Modern roads in the United States will last for decades. And yet the damage they cause in our national forests is immediate.
Since 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected more than 58m acres of national forests from development, barring road construction and timber harvests. The policy came to be with huge bipartisan support; almost 2 million people submitted comments on it, the majority of whom championed the protections.
Now the US secretary of agriculture, Brooke L Rollins, is working to rescind the “Roadless Rule”, opening public lands – our lands – up for logging and other development to the highest bidder.
This is just one prong in the Trump administration’s campaign to remake public lands in ways that most Americans would find unrecognizable.
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I know these places well. I served proudly as the director of the National Park Service for four years, beginning in 2021. In the short time since I stepped down, the administration has fired hundreds of park superintendents, rangers, tour guides, biologists, archaeologists and other staff from one of the most popular agencies this country has ever known. In 2025, more than 320 million people visited national parks systems alone, and millions more spent time in national forests.
The broad aim of this travesty is to disconnect everyday citizens and visitors from their relationship to these lands, from our history, and from our collective ownership.
That runs counter to everything I value, not only as a NPS director, but as a youth growing up on the Umatilla Indian reservation in north-eastern Oregon.
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I grew up hearing the Cayuse creation story, in which humans came to be in part when the Salmon gave us two gifts: his voice, and his body to nourish us. In return, Salmon asked Creator to ensure that humans would be good stewards of the natural world. That is a covenant I live by.
Removing the Roadless Rule would be an assault on that covenant.
This wise policy protects our last-standing undisturbed wildlands – forests, wetlands, canyons and other places that are home to many threatened and endangered species. Grizzlies. Wolves. And salmon. These are the unfractured areas where game animals such as elk and mule deer thrive.
And they support people as well. More than 180 million Americans rely on forested lands to capture and naturally filter their drinking water. Opening them up to logging and construction pollutes that water with sediment and more. No one that I know welcomes the higher water bills that come with decontamination.
Anyone who thinks this is a fight between red and blue is deeply mistaken. Few things unite the people of this country like their love of the land. Hunters, anglers, hikers, campers, families of every stripe support the national treasures that are our wild places. We all want a relationship with our land.
Who doesn’t want that relationship? Big business. Companies want exclusive leases. They want extraction – extraction that benefits them only and will cause damage that lasts long after they’ve taken the lost dollar out of the earth.
Decades ago, Umatilla chairperson Alphonse “Frenchy” Halfmoon advocated for removing roads on our reservation as a way of reconnecting us to the lands that have sustained us since time immemorial. My family and I recently walked those formerly paved roads, now trails, up to Iskuulpa Creek, where the salmon can now run easier.
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It takes a lot to remove a road. And while nature is resilient, it takes even more to heal the land and habitats after the road is gone. A better option: in our national forests, just don’t build them.
Tell your representatives and the US Forest Service that the government should not rescind the Roadless Rule. You have to fight. Democracy, as the saying goes, is a contact sport.
Public lands belong to us all, including you. That means you get a say. It also means you share the responsibility of caring for them – and, when they are cared for, you get the joy of benefiting from them. Keeping the Roadless Rule benefits every last one of us.
