On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins formally filed a proposal to rescind the federal “roadless rule,” a 2001 regulation that bars road building and most logging in undeveloped national forest land. The rollback would affect more than 4 million acres of federally managed forest in California alone, potentially opening pristine backcountry to new roads, timber harvests and other development.

Rollins, who first floated the idea last year, said the change is meant to clear the way for more aggressive fuel management on public lands.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Rollins said in a statement announcing the move.

But the Forest Service’s own data complicates that argument. Agency researchers who studied roughly 850 miles of roads running through the Angeles, San Bernardino, Los Padres and Cleveland national forests — all of which include roadless sections — found that nearly two-thirds of human-caused wildfires over a 26-year period ignited near roadsides. Those are the places where people, sparks and dry, invasive grasses most often collide.

It’s a familiar problem for anyone who has followed California’s fire season: blazes rarely start from nowhere. A hiker burning toilet paper in the backcountry, a poorly wired hot tub, or a tow chain dragging sparks across dry grass — human activity, not lightning, sparks the vast majority of California’s wildfires, and roads make that activity possible in areas that would otherwise see little foot or vehicle traffic.

California officials have pushed back hard against the administration’s reasoning. In a letter sent to Rollins last September, state Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot argued that the roadless rule has not stood in the way of forest thinning or prescribed burns. He pointed out that more than 240,000 acres of roadless land in California have already undergone vegetation treatments to lower fire risk, including work in the Caples Creek area south of Lake Tahoe that helped protect nearby communities during the 2021 Caldor Fire.

Crowfoot warned that allowing construction, logging and mining in these areas “may put rural communities at increased risk of fire and significantly increase firefighting costs” for the state.

The concerns aren’t limited to California. A peer-reviewed study published earlier this year by researchers with The Wilderness Society found that, nationwide, wildfires are roughly four times more likely to ignite near roads than in roadless or wilderness areas. Ignition rates were lowest in designated wilderness, slightly higher in roadless zones, and highest within about 50 meters of a road.

“Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is also not a wildfire solution, and never will be,” said Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns for The Wilderness Society.

Administration officials insist the rule change won’t automatically trigger new logging or road projects. Instead, they say, individual national forest managers will decide how to proceed based on local conditions, with input from states, tribes and nearby communities.

Still, skepticism runs deep among conservationists, particularly given a 2025 executive order from the administration calling for an “immediate expansion of American timber production.” Critics also note that the existing roadless rule already permits limited road construction when necessary to protect public safety from wildfire threats — raising questions about what additional flexibility the rollback would actually provide.

A group of former U.S. Forest Service chiefs, including one who served during Trump’s first term, wrote in an opinion piece last year that eliminating the rule would put critical watersheds and wildlife habitat at risk. They also questioned the practical logic behind the move.

“Why build more roads when the agency, strapped for resources, can’t even maintain the ones that already exist?” they wrote, adding that the reason many backcountry areas remain roadless in the first place is that their most valuable timber was harvested long ago, leaving behind resources that are costly and difficult to reach.

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, condemned the timing of the announcement, coming as it does amid a brutal fire season and following deep staffing cuts at the Forest Service under the Trump administration. Huffman said he intends to fight the rule change in Congress.

“The Trump administration is at it again, selling out our public lands to corporate polluters, ignoring the overwhelming objections of the American people,” Huffman said. “It’s reckless.”

Members of the public have until midnight on September 21 to submit formal comments on the proposal through the federal government’s regulations portal.

Original source: CalMatters

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