The Trump administration unveiled a plan Wednesday to build more roads in pristine national forests, releasing figures that show near-term construction of new motorized networks would be possible across almost 4% of Wyoming, an area the size of the entire Shoshone National Forest.
The plan – which rescinds the 2001 National Forest Roadless Rule – would affect 3.2 million acres of national forest roadless areas in the Equality State. That roadless acreage is valued as wildlife habitat and widely used for non-motorized recreation like hunting, fishing, riding, skiing and backpacking.
It’s also the target of the timber industry and advocates of motorized recreation interests that could benefit from overturning the 2001 conservation measure. The Department of Agriculture states that the proposal will pit motorists and industry against others who use federal public lands in national forests.
The construction of new roads “would result in tradeoffs with opportunities for quiet, remote and self-reliant recreation and may increase user conflicts,” the federal notice states, “and result in lost economic benefits.”
Expansion of road networks “is uncertain and anticipated to be limited due to land management plans, budget, and resources,” the plan states.
“They continue to prove that they are hell-bent on breaking our public land heritage with insane giveaways to the few.”
Land Tawney
Conservationists condemned the initiative. Trump’s administration is “hell-bent on breaking our public land heritage,” Land Tawney, co-chair of American Hunters & Anglers said in a statement. The rescission is “a giveaway to the timber industry,” said Kate Groetzinger of the Center for Western Priorities.
The plan will harm “elk country, trout streams, hunting grounds, and backcountry places that define this state,” Julia Stuble, Wyoming state director for The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.
The roadless issue already has become a political hot potato with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Byrd blasting Republican opponent U.S. Rep Harriet Hageman over her support for more roads.
He called her an “out-of-touch politician” who is “playing fast and loose with the facts.”
Hageman isn’t representing Wyoming, he stated earlier this year, but is “auditioning for corporate campaign donors.”
‘Environmental catastrophe’
Hageman has been critical of the Roadless Rule.
“The United States Forest Service Office created an environmental catastrophe when it issued the Roadless Rule in the final days of the Clinton administration,” Hageman said in June. She made her comments at a hearing about forest fires and the upcoming wildfire season where she quizzed Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz.
“It’s definitely increased catastrophic wildfire risk,” Schultz said of the rule. “It inhibits our ability to actively manage the land to protect communities. It limits public access to enjoy their national forest.”
Earlier this year, Hageman introduced a bill to overturn the Roadless Rule. The bill, separate from the administrative rescission, would prevent the rule from ever being adopted again.
Hageman’s bill also would require the construction of new roads across untrammeled forest lands. The Roadless Rule violates the Forest Service’s 1897 Organic Act, the Wilderness Act and National Environmental Policy Act, her office stated.
Hageman’s bill will lead to “improved forest health, reduced wildfire risks, reduced insect infestations, and the creation of jobs in sectors like logging, construction, and maintenance,” her office stated.
Byrd criticized Schultz’s comments as “agency capture,” or the takeover of a department by the industry it is supposed to regulate.
“It is deeply disappointing to see the leadership of the Forest Service capitulate to political pressure,” he said. Fully 99% of comments submitted last year on repealing the Roadless Rule opposed overturning it, he said.
“A democratic government is supposed to listen, not find legislative loopholes to ram a corporate subsidy through Congress,” he stated.
Roads and wildfires
Both sides fiercely debate the relationship of roads to wildfires. “Forest Service Associate Chief Chris French conceded under questioning that it is a ‘longstanding fact’ that most wildfire ignitions are human-caused and directly tied to where roads are built,” Byrd said.
The Democrat accused Hageman of spreading falsehoods. “She has no problem standing up there and flat out being dishonest and lying,” he said in an interview this week.
Neither Hageman’s campaign nor her Washington office responded to WyoFile’s request for comment on Byrd’s charge.
Republican U.S. House nominee Chuck Gray has also advocated for doing away with the Roadless Rule. He characterized the rule as damaging, not conserving, and called it “a Clinton-driven, left-driven attempt to hurt our public lands.”
Gray said the rule inflated the cost of lumber and housing. “It needs to be rescinded so that we can log, we can reach our full potential, and we can recreate,” he said in a campaign debate.
