Sigh. Here we go again. We could have a contest for most over-the-top statement on an email.. and I think the Western Environmental Law Center would win hands down. I didn’t even know that WELC was all that metaphysical.
Trump to unleash Hell on crown jewels of undisturbed public lands by rescinding Roadless Rule
Sorry, as a certified Roadless Geek and veteran of Colorado Roadless, I think this effort follows the Generational Law of Bureaucracy.. which is:
Wait until everyone’s retired who knows about how to do something (preferably over five years)… and then start the same process all over again.
This seems like a mostly symbolic waste of government time to me.. kind of like the Trump Admin equivalent of the MOG work.
Here’s the announcement, it’s pretty straightforward.
Here is there argument for why it is needed.. to help with wildfire.
Here’s what I’d do instead.. 1. stop doing plan revisions. 2. Get plan amendments done with prescribed fire, managed fire, PODs and evacuation routes. If it turns out that a critical area is in a Roadless Area, the problem is not cutting trees (we went through this in Colorado, the argument was that you could do fuel reduction treatments because.. (this was the ENGO argument for not needing tweaks to the 2001 Rule)
Fuel treatments other than PF (not restricted in RR) would be infrequent, remove “generally” small diameter material and might fit the “uncharacteristic.. range of variability” verbiage. Here’s the exact wording:
(b) Notwithstanding the prohibition in paragraph (a) of this section, timber may be cut, sold, or removed in inventoried roadless areas if the Responsible Official determines that one of the following circumstances exists. The cutting, sale, or removal of timber in these areas is expected to be infrequent.
(1) The cutting, sale, or removal of generally small diameter timber is needed for one of the following purposes and will maintain or improve one or more of the roadless area characteristics as defined in § 294.11.
(i) To improve threatened, endangered, proposed, or sensitive species habitat; or
(ii) To maintain or restore the characteristics of ecosystem composition and structure, such as to reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire effects, within the range of variability that would be expected to occur under natural disturbance regimes of the current climatic period;
So if you follow that (and I don’t know if there’s case law in which a fuels treatment project didn’t meet the criteria), the only problem is temp roads. And sometimes that can be a problem, because there are (some, few?) places that material may need to be removed for fuels reasons and can’t be burned onsite because of the forest conditions. We also ran into problems with powerlines and dams in roadless areas. Powerlines obviously need maintenance, and equipment was allowed to get to dams based on “imminent” threat.. how immanent is “immanent.”
The point of what we did in Colorado was to locate the specific 2001 Problem Children and deal with them. As part of deal-making, acres that had roadless characteristics but had not been included in the original mapping (low-tech compared to now) were added. If I were in the Admin, I’d ask the Governors (except for Alaska, Idaho and Colorado) to identify any Problem Children and work changes to the reg from those. This has the added advantage of dealing with real world issues so that it doesn’t end up being just another sucker of employee time with the result ending up in a courtroom, being decided by someone who decided if the right words are on paper. This is not to diss my legal friends, but I think there is a better way.
In my meanderings, I wondered:
Why is Colorado Roadless Rule litigation not on the FS webpage?
Nor apparently the actual rule itself, but you can find it here.
Finally, just a note to folks unfamiliar with the 2001 Rule.. there are roads in roadless areas (original mapping issues) and there are pre-existing rights, and there is grazing and recreation (in fact part of a ski area was in a Roadless Area), so it’s not accurate to equate Roadless with “pristine” or “undisturbed.” There are powerlines and pipelines and OHV trails…
Environmental extremism will most likely want to fight this to the very end. They should be planning on selecting the hill they want to end on. There seems to be many, many hills to choose from.
Does this only rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule and not the state specific rules? The press release isn’t clear on that and it doesn’t look like the actual recision has hit the Federal Register yet. It would be a pity if it got rescinded for other states but kept for Colorado because we have a state specific rule. I’m sick of the Forest Service and environmental groups getting away with treating roadless areas as if they were identical to recommend wilderness or were basically the Forest Service’s version of wilderness study areas.
We’re still litigating two road closures in the Pike San Isabel NF that they closed simply because they were adjacent to roadless areas and weren’t even in them. So not only were they treating roadless areas the same as wilderness, they were then closing roads next to them to create buffer zones around them. It just never ends.
