09/08/2026
Please, keep sending stuff like this to the USFS and to our congressional delegation.
Montanans want to Keep the Roadless Rule. We don’t need more new roads. The government can’t even maintain the ones already there. AND:
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“…the (Agriculture) department’s lengthy analysis undermined the claims . . . of rescinding the ruling, finding that roadless areas have burned less than other Forest Service lands and concluding that repealing the rule would have little impact on fuels treatments to limit that overgrowth…”
The Missoulian September 8, 2026
As feds seek to nix roadless rule, their own study undermines wildfire claims
By Sam Wilson
https://missoulian.com/article_c3882f89-0ba2-4f96-b407-b3e8cabf4784.html
The Trump administration has been pushing to rescind “roadless rule” protections on millions of acres of Forest Service lands. But its own analysis may have thrown cold water on arguments that the 25-year-old rule has fanned the flames of wildfires in the West.
About one-quarter of national forest land across the country is currently protected by the roadless rule, which generally prohibits logging and road-building.
In Montana, those “designated roadless areas” span vast swaths of Montana’s backcountry, much of it bordering wilderness areas or stretching across the most rugged and remote parts of the state’s mountain ranges. The designation covers about one-third of the state’s 17 million acres of Forest Service land.
USDA officials argue the roadless rule has been a barrier to the timber industry that stymies the ability of local forest managers to prevent wildfires and to suppress them when they start.
“For 25 YEARS, Washington’s failed one-size-fits-all Roadless Rule has tied the hands of local forest managers, leaving over 44 MILLION acres vulnerable to overgrowth, disease, and catastrophic wildfire,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in an Aug. 18 social media post.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture took a major procedural step toward rescinding that rule last month, with the release of a 240-page draft environmental impact statement, or DEIS.
But the department’s lengthy analysis undermined the claims from Rollins and other supporters of rescinding the ruling, finding that roadless areas have burned less than other Forest Service lands and concluding that repealing the rule would have little impact on fuels treatments to limit that overgrowth.
Meanwhile, it anticipates a modest potential impact on possible timber production from opening those forest lands to logging. The DEIS concludes the economic impacts are “not expected to be substantial overall.”
"The roadless rule has not prohibited or stunted the agency's wildfire responses or preparation," said Hilary Eisen, federal policy director for Wild Montana. The group has been one of the state's most vocal opponents to the Trump administration's plan. "It will have a hugely detrimental impact to all the resources the Forest Service is tasked with stewarding, and the benefit is not there."
Fueling fires
The DEIS is the government’s first official step toward repealing the roadless rule, after announcing its intent to do so last year.
It kicks off a public-comment period that lasts through Sept. 21, and it analyzes the pros and cons of axing the rule. It also looks at a middle-of-the-road option that would drastically shrink the boundaries of many roadless areas while outright eliminating others.
The analysis repeatedly cites a lack of “management flexibility” under the current roadless rule, including vegetation management to address forest health and reduce potential for destructive wildfires.
“Taken together, the prohibitions have removed important management tools for key areas where there are needs or opportunities to address overgrown and fuel-loaded national forests,” the DEIS states.
The vast majority of wildfires are human-caused, and many studies, including several published by the Forest Service, have shown that wildfires are far more likely to ignite close to roads. The USDA’s analysis also acknowledges that fewer fires start, per acre, in roadless areas than on other federal forest lands.
When they do start, those fires on roadless lands and in wilderness areas are often bigger, according to the DEIS, which analyzed wildfires the period from 2014-2024. But federal forest managers typically let lightning-caused wildfires play out in wilderness areas, owing to the lack of at-risk infrastructure or communities and the goal of letting natural processes — fire included — dominate those landscapes.
Similar policies are also employed in roadless areas, though forest officials only do so under the right weather conditions and when the risk of a larger conflagration threatening nearby homes or infrastructure is near-zero.
Bill Avey, president of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, said this policy is crucial to keeping wildfires safe, by not putting them in dangerous areas when there’s no “values at risk” in the fire’s path.
“Where do you have values at risk? Where you have roads,” said Avey, who retired in 2021 after 40 years with the agency, including supervising the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest.
Still, only 8.7% of total roadless acreage on national forest lands burned during that decade-long period, according to the DEIS. In wildernesses and other federal forest lands, that figure was about 14%.
The Forest Service and the USDA did not respond to emailed questions about the DEIS last week. But in a Sept. 2 interview with Fox News, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden argued the country’s national forests 100 years ago were healthier and less “choked with trees” that could fuel major wildfires.
“And that reason is 100 years ago, they didn’t have the roadless rule and they were engaged in active forest management,” Vaden said. He added, “With the removal of the roadless rule we will be able to apply active management techniques to our national forests which will get them back to the good health they had a century ago.”
