictive. You can bike; there’s a trail; you can drive your ATV in. So we think they’re actually pretty accessible and that opening the ones that aren’t is not actually a good idea.
Stephanie Wein: Particularly, these are the acres that we should allow to remain roadless when there is so much extraction already happening in the areas that, whether it is the private forest or all the national forest that isn’t inventoried as roadless areas. Allegheny National Forest is this great example where the roadless area conservation rule only protects about 25,000 acres of our national forest of roughly half-million that the forest entails, when 95% of the forest is already open to these other uses.
Kara Holsopple: What are the issues associated with building roads in these areas? What kind of impacts does road building have?
Stephanie Wein: Road building can have a few impacts on previously intact forest. To address one of the main stated reasons for rescinding the Roadless Rule, it can actually lead to more fires. If you have trucks going through, if you have more human access, then you have more chances for ignition. Most wildfires actually happen not deep in the undisturbed woods, but along the human-wildland interface. The more access we have along roads, the more chances there are for ignition. The early successional, little weedy plants that grow along a roadway are the stuff that’s most likely to burn.
But then when you step back, there are the other impacts that can be associated with habitat fragmentation. There are a lot of species here in Pennsylvania that depend on what we call interior forest. That’s once you get away from the edge, whether it’s from the farmers field or the edge of the strip mine or the edges of the suburban development or the end of the road. As you walk into a forest, you can feel the climate slowly change: it gets cooler, the light changes, it gets darker, and it’s often more humid. There are animals that rely on that specific setting or who are just more sensitive to human activity. What they really need is this intact, undisturbed forest.
When you cut a road through an intact forest, that road only might have a footprint of a few acres. But you’ve actually significantly reduced the acreage of interior forest that species like the goshawk or the scarlet tanager or the eastern hellbender or the Allegheny wood rat or bobcats and fishers – a lot of the the forest animals that we associate with the wildest parts of Pennsylvania, they really need that interior.
When you throw a road across, you disrupt that intact habitat. If you throw a high-traffic road through a forest, the bobcat will actually often not cross that road at all. You’ll have separate populations; they’ll start inbreeding; they will be genetically isolated; the health of that population will decrease.
It only takes a few cars an hour to kill over 80% of salamanders, just forcing it across a forest floor to breed. That can even be a pretty low-traffic road, and you’ve had a really huge impact on amphibian populations.
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Ellen Montgomery: People may not understand that an intact wild forest acts as a really great natural filtration system for rainwater. It comes down, lands on the leaves, trickles down, is absorbed through the soil. A healthy soil will actually filter out a bunch of the bad stuff that we don’t want in the water. It goes into the water table, or the stream flows out of the forest, and becomes part of our water supply.
Millions of Americans depend on clean water that is filtered through our national forests. As soon as you start with roads and then what roads lead to, industrial activity, you then have all of the toxic chemicals associated with highways and things that drip off of cars. It’s a public health issue. It’s also an issue for fishermen who would prefer to catch their fish out of clean streams and clean rivers, and then it’s potentially an issue for the local municipal utilities that are actually dealing with this water.
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The public comment period on the proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule ends on September 21st.
Ellen Montgomery with Environment America and Stephanie Wein at the group PennEnvironment.
In an email, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said repealing the Roadless Rule is important to improve public safety where forests meet communities and to return to local decision-making for forest plans. The spokesperson said the rulemaking is also a response to President Trump’s Executive Orders that call for expedited logging and increased fossil fuel production and mining on public lands.
