Earlier this month, Ian Isaacson backpacked into the heart of Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains, compound bow in hand, on the lookout for elk.

“I’m a generalist,” Isaacson said a few days before his trip. “After big game season here in September and October, I quickly shift to bird hunting, primarily chukar hunting these days.”

With the start of elk and deer season underway, Isaacson had other hunting trips on the horizon: rifle deer hunting in southeast Oregon. More elk hunting in Idaho.

Beyond the benefit of a full freezer, what brings Isaacson back to these isolated wild areas is solitude and peace.

“It just fulfills me as a person,” Isaacson said. “Being able to get away from the hustle and bustle is vitally important.”

Those isolated wild areas could soon see new development as the Trump administration moves to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, known as the roadless rule, created under former President Bill Clinton.

For more than two decades, that policy has blocked most new road construction and logging in almost 59 million acres of federal forests across the country, including about 2 million acres in Oregon and 2 million acres in Washington.

Isaacson volunteers as co-chair for the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Oregon chapter. For hunters like him, protecting these wildlands from roadbuilding helps ensure animals like elk have large expanses of intact habitat where they can roam freely. Roads bring people, and people bring cars, trash and noise. That can stress elk, leading to fewer calves and smaller herds — and fewer available hunting tags.

But more importantly for Isaacson, roads threaten to take away the areas where he finds peace.

“Those are the places where we as hunters and anglers get to be active participants in the natural cycle of things,” Isaacson said. “It’s really hard to describe how important those experiences are to us.”

In August, the U.S. Forest Service officially started the public process for rescinding the roadless rule, issuing what’s called a “notice of intent” that outlines the initial details of its plan. The public has until Friday to provide input (click the green button in the top right corner that reads, “SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT.”)

Rescinding the decades-old environmental rule is the latest move by President Donald Trump to open long-protected federal lands to development, like logging and mining. And like anything involving timber and forests, this policy cuts deep into Oregon’s culture and history.

For some firefighters and timber executives, new roads in remote areas represent a promising policy change — but it’s not clear if they’ll get the benefits they seek. One thing is sure, however: If the Trump administration moves forward with this change to a national policy, the way it’s implemented will be far from universal.

Leaving roads up to local supervisors

Many timber and mining industry executives oppose the roadless rule, as do some local officials from cities and counties that rely on these industries. They say policies around roadbuilding and logging across tens of thousands of acres of varied landscapes should be left up to supervisors who oversee individual national forests.

“The roadless rule, while I understand is well intended, it’s not delivering on what we need it to do, which is to allow active forest management, science-based management in the right place at the right time, decided by the local experts and local information,” said Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a Portland-based timber industry association.

Without the roadless rule, supervisors overseeing more than 150 national forests will likely be the ones deciding whether to cut roads through once-protected areas. While forest supervisors are often experts in their local forest ecology, Oregon State University professor Mindy Crandall worries about losing sight of the big picture.

“The idea of managing everything locally without regard for the cumulative impacts is how we got ourselves into trouble in the first place, right?” Crandall said, noting that the national forest system was created to protect timber and water quality from industrialization. “I think local control sells politically, though, so that phrasing is very popular right now.”

The timber market is rough at the moment. Prices have plummeted in recent months, as demand for freshly cut logs is down. Seven mills closed in Oregon last year. When there are fewer mills nearby, timber companies have to pay more to move logs to processing, eating into their profits.

For forester Amanda Sullivan-Astor, policy manager for the Associated Oregon Loggers, rescinding the rule is less about economics, and more about forest health. Over a century of aggressive fire suppression has allowed forests to grow dense, and climate change is fueling drought and pests. For Sullivan-Astor, selective logging is part of the solution.

“By no means is the rescinding of the roadless rule going to open these lands up to unhinged, problematic clearcutting,” Sullivan-Astor said. “That’s not going to happen. Our members don’t want to do that. I don’t think anybody really wants or expects that.”

Roads help firefighters, but they also bring more fires

Firefighters need roads to access rugged, mountainous areas when they catch fire. Roads also create fuel breaks that help stop wildfires from spreading. U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz highlighted wildfires as one of the main reasons for rescinding the rule.

“For nearly 25 years, the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action — prohibiting road construction, which has limited wildfire suppression and active forest management,” Schultz said in a press statement.

The Forest Service’s notice of intent also heavily emphasizes the need to rescind the rule to help firefighters fight wildfires.

But forest ecologists and fire scientists warn that roads can make wildfires worse. Most wildfires are caused by human activity — such as chains dragging behind trailers, people tossing lit cigarettes, catalytic converters sparking dry grass, or campers not fully dousing campfires. Roads also change the landscape, allowing fire-prone invasive plants to thrive.

In 2021, Oregon State University researchers found that roadless forests had fewer wildfires. And while wildfires tend to grow larger in roadless areas, in the end, those burns made forests more resilient to future fires.

“These areas are some of our most resilient areas to wildfire risk already,” said Grace Brahler, wildlands director for the Eugene-based nonprofit, Cascadia Wildlands. “A lot of these areas are far away from communities, so introducing roads will really just increase the likelihood that human-caused wildfire starts can happen in these areas.”

Environmental groups say rescinding the roadless rule is a disingenuous move by the Trump administration to increase logging in the name of wildfire prevention — an issue that widely resonates with people, as massive wildfires destroy more homes every year without regard for political parties.

“It’s really all about repaying favors to Trump’s timber industry donor friends,” said Erik Fernandez, wilderness program manager for the environmental nonprofit, Oregon Wild, who’s based in Bend. “This isn’t going to do anything to reduce fire risk or improve the health of the forest. It’s about increasing logging on our public lands.”

The public process

The 2001 roadless rule was one of many environmental policies passed by the Clinton administration following the “timber wars” of the 1980s and ’90s, when clear-cutting federal forests, particularly in the West, grabbed national attention. At that point, a postwar housing boom had cleared vast expanses of dense, old forests that were critical habitat for struggling species, like the spotted owl and marbled murrelet.

As part of its public process for creating the roadless rule, the U.S. Forest Service held 430 public hearings nationwide that drew more than 23,000 people. It also received 1.6 million written comments, much of which called for increased protections.

Now, the Forest Service is not holding any public meetings to rescind the roadless rule. The move would apply to national forests in all states except Colorado and Idaho, covering about 45 million acres. The agency is relying solely on written comments. As of Sept. 16, about 1.1 million people had submitted comments to its notice of intent to rescind the rule.

A notice of intent is just the first step. Up next, the Forest Service plans to publish a draft environmental impact statement around March 2026, which will include more details about the agency’s plans. The Forest Service says it will accept more public comments around that time.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/17/roadless-rule-logging-federal-forests-oregon-washington/