Local decisions
Elimination of the Roadless Rule would return decision-making on roads to the local level, the Trump administration said. It cited “increasing wildfire risk, the spread of insect and disease infestations, and the need for community protection in the wildland-urban interface,” as some of the reasons to roll back roadless protections.
“Any near-term permanent road additions would be anticipated to occur on lands where current land management plans allow them … totaling about 18.2 million acres, or 45.5 percent of the potentially affected environment,” the Federal Register posting states. “Temporary roads, if proposed, are more likely to occur on lands within 0.5 miles of existing roads—totaling about 11.3 million acres, or 28.3 percent of the potentially affected environment.”
Factoring in those percentages, the affected area where new roads are possible in Wyoming amounts to 2.36 million of Wyoming’s 3.2 million roadless acres. That’s 3,690 square miles or 3.77% of the state, an area larger than Delaware.
Reversing the 2001 Roadless Rule could cost the country’s recreation economy $6.1 million annually, according to the Federal Register filing. It would generate $5.2 million to $11.4 million in federal revenues and $4.6 million to $10.6 million for the timber industry, according to the announcement.
Any economic boon would be tempered by “road costs, maintenance funding gaps, and the $6.9 billion deferred maintenance backlog for roads and bridges,” the federal summary of the plan states.
The 25-year-old national forest Roadless Rule seeks to address “a national asset that should be conserved and managed consistently,” conservation group Defenders of Wildlife said. The existing rule generally prohibits road construction in inventoried areas larger than 5,000 acres but provides exceptions for public safety, floods, fires and pollution emergencies.
The public has until Sept. 21 to comment on the plan to eliminate the Roadless Rule. Hundreds of pages of government documents supporting the rescission include a 333-page draft environmental impact statement.
After spending a day analyzing the documents, the Center for Western Priorities called the plan an effort to spin logging subsidies into a wildfire mitigation strategy.
“The government’s own study shows repealing the Roadless Rule could actually increase wildfire risk as well as have shocking negative impacts on Western communities,” the group’s Communications Director Kate Groetzinger said in a statement. The documents show agency’s own scientists believe rescission will “harm hundreds of species already at risk of extinction, decrease the quality of drinking water in Western communities, cost rural communities millions of tourism dollars, and grow the Forest Service’s already-massive road maintenance backlog,” she said.
WyoFile’s analysis
Here’s how WyoFile analyzed the plan by the U.S. Forest Service to rescind the Roadless Rule.
Across the nation, there are 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas – areas larger than 5,000 acres where roadbuilding has been largely prohibited for 25 years.
In Wyoming’s national forests, roadbuilding has been prohibited across 3.2 million acres, some 5,000 square miles or about 5.1% of Wyoming’s total land area of 97,813 square miles.
The plan to rescind the Roadless Rule states that the Forest Service “anticipates” proposed new near-term permanent or temporary roads would occur on 73.8% of existing roadless areas. If applied to Wyoming, that would pertain to 2.36 million acres of inventoried national forest roadless areas. Terrain, cost and other factors could limit locally where roads could go.
The affected 2.36 million acres where new roads would be possible amounts to 3,690 square miles or 3.8% of the Equality State. That’s an area almost as large as the 2.4 million acre Shoshone National Forest which stretches from the Montana border to South Pass.
Sources: Federal Register (proposal), Wikipedia (state size); Shoshone National Forest.
“The Real Reason the Forest Service Wants to Kill the Roadless Rule” OUTDOOR LIFE.
Mr. Campbell is correct. No one in their right mind is going to invest in a sawmill. Currently at most you could possibly add two more Timber Contractors in western Wyoming and maybe two in the eastern side before the existing mills are swamped. It takes the FS 10 years to cycle a timber sale due to litigation. The so called conservation groups got what they wanted. Now we watch it burn.
We need to protect our land!
Why would you vote for the hag? She doesn’t represent us, she does represent Trump. Whenever I write to her she spews nonsense and lies. You have a choice in November, vote like OUR public lands depend on it.
First of all we don’t need any more roads on our National Forests. We can’t keep up with the maintenance of the roads we have due to under funding of the yearly maintenance of our current roads. Take the Loop Road (FS 300) outside
Lander. This year may be the first year in five that a blade will be on it. This is not the fault of our Engineering staff but the lack of funds allocated by Washington and the massive cuts by our current Federal Administration.
