Opinion: Trump's Roadless Rule rollback puts Arizona forests at risk

A pile of decapitated salmon carcasses helped me fully grasp the power of the Roadless Rule. About two decades ago, I spent a summer in Ketchikan, Alaska, at the edge of the Tongass National Forest, researching endangered goshawks. The gravitational pull of the forest tugged at me until I snuck off for a few days of backpacking. Friends with a boat dropped me off about 30 miles up the coast, and I started walking into the thick forest.

Soon I encountered a phalanx of fat grizzly bears feasting in a stream so thick with salmon it looked like it was boiling. The grizzlies snatched fish into their jaws, munched off their nutrient-rich heads and carelessly tossed what remained behind into that growing mound of massacred fish carcasses. This was nature in its purest state.

I edged carefully around the bears and wandered for the next few days under the thick canopy of old-growth trees with trunks the size of houses. I was by myself but not alone in one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places I’ve ever seen. But as I made my way back to Ketchikan and reached a portion of the Tongass unprotected by the Roadless Rule, that pulsating life around me vanished. Clear-cutting caused the forest to burst wide open into a barren expanse with no animals and few trees in sight.

In its ongoing effort to dynamite our nation's bedrock environmental protections, the Trump administration is now taking aim at the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, one of the most important conservation policies on the books that many Americans have never heard of.

The rule bans road construction and commercial logging across nearly 60 million acres of national forests, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom. These unspoiled landscapes safeguard clean drinking water and support recreation for outdoor enthusiasts like climbers, hunters, anglers and backcountry skiers. They also provide sanctuary for jaguars, grizzly bears, Mexican spotted owls and myriad other species teetering on the edge of extinction.

Roadless areas are the last truly wild places left in America.

Before the Roadless Rule's adoption in January 2001, our national forests were under siege. Logging companies bulldozed deeper into these pristine landscapes year after year, clear-cutting huge swaths of ancient forests. That prompted necessary lawsuits and drove activists like me to climb high into giant trees to stop this reckless destruction. The Roadless Rule brought a truce to that decades-long timber war. When everyone, including the timber companies, knew that roadless areas were off the chopping block, there was no need to keep fighting.

Crucially, the rule was a compromise. It didn't protect every acre, and certainly not every acre that conservationists like me wanted protected. It puts 9% of our public lands off-limits to bulldozers and chainsaws. But those 9% are the most ecologically important, and they're the places Americans most want protected. When it was proposed, more than 1 million Americans weighed in on the rule, the vast majority voicing support.

But now the timber war truce is on the verge of collapse. The Trump administration is moving to scrap protections on three-quarters of all roadless areas, representing millions of acres of public lands, delivering a stunning victory to the logging industry and a defeat to every American who cares about our national forests.

It's part of a broader pattern of privileging corporate profits over the public good. In just the past few months, the administration has waived Endangered Species Act protections for animals in the Gulf of Mexico to facilitate offshore oil drilling, a move that could drive the critically endangered Rice’s whale to extinction, and pumped millions of taxpayer dollars into the coal industry.

Now it's logging companies' turn to cash in.

Eliminating the Roadless Rule would be the single largest evisceration of public lands protection in American history, threatening national forests in 37 states. In Arizona, roadless lands are found in the Apache-Sitgreaves, Coconino, Coronado, Kaibab, Prescott and Tonto national forests, encompassing the ponderosa pine forests of the Mogollon Rim, the dramatic canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, and the isolated sky-island mountain ranges of the southern borderlands.

Killing the rule would open vast stretches around some of America's most iconic natural areas to large-scale road construction, logging and other industrial development, including forests surrounding Yellowstone and Glacier National Park and my beloved Tongass National Forest, one of the largest and most intact rainforests left on Earth.

But the consequences would go much further. Our national forests are the largest source of clean municipal drinking water in the U.S., serving more than 60 million people in 33 states. Road construction causes soil erosion and sends sediment flowing into freshwater, threatening those vital drinking water supplies. It’s also a death sentence for salmon and grizzly bears.

Bulldozing into forests fragments animal habitat, increases human conflicts with wildlife and raises the risk of wildfires, which are four times more likely near roads and most often ignited by humans.

This isn't theoretical. We know the consequences because our national forests are already carved up by roads. Today, the Forest Service manages nearly 370,000 miles of roadways, roughly eight times the length of the country's Interstate Highway System, making it the largest road-building agency in America. Taxpayers cover the cost of building those roads and are on the hook for maintaining them. And once these roads are built, forests are forever altered.

If the administration succeeds in scrapping the Roadless Rule, it won't revitalize a lost economic engine. It will reopen a settled conflict and unleash another deluge of legal battles that will lead to years of chaos and uncertainty.

But it's not a done deal. The administration needs to hear from us that roadless areas deserve protection. Comments on the proposed rollback are open until midnight on Oct. 6.

And if Trump doesn't listen to reason, or the desires of most Americans, Congress needs to override him. Our representatives in Washington should respond to the assault on our national forests by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act to enshrine the rule's protections into law. Doing so would send a clear message that our national forests belong to the American public and should be safe from the whims of this profiteering president.