We should all be deeply concerned about the most recent challenge to the integrity of America’s national forests — the proposed repeal of the 2001 U.S. Forest Service Roadless Area Conservation Rule. This could open up nearly 45 million acres of our public lands to road-building, logging, mining and development.

Roadless wildlands protected under this rule provide abundant benefits to nature and to people. In their current status, roadless areas provide critical wildlife habitat, mature contiguous forests, magnificent scenic vistas, clean water, carbon storage and recreation opportunities.

However, one often overlooked and very important benefit is that roadless areas are critical to the preservation of wilderness character, including the “qualities” and “values” in wilderness.

On Aug. 29, under direction from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, the Forest Service announced the proposed repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule. Inventoried Roadless Areas are wild areas within national forests where new road building, reconstruction and logging are generally prohibited, with some notable exceptions.

The general prohibition on road building allows these places to remain in a mostly natural condition with limited development and infrastructure. These roadless areas are not currently designated wilderness but are often located adjacent to wilderness areas. Tens of millions of acres of these roadless areas are also currently recommended as wilderness in the Forest Service’s own forest plans or proposed for wilderness designation via legislation currently pending in Congress, such as the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act.   

Roadless areas provide a de facto buffer to protect wilderness from the impacts of industrial forest management and other resource extraction occurring on nearby national forest system lands.

The Wilderness Act is silent on the issue of buffer zones around designated wilderness where activities detrimental to the preservation of wilderness character could be limited. However, many subsequent wilderness laws have specifically prohibited the establishment of protective buffer zones.

While not perfect, and with notable loopholes, inventoried roadless areas provide an elegant solution to the issue of buffers that meet this need for protection from impacts occurring outside the wilderness boundary to preservation of wilderness character inside, “as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled” by humans.

Critical to this reasoning is that wilderness character inside designated wilderness can be, and often is, impacted by activities that occur outside wilderness. Those impacts are many.

For example, they include impacts to solitude from the sights and sounds of development and activities occurring outside the wilderness boundary — from things such as logging, mining, road construction, gravel pits, shooting ranges, motorized recreation and highly developed trailheads for recreational access.

Additionally, natural conditions and wildness inside the wilderness boundary line can be damaged or enhanced by the presence or absence of suitable wildlife habitat in adjacent areas. Animals and plants located inside wilderness need habitat beyond the administrative boundary of wilderness to move within their home range or for adaptation to climate change. Roadless areas provide these natural conditions and offer the benefit of an expansion of their available habitat.

Inventoried roadless areas have been serving as buffers that often prevent the most egregious, as well as many lesser, insults to wilderness character. The absence of inventoried roadless areas adjacent to wilderness would make it much more likely that industrial forest management would take place right up to the wilderness boundary. In wilderness areas that do not have this de facto buffer, industrial forest management already does often occur right up to the line.

It’s shocking to see how much of America’s remaining wildlands on national forests would be threatened by industrial development if the Roadless Area Conservation Rule is repealed.   

We must keep these places roadless for their own sake and for their contribution to the preservation of Wilderness.    

Suzanne Cable retired in January 2024 after a 30-year career with the U.S. Forest Service. She recently joined Wilderness Watch Board of Directors.

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The U.S. Forest Service is headed for obsolescence due to recent personnel reductions, proposed budget cuts, and reorganization plans. The ability of the Forest Service to meet its legislatively mandated multiple-use mission to the American public is being systematically dismantled. 

I and many Americans welcome thoughtful strategic reform of federal agencies, but what we have seen occur over the last several months to the Forest Service is nothing like that.

We’ve seen an agency systematically and deliberately dismantled by indiscriminate firings, forced retirements, and coerced resignations. And the chaos is not over with a reduction in force and drastic structural reorganization planned and looming in the future, but currently on hold by a federal judge and awaiting a ruling by the Supreme Court.

The large number of personnel leaving the federal government has been widely reported in the news media. What has not been daylighted, however, and specifically in the case of the Forest Service, is that since firefighter and law enforcement positions were not eligible for the various incentives offered to encourage employees to leave, nearly all the employee reductions have come from the far-less-than 50 percent of the remaining agency workforce. That includes personnel that serve as wilderness managers, recreation specialists, fisheries and wildlife biologists, botanists, archeologists, research scientists, and the many varieties of forestry technicians doing work on the ground.

The short-term impact of personnel reductions will be seen this summer when all remaining employees and resources are devoted to responding to wildland fire upon reaching national preparedness level 3 (we’re currently at level 2). This is after thousands of qualified call-as-needed firefighters and fire operations support personnel have lost their jobs. This will come at the expense of the many other mission-critical responsibilities of those remaining employees.

We’ll also see the impact when recreational access, information and education, and infrastructure maintenance is reduced or absent while summer public visitation to national forests surges.

Not unlike 2020 in the first year of the COVID pandemic, agency personnel are again directed by their leadership to keep open all recreational access and facilities regardless of whether they can safely and responsibly operate those sites and facilities to established standards.

Instead, we will see unmitigated damage to nature from unchecked visitation to sensitive landscapes due to unmanaged recreation. We’ll see impacts to wilderness character, water quality, wildlife, and vegetation that in the most fragile and heavily used areas will never recover.

An especially acute example of reduced staffing with the potential for irreparable damage is on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington state.

The cherished Enchantments area of the Alpine Lakes is one of the busiest wildland destinations in Washington state for outdoor recreation with more than 100,000 people hiking there each year.

There are usually 10 to 12 wilderness rangers on rotational patrols that care for the Enchantments each summer. Due to staffing reductions, the Wenatchee River Ranger District has one wilderness ranger on duty this summer to patrol not only the Enchantments but also the other 150,000-plus acres of designated wilderness on the district. Additionally, the district now has one trail crew leader and no trail crew.

This is a situation that will result in not only irreparable damage to wilderness character and natural resources, but will lead to unsafe and unsanitary conditions for visitors as unmitigated human waste, trash, parking congestion, and search and rescue operations are widespread.

This is an entirely self-made crisis by the current administration due to implementing a poorly planned and executed deliberately destructive take down of the ability of the Forest Service to deliver services to the American public.

The gutting of the Forest Service is just one example of a national crisis that will take years or decades to recover from once we, as a society, choose to stop the damage to our federal system of governance.

We must individually and collectively speak out to all our elected officials and demand a stop to the out-of-control damage being done. We need to begin to rebuild a federal government that we can rely on to deliver critical services to the American public, including the Forest Service, and protect our wild landscapes from destruction.

Suzanne Cable retired in January 2024 after a 30-year career with the Forest Service. She finished her career as the forest-wide program manager for recreation, trails, and wilderness on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. She has recently joined the Board of Directors of Wilderness Watch. 

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