Note: This blog post responds to an oped in The Hill by Mike Dombeck, Dale Bosworth Tom Tidwell and Vicki Christiansen, former Chiefs of the US Forest Service.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Roadless Rule was adopted, few people anticipated the wildfire conditions we face today.
In 2001, large fires were still relatively uncommon. Today, they dominate summers across much of the West. Since the Roadless Rule took effect, millions of acres of inventoried roadless areas have burned, and nearly half of all roadless acres are now rated as having high or very high wildfire hazard potential. That reality calls for an honest reassessment of whether this policy is delivering the protection it promised.
Former Forest Service leaders recently defended the Roadless Rule as a measure that safeguards clean air, clean water, wildlife, recreation and sustainable economies. Those values are widely shared. The disagreement is not about whether national forests should be conserved, but about how best to protect them under modern conditions shaped by drought, insect outbreaks and increasingly severe wildfires.
High severity wildfire is now one of the greatest threats to the benefits Americans expect from their national forests. Extreme fires do not simply burn trees. They damage soils, destroy seed sources, destabilize slopes and overwhelm streams with ash and sediment.
Drinking water systems in communities across Oregon, California, Montana and other western states are threatened by severe wildfire. If clean water is a priority, forest condition matters. Dense, drought-stressed forests loaded with dead and dying trees are not resilient watersheds.
Healthy forests do not maintain themselves under current conditions. More than a century of fire exclusion, combined with decades of passive management, have left many western forests unnaturally crowded. Climate stress then accelerates insects and disease.
Together, these factors create landscapes primed for extreme fire behavior. That is why forest scientists and land managers increasingly emphasize active management, including thinning and prescribed fire, as essential tools for restoring forest structure and reducing the severity of wildfires. These treatments are aimed at reducing risk and improving long term ecological function on National Forest System lands.
Public lands access is a critical and often misunderstood issue. Poorly designed or neglected roads can create environmental problems, and no one is arguing for unchecked expansion of the forest road system. But a complete lack of access also carries real consequences.
Reviews of major wildfires across the West routinely identify limited access as a major obstacle to safe and effective firefighting. Fire crews and equipment need reliable routes to reach ignition points, establish control lines and evacuate safely. In many roadless areas, valuable time is lost constructing emergency access while fires grow larger and more destructive.
The Roadless Rule applies to millions of acres of National Forest land under a single nationwide restriction. It makes little distinction between remote backcountry far from communities and fire prone forests adjacent to homes, infrastructure and municipal watersheds. It also did not anticipate the rapid expansion of the wildland urban interface or the scale of wildfire we now experience. As a result, many areas most in need of treatment remain difficult or impossible to address.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the Roadless Rule was layered on top of the Northwest Forest Plan, which already governs nearly twenty million acres of federal forest. Adopted in 1994, that plan placed the majority of its land base into conservation focused designations such as late successional and riparian reserves. Only a limited portion of the landscape was intended to support ongoing restoration work and a sustainable timber supply. The Roadless Rule further constrained that already narrow margin, reducing flexibility without adding meaningful new environmental protections.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule would not repeal the Wilderness Act, remove Wild and Scenic River protections or weaken the Northwest Forest Plan. It would not eliminate environmental review or public involvement requirements under existing law. It would not mandate new roads or logging projects. What it would do is restore discretion to local land managers to evaluate site specific conditions and determine where limited access is necessary for forest restoration, fuels reduction or emergency response.
In an era of megafires, protection cannot mean simply leaving forests untouched while they grow more vulnerable to catastrophic loss. It must mean keeping forests standing, watersheds functioning, communities safe and public lands accessible. Updating policy to reflect today’s risks is not a retreat from conservation. It is a necessary step toward responsible stewardship in the 21st century.