We need to keep those roadless areas Wild and Free for future generations.
Instead of more roads, how about the Forest Service just maintain the roads that are on their present maps. The roads where I live haven’t been maintained in over 10 years. We had monsoons in July and the Forest Service barely had the money to bring in equipment to clear our major access road they are responsible for. Most of the roads already existing have become impassible in a 4WD truck. So why add new roads?
Well said Robert & Sandy. Plenty of research and experience reflected in your comments. I’m not as articulate or well educated but I have been, when younger, a hunter and fisherman in the back country. As evidenced by past actions our federal representatives see no value in anything but the almighty dollar. The sellout to timber interests is obvious. The potential for abuse of the forest resources is huge given the disastrous cuts to forest service personnel by this administration. I can’t get around much anymore except on my 4whlr but see no need to cut more roads through our forests. The recent election of the trump suck ups to represent us in Washington will only serve to further harm to our environment.
NOT TO WORRY. probably 90% of the large sawmills have been shutdown and can’t be rebuilt – you’d have to be crazy to build a new sawmill which is dependent on timber harvested from National Forest lands – too political. Our national policy is to import timber from Canada on which we have imposed a large tariff – something like 40%. The tariff adds almost $8,000 to 10,000 to the cost of a new home. Reducing wildfire losses in the western US would require tens of thousands of new loggers and they just aren’t available. Bottom line is that our national forests will continue to burn and die off from insect infestations. The new recreational trails will continue to be in fire scarred and dead bark beetle infested areas; and, thousands of homes will be lost to fires – same as today.
As a practical matter, I agree with much of what Lee Campbell says here. The economics of the timber industry don’t support large scale logging in the National Forests, especially those of the West. And yes, there will be more fires and perhaps additional beetle kills. What he’s not acknowledging is that fires and beetle infestations are primarily driven by climate change–Trump’s alleged great hoax. It is also true that the overgrown forests that we now have became so because of the deliberate policy of fire suppression begun by the Forest Service after the “Great Fires of 1910” (see fire ecologist Stephen Pyne’s book Year of the Fires). Over a century of fire suppression and at least a half century of ever increasing climate change that is making the West, especially the Rocky Mountains, hotter and drier, will eventually turn most of our mountain forests into high altitude shrub and grasslands. I’ve heard a number of forest ecology PhDs make that prediction, and I concur based on what I’m seeing where I live.
I think what is driving the great push to eliminate roadless areas is that the timber industry does in fact see what climate change is doing to our forests and is determined to get what’s there now before it is no longer commercially viable, primarily as a consequence of the inevitable fires (there are in fact still commercially viable stands of timber out there). In other words, cut and run, which is what the industry has always done.
Another great drive is to expand motorized recreation by pushing more roads into the National Forests. Doesn’t matter if they’re burned up; all ATVers care about is speed in numbers over as much land as they can get to and rip up. (I’ve lived here for 34 years and that’s what I see on a daily basis).
No doubt we will also see an attempt to remove Wilderness protections and open Wilderness up to the hordes of tourists that descend year round upon our public lands. (Poster child for Wilderness destruction: Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range, ruined by hikers and climbers. Ruination of public lands is not just from ATVs).
Quite frankly, the most important resource is being destroyed even now–peace and quiet.
The tragedy is that whatever we conservationists are doing, it is mostly fighting rear guard actions against the march of the immensely powerful empire of industries. The final impacts of climate change can’t come fast enough.
This is just a bad idea. I’m not against making some modifications where needed. But just changing the roadless rule everywhere is unwise and undermines efforts to preserve non roaded areas, without the formal designation of wilderness and all the restrictions that would bring.
But the voting public of Wyoming, who just selected Hageman and Gray, are surprised by this? Perhaps voters need to stop forwarding those who do not represent Wyoming’s future.
Excellent report by Angus. One point. The above map indicates that the Dunoir Special Management Unit of the Wind River District of the Shoshone National Forest is an Inventoried Roadless Area under the Roadless Rule. It is not.