If roadless areas are truly going away, I say good riddance to at least one tool the Forest Service was using to circumvent congressional designation of wilderness areas and create de facto administrative wilderness contrary to the intent of the Wilderness Act.
Not only Patrick, but the PSICC is in violation of their own TMR, and don’t really care! I’m sure your group is aware of it though, keep up the good fight!
Patrick, here is my guess, that they have to do a national rule to redo it and won’t touch Idaho and Colorado, for one thing, each of those two states removed or changed the rule because of their Problem Children. Although I’m politically impaired, I also think going after Idaho would not be good politically since they put A LOT of work into theirs.. and while Colorado’s ended up being a D effort, it wouldn’t be worth going after on its own. But I’ve been wrong before..
This tools this Administration uses are all blunt instruments (or tools of mass destruction, like chainsaws). My guess is this will be up to the Rs in Congress whether there are any exclusions. (See Montana federal land sales.)
My first observation is: Oy …
Two more follow.
1) Sharon said:
“So if you follow that (and I don’t know if there’s case law in which a fuels treatment project didn’t meet the criteria), the only problem is temp roads.”
And there’s only two problems with that: “temp” and “roads”. Roads are ecological degredation force multipliers, and “temporary” roads have the staying power of Freddie Kruger.
Some might say (politely) “too bad,” and I would in most cases agree. National forest lands are not ecological preserves – wood was oil before oil was cool, and we need to harvest it. We need wood for any number of reasons, including building all those houses that Senator Lee is apparently keen on.
But harvesting wood in “roadless” areas incurs significant ecological and economic costs. The roadless rule attempted (ineptly, as I now see it) to grapple with these costs. But to simply pretend these costs don’t exist is short-sighted in the extreme.
2) Sharon said:
“Finally, just a note to folks unfamiliar with the 2001 Rule.. there are roads in roadless areas (original mapping issues) and there are pre-existing rights, and there is grazing and recreation (in fact part of a ski area was in a Roadless Area), so it’s not accurate to equate Roadless with “pristine” or “undisturbed.”
Good point. The sporadically inaccurate roadless maps on which the 2001 rule was based were not (to the surprise of some observers) sufficiently leaky to sink the rule. But they illustrate an effort conceived more in haste than in wisdom.
As a practical matter, the rule mostly curbed potential harvest in forests that were, as of 2001, high in CFL (google it, kids) and low in road density. That amounted in the main to certain areas of the Tongass and the high, wet forests of R1. It is these forests that may now be, as it were, facing the axe. But anyone who thought that was not already the case before today’s announcement probably wasn’t paying attention.
As an OHV and managed recreation lead during the Clinton Roadless Rule battle, I don’t want – at this time – to debate the merit of rescinding the Rule given the fact that motorized trails are allowed in roadless areas but to ask the question… How does this recent action empower, direct, or guide a FLT as they prepare their program of work for the next budget cycle?
I would say it doesn’t… however sometime during lunch break or drifting off between tedious form-filling out, if I were on an FLT I might wonder about Roadless Problem Children on my forest.. inability to do a linear fuel break as part of a POD, dams that people are worried about, and so on… just in case something changes at the end of the day.
Now some folks don’t remember but for a time the 2001 was enjoined in Wyoming. So a particular project (rerouting a road in part of a campground that was in a Roadless area) went through as did some mineral leases during various legal permutations (the so-called “gap leases” in Colorado.
So say the Admin promulgated the Rule, it goes to court but is not enjoined immediately… conceivably some projects could be approved during that window. So it’s not something to consider during POW discussions but possibly to have in your back pocket.
“case law in which a fuels treatment project didn’t meet the criteria”
The case that came to mind was the one on the Los Padres, where the 9th Circuit reversed a decision in 2022. The court determined that planned timber cutting under the subsection (b)(1) exception was arbitrary and capricious because the Forest Service failed to explain how 21-inch-diameter trees constituted “small diameter timber.” Los Padres ForestWatch v. Forest Service, 25 F.4th 649
The Forest then explained it and passed muster in 2024
https://forestpolicypub.com/2024/03/11/federal-lands-litigation-update-through-march-10-2024/
Also upheld by a Montana district court in at least three of cases.
Thanks, Jon, I had forgotten that one..
“The court found that a 21-inch diameter could reasonably be considered “small” where the predominant Jeffrey pine can grow to 60-90 inches.”
There’s also “generally” in the Rule which could be interpreted in many ways.