A new report in Biological Conservation coauthored by David Mildrexler, Logan Berner, Beverly Law, and Mary Booth concludes, “The justifications for rescinding the Roadless Rule are fiscally misguided and ecologically flawed.” The rescission, they write, would endanger “irreplaceable intact forest landscapes in the US,” landscapes that “are part of a global network of intact forests vital to regional and planetary health.”
The Forest Service issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule and designated the first inventoried roadless areas in 2001, almost 40 years after Congress passed the 1964 Wilderness Act. The Wilderness Act directed the Secretary of Agriculture to review national forest lands for wilderness potential and to make recommendations “regarding the suitability of those lands for wilderness designation.”
Since the 1920s, the Forest Service has inventoried undeveloped areas and managed them to preserve their natural qualities. As described on the Congressional website, two attempts by the Forest Service to inventory national forest lands under the Wilderness Act were blocked, and management of these lands was limited through legal action. Eventually, “Congress intervened to legislatively address the reviewed areas, such as by designating them as wilderness or returning them to multiple-use management.”
The rule’s main purpose was to protect the nation’s collective roadless area resources from the negative impacts of roads and timber harvesting. Following various rounds of litigation and three separate rulemakings, inventoried roadless areas and their management have been defined and specified. Roadless area characteristics include:
- High-quality or undisturbed soil, water, or air.
- Plant and animal diversity.
- Sources of public drinking water.
Under the 2001 Rule, road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting are prohibited with some exceptions. (Colorado and Idaho have their own versions of the Roadless Rule.) Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ rulemaking to rescind the Roadless Rule has met stiff resistance, including more than 600,000 public comments with 99% opposing the rescission. Now, Utah Sen. Mike Lee is attempting to bypass the rulemaking process by adding the Roadless Rule Nullification rider to the Wildfire Prevention Act, which has advanced to the Senate floor.
The new report by Mildrexler et al. emphasizes the significance of Earth’s intact forests, which “provide globally significant ecosystem services to humanity…. To maintain these services it is crucial to protect intact forests from road building and other types of anthropogenic degradation. In the United States, some of the most important intact forests were designated as Inventoried Roadless Areas (IRAs)…. We find IRAs have among the highest integrity forests in the nation.”
A major argument for removing roadless-area designations is wildfire prevention and suppression. But as the scientists note, building roads into roadless areas will not only degrade forest ecosystem functions, but will also increase fire risk. The rescission will also be “grossly uneconomic, especially given the Forest Service’s current $10.8 billion backlog in deferred maintenance,” huge chunk of which stems from “a century of intensive logging,” that produced more than 386,000 miles of roads on national forests. The authors cite an additional 60,000 miles of illegal unauthorized roads.
“This massive road system,” they write, “contributes to reductions in the quality and quantity of water, habitat fragmentation, spread of invasive plants, increased wildfire risk, and other problems that undermine ecological integrity…. ” (Aplet et al., 2026; Healey, 2020; Gucinski et al., 2001; Lindenmayer et al., 2025; Wisdom et al., 2018). In this context, remaining roadless areas have enormous ecological value.
Photo: An old logging road on national forest land in Montana continues to degrade the forest ecosystem through erosion (photo by Greg Munther).