The Washakie Wilderness Act of 1972 gave wilderness type protections to the Dunoir while the Forest Service had five years to decide whether it deserved full wilderness status. As one would expect, the FS said it didn’t, but strong opposition to opening the Dunoir up to “multiple use,” primarily logging, kept it in SMU status. It has had that status since then, although during the Shoshone NF planning process that lasted from 2005 to 2015, the Forest tried to open the Dunoir to mountain bikes. Conservationists were able to stop that.
See https://www.jhnewsandguide.com/opinion/guest_shot/dunoir-law-says-no-mountain-bikes/article_ea17832c-1baa-52f2-95e0-d59a59bab64e.html
Speaking strictly about the Shoshone NF, after the Forest Plan was finalized in 2015, the Forest’s next requirement by law was to begin a Transportation Management Plan. It did so, but then dropped the process in order to begin a largescale logging project in the Wind River District, the Green/Union Project. (The Wind River District historically is the most heavily logged in the Shoshone. Consequently it also has the highest density of roads of any District in the Forest, and so has the most damaged roads, mostly from ATV traffic).
The Green/Union Project has begun but has been interrupted by both fire and Trump politics, i.e., firing personnel left and right to the degree that the Forest’s Right Hand doesn’t know what the Left Hand is doing. Add to that the decision to eliminate Regions and replace them with State Directors, who in turn will be under the thrall of the States, our Forests are facing deliberate environmental apocalypse. Killing the Roadless Rule is just one more step Trump is taking to impose Manifest Destiny 2.0 on the West.
We all know that the science shows protecting Roadless Areas is vital, but we also know that with Trump, science is irrelevant. What matters now is politics–it’s the only thing that will stop the Recission.
I would like to point out to conservationists that during the battle over privatization of public lands in Congress last year, a predecessor to Roadless Rule Recession, it was mostly hunters who killed Mike Lee et.al’s efforts to destroy public lands. With MAGA, conservationists carry no weight. Hunters still do. I am well aware that many conservationists don’t like hunting and hunters–I myself have some issues with them–but the power they can bring to bear to the benefit of conservation is undeniable.
I strongly recommend that conservationists look deeply into the brutal facts of public lands politics and join with hunters to protect the Roadless Rule, because if we don’t have public lands, we don’t have anything else.
Well, now to critiquing the so-called Draft Environmental Impact Statement that the USFS says supports repealing the Roadless Rule. My initial survey of it points to its fraudulence, but unfortunately reading it is part of the down and dirty process of protecting public lands.
Hageman is doing everything she can to be ‘one of the boys’ in the billionaires’ club, never understanding that if they have their way, women will be tossed out of their greedy House and Senate chairs in a second, their use to the boys complete. Hageman, too old to breed, would be relegated to Vance’s ‘free grandma babysitting’ to earn her keep in an increasingly misogynist government.
Currently, she has a longer leash than most American women, but she’s still on a leash.
Hageman is a cocky fool to ignore 99% of American comments, an almost 100% majority say in continuing support of the Roadless Rule. Why it was even opened for comments is beyond me, people put their hearts and souls into protecting OUR lands from its uncaring would-be rapers. Emboldened by a regime that does what it wants regardless of Constitutional Law or the will of We The People, Hageman goes skipping along on her merry way, blindly following a man who tried to have his own Vice President hanged. For what? A yearly $174,000, free healthcare for life and low taxed seat in the Senate. With Mikey Johnson facing votes he knows will go against tRump, he simply sent Congress home, over and over again, to keep the wannabe dictator stumbling about destroying our country. And those in that sweet senatorial seat only worked 88 days (they may have worked a few more since that statistic) has earned roughly $1,700.00 a day.
I’m shocked that, on the Roadless Rule issue alone, she actually won the Primaries.
Keep on her about this. Share what rescinding the Roadless Rule will do to the unique beauty our land has to share, and never forget she tried to sell off OUR public lands to billionaires. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s still in cahoots with Utah land-raper Senator Mike Lee, who right now is attempting to steal lands across the Rockies.
Just a note, John Barrasso is now joining Hageman in her disgusting quest.
They’re all getting their 15 minutes of infamy. What do they care?
Wyoming’s republican nominee for governor ran on protecting public land. Where does he stand on this issue?