The Trump administration on Tuesday advanced a formal proposal to rescind a decades-old rule that protects more than 44 million acres of national forestland from road construction and timber harvesting, including about 4.4 million acres in California.
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule is a 2001 bipartisan measure that established lasting protections for wilderness areas within national forests. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, said this week that repealing the rule will give local agencies more authority over land management issues and help reduce barriers to wildfire risk reduction.
“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement, adding that “our forests can’t afford another decade of inaction.”
The repeal will primarily impact California and nine other Western states, which are home to more than 95% of inventoried roadless areas, the agency said. California’s roadless areas span 21 national forests, including portions of the Angeles, Tahoe, Inyo, Shasta-Trinity and Los Padres national forests.
The announcement moves forward a plan unveiled by the Trump administration last year to open up roadless forests. It kicks off a 30-day public comment period leading up to a final decision. It also comes amid orders from the president to ramp up domestic logging and timber production by 25%.
Environmentalists say the move will destroy some of the nation’s last remaining undisturbed wildlands. Research has found the construction of roads can fragment habitats and increase erosion and sediment pollution in drinking water, among other potentially harmful outcomes.
“These are some of the last truly wild forests left in the country, places that shelter endangered wildlife and protect our drinking water,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “Once you start bulldozing roads for commercial logging and industrial development, there’s no getting them back.”
Federal officials said the rescission will remove the national designation of roadless areas but does not mandate timber cutting or road construction. Forest Service chief Tom Schultz said it will allow for essential forest management activities, such as removing fire-prone dead timber. More than 40% of roadless areas have high or very high wildfire hazard potential, but only 5% have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014, he said.
Several opponents disagreed with the notion that eliminating the roadless rule will reduce fire risk, pointing to studies that say wildfires are more likely to ignite near roads in part because roads can bring humans farther into the forest, creating more opportunities for accidental ignitions. Roads can also facilitate the spread of flammable invasive grasses and other fire fuels.
One study published this year in the journal Fire Ecology found that between 1992 and 2024, wildfire ignition density on national forest lands in the contiguous U.S. was lowest in designated wilderness areas and inventoried roadless areas. Ignition density was highest within 50 meters of roads, although fires that started near roads were, on average, smaller than those that started farther away, the study found.
“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 with the nonprofit Wilderness Society.
The administration’s plan has been broadly unpopular. The USDA’s notice of intent to repeal the rule, announced last August, brought in more than 600,000 public comments, the vast majority of which were opposed to the plan. (An analysis of the comments by the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan advocacy and conservation group, found that nearly all the comments, 99%, were against the repeal.)
The USDA said the proposed rule and draft environmental impact statement will be published to the federal register on Wednesday. Public comments must be received by midnight on Sept. 21.
