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On August 18, Donald Trump’s United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) officially proposed eliminating the national Roadless Rule. If finalized, the repeal would strip protections from 44.7 million acres of wild intact forest.

The rule, passed in 2001, protects in total 58 million acres of forest from road building, logging, fossil fuel extraction, and other development. Forests in Idaho and Colorado, which have their own state roadless laws, would be exempt, at least for now.

The USDA, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, initially gave the public only 30 days to comment on the plan. They were forced after public pressure to allow 15 additional days, until October 6. Opponents are aiming to mobilize 1 million public comments during this short period, as well as sponsoring public events speaking out against the repeal.

One hundred and eighty environmental, conservation, and citizen’s groups have been joined by tribes, sportsmen, wildland firefighters, and businesses dedicated to tourism, in submitting a joint public comment or otherwise speaking out against this decision. A letter in support of the Roadless Rule and opposing recission has been signed by 164 congressional representatives.

The recission is “the largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history,” according to Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Spivak told Truthout the Roadless Rule shelters “hundreds of threatened and endangered species. It provides incredible recreation opportunities — hunting, fishing, hiking. These were really the last of the forests outside of wilderness that had not been opened up to industrial development.”

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The roadless-area forests contain immense old-growth trees, pristine rivers that are filled in the summer and fall with some of the last healthy salmon runs in the country, and trail through some of the U.S.’s grandest scenic beauty. These forests help protect some of the country’s remaining wild species — grizzly bears, wolverines, and endangered lynx. They host key migration corridors for antelope, elk, and mule deer. They protect headwaters of streams providing clean drinking water to 24 million people in the country.

The current protections include 9.3 million acres of the Tongass rainforest in Alaska. The Tongass contains incredible landscapes — rugged ocean coastlines, glacial fjords, snow-capped peaks, wild rivers, and old-growth forest. Concentrated in the Tongass are Earth’s largest remaining intact stands of coastal temperate rainforest, making it a vital carbon sink for curbing climate change. Its trees capture approximately 44 percent of all the carbon stored by U.S. national forests, absorbing 1.5 times more carbon than the U.S. emits annually.

Opening the Tongass and all roadless forests to destruction would be a crime against nature. And further opening the Tongass to development would be yet another crime against Native peoples. The Tongass is the ancestral homeland of the Tlingit and Haida Indigenous peoples. A joint statement from the tribes condemns the decision to rescind the rule, saying it was taken “without any prior consultation with our Tribe or other Southeast Alaska tribes. As a sovereign tribal nation, we do not recognize the validity of federal actions impacting our traditional homelands when undertaken without meaningful government-to-government consultation, as required by law and respect for our inherent sovereignty.”

The statement continues, “The Tongass is more than an ecosystem — it is our home. It is the foundation of our identify, our culture, and our way of life.”

Examining the USDA Plan

The USDA proposal claims to “reduce regulatory burden and return decisionmaking for the management of inventoried roadless area to the land management planning process at the individual national forest level…. Recission of the national-level prohibitions provides responsible officials with flexibility to better guide management of the National Forest System lands and respond to changing local resource conditions.”

Describing these relatively untouched forests — rich with species, habitat, and natural wonders — as “resources” is a dead giveaway to the proposal’s actual........

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