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Today is the deadline for public comment on President Trump's plans to reverse the Roadless Rule on America's national forests. It bans most new road building and logging on 58 million acres of Western forests. The administration is trying to fast-track rescinding the Roadless Rule, but as NPR's Kirk Siegler reports from Eugene, Oregon, that may be difficult.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Just before he left office in 2001, President Clinton signed an executive order that prevented logging on about a third of all U.S. Forest Service land. Clinton's Roadless Rule was hailed by conservationists and despised by the industry. Now President Trump wants it scrapped. It's part of a broader executive order that aims to dramatically boost logging on Forest Service land. The argument is this will help western timber towns prosper again and better protect them from wildfires.
COREY BINGAMAN: We just don't live in the same ecosystem. We don't live in the same climate that we did when the Roadless Rule was first enacted.
SIEGLER: Corey Bingaman is with the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry trade group. He's standing on a mountain in western Oregon looking out at black skeletons of burnt trees from a massive wildfire in 2020. He says repealing the rule would give the Forest Service more flexibility to build fuel breaks and do some thinning here.
BINGAMAN: Fires are way more volatile, way more destructive, and they are threatening communities in a way that we really did not foresee in the early 2000s.
SIEGLER: Those who want the rule repealed say it's not about punching new roads into pristine, remote forests and cutting old-growth trees. But environmentalists don't buy it. Chandra LeGue of Oregon Wild says opening these lands back up is a potential free-for-all for loggers.
CHANDRA LEGUE: These last remnants of wild, unlogged forests are incredibly special and unique on the landscape at this point and valuable for so many reasons. Those are the forests that need to be protected as a legacy for future generations.
SIEGLER: The Trump administration has said that tossing out the Roadless Rule would restore common sense to forest management. But it's not clear how much will change if it gets reversed. Here in the Pacific Northwest, people on both sides acknowledge the Forest Service doesn't have the resources to build new roads or even keep pace with current timber harvest targets in forests with existing roads.
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SIEGLER: Still, Sean Smith, CEO of the family-owned Starfire lumber in Cottage Grove, Oregon, is grateful that the new administration is trying to change course.
SEAN SMITH: It would be salubrious for the industry. And any increase in supply, you know, when our margins are pretty pinched is going to be helpful to us.
SIEGLER: Today's public comment deadline is only an initial step as the Trump administration will still be required by federal law to conduct a full environmental study before actually overturning the 24-year-old Roadless Rule. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Eugene, Oregon.
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