In 1926, the Forest Service had few, if any, policies for reducing wildfire fuels, a practice that only started becoming widespread in the latter half of the last century. More recently, a Forest Service study from 2020 found the agency has conducted more fuels treatments, per acre, in roadless areas than on other national forest lands. Those treatments include thinning out younger trees and conducting controlled burns of vegetation on the forest floor.
Moreover, the USDA’s analysis states that rescinding the roadless rule will do little to change how much fuels reduction actually happens in roadless areas.
“Although lifting restrictions on road construction could expand treatment options in the WUI (wildland-urban interface), the high cost of road building and declining budgets for road construction and maintenance mean the overall increase in treatment capacity would be modest,” the DEIS concluded.
The cost of roads
When the federal government adopted the roadless rule in 2001, it was in part a response to the ballooning cost to maintain its existing forest roads.
The Forest Service today oversees a 368,000-mile road network, which costs $1.6 billion per year to maintain. That’s far less than Congress gives it in funding, just $73 million last year. The Trump administration has requested the same amount for the next fiscal year. Other programs brought total funding for road building, maintenance and decommissioning to $270 million, but the USDA’s analysis notes it can't bank on having that short-term funding in the future.
That funding gap has led to a $6.9 billion backlog of deferred maintenance backlog on the agency’s bridges and roads, according to the DEIS. That figure only accounts for roads that can accommodate passenger vehicles, or 18% of the total road network.
Adding new roads is also costly. The analysis states that building dirt roads cost an average of $80,000 to $100,000 per mile. For gravel roads, that figure is upwards of $500,000.
"We're losing a lot of roads to entropy, and building new roads doesn't solve that problem," Eisen, with Wild Montana, said. "It only exacerbates that problem."
The DIES also found the costs of building new roads in current roadless areas could be “much greater than typical road construction because of steep and difficult terrain, extensive earthwork, geotechnical challenges, costly infrastructure such as bridges or tunnels and accessibility due to isolated locale.”
Looking ahead, the analysis anticipates repealing the roadless rule would result in “little expected increase in the publicly available road system.”
Fire suppression
In his remarks to Fox News, Vaden also reiterated the administration’s stance that a lack of access has hindered fire suppression efforts in roadless areas, particularly where they extend close to communities or at-risk structures.
Under the rule, he said, “We have tied our own hands and said we’re basically not going to do anything. And look at the result that has had on things like wildfire suppression.”
According to the USDA’s analysis, wildfire suppression has a slightly lower success rate in roadless areas than other non-wilderness national forest lands: 94% and 97%, respectively. But it also acknowledged fire managers often have different goals in roadless areas, where fully containing a blaze may not be worth the risk to firefighters working in a remote area.
Avey, with the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, said that’s often a function of rugged, rocky or otherwise dangerous terrain: “You’re going to hurt people if you put them in there.”
The roadless rule already allows agency officials to approve emergency use of dozers and temporary road-building to respond to dangerous wildfires in roadless areas. Instead of rescinding the rule, his group has instead advocated for revising it to delegate that authority to forest-level staff.
"Every time I asked, I got permission to do that," he said. "So let's trust the people that we're paying to manage these lands."
The group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology has also opposed the roadless rule repeal, and argues that existing firefighting tactics like handcrews and aviation support are typically a better fit for those remote areas. In a press release following last month’s USDA announcement, the group quoted Brandyn Harvey, a 30-year firefighter and engine chief.
"We have over 100 years of experience developing aviation-based firefighting assets that provide crews speedy access to wildfires and can fully equip them in remote unroaded areas," Harvey stated.
Having roads established in those areas could allow for safer, more cost-effective wildfire response, the DEIS states, and rescinding the roadless rule “would provide increased opportunities for wildfire risk mitigation, especially within higher risk firesheds.”
Much of that depends on whether those new roads can be built in maintained to standards that allow vehicle-based suppression to be done safely.
“Additional roads would provide safer, more effective, and more efficient containment opportunities, potentially reducing fire sizes and durations,” the analysis states.
But it also acknowledges the “probability, number and frequency” of new fire starts dramatically increases alongside road density.
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Micheal Mann Aug 6, 2018 : “A new normal makes it sound like we have arrived in a new position, and that's where we're going to be. But if we continue to burn fossil fuels … We're going to get worse and worse droughts and heat waves and super storms and floods and wildfires.”
“… we're walking out onto a mine field. As we continue to move forward onto that mine field, as we continue to burn fossil fuels, we're likely to encounter more and more extreme and damaging and irreversible impacts on our climate.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/climate-change-is-making-wildfires-more-extreme-heres-how
High winds, high temperatures, pervasive drought. These extreme conditions are driving two enormous fires in California, and many more throughout the American West and much of Northern and Western Europe. William Brangham talks with Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University about the ways climat...
