Roadless Rule Rescission Threatens Public Land, Possible Impacts to University Research and Recreation

By GEORGE SLAATS

   On Aug. 18, 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) opened the final public comment period on its rescission of the Roadless Rule. This repeal could open 45 million acres of public land across the country, an area roughly the same size as all of Washington State, to build roads, logging, mining and other natural resource extraction.
   The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, more commonly referred to as the Roadless Rule, is a 2001 conservation measure and Forest Service policy that protects over 45 million acres of undeveloped forest lands from new roads. Restricting road construction protects these areas from commercial logging, mining, drilling and development. Following a temporary road-building moratorium in 1999, the Forest Service developed plans for a more comprehensive policy. “The Rule is the direct result of a tremendous outpouring of public support. More than 600 public hearings were held around the nation, and the public provided more than 1.6 million comments on the Rule—more comments than any other rule in the nation’s history,” said environmental law organization Earthjustice.
   In August 2025, the USDA announced a rollback of the 25-year-old rule. A Forest Service ‘Roadless Areas’ webpage stated that “returning decision-making authority to local leaders ensures that issues such as reducing wildfire risks and forest health are addressed based on local conditions rather than a one-size-fits-all regulation.” In the following three-week comment period, the Center for Western Priorities reported that over 600,000 responses had been submitted, of which 99 percent were in opposition to repealing the rule.
   Repealing the rule would have deep impacts on ecosystem health and recreation opportunities in roadless areas. “This would open it all up. Essentially anything that wasn’t wilderness and didn’t have some other special protection on it would then be as open as all of the general forest lands, which are open to logging, mining and other extractive uses,” explained Lia Brewster at a Puget Sound campus panel discussion on April 22, 2026. Brewster is the NW Conservation Campaign Strategist for the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy nonprofit. In response to the wildfire mitigation argument, she noted that there are already exceptions built into the rule for such fuel treatments. “34 percent of fuel treatment that happens on national forest land happens in roadless areas because those exceptions are there,” she said.
   According to the environmental impact statement released by the Forest Service on Aug. 20, this recession would open public land to millions of acres of clear-cut timber harvesting and mining, which is “likely to adversely affect 327 ESA (Endangered Species Act) listed species and 71 critical habitats.” It would create thousands of miles of new roads which would “likely be closed to public motor vehicle use” and increase already high maintenance costs for the Forest Service. The greatest negative effects would fall on people who hold intrinsic value for the existence of roadless areas, the ecosystem services and recreation benefits they provide.
   In Washington alone, there are 2 million acres at risk across the state. “Leavenworth, Kittitas County, Walla Walla and other communities in Washington rely on drinking water from forests protected by the Roadless Rule,” the Washington Trails Association website stated. “Outdoor activities support 120,000 jobs in our state, particularly benefiting small businesses and people’s livelihoods in rural communities.”
Impacts extend to students and faculty at the University of Puget Sound. Professor of Biology, Carrie Woods, does research on the Olympic Peninsula, which has 86,000 acres of protected roadless area. When asked about how new roads might impact these areas, she said, “When you bring a road in, you bring an edge, and edges bring a lot of changes to the system. So they increase temperature, they increase wind, which increases drought, which then increases the chance that there could be a fire. All of those things happen just by building a road.” She explained that the forests of the Olympic Peninsula aren’t studied enough for restoration efforts to be effective. “If we keep fragmenting our forests, we will drastically change them. And we are naive to think that we know enough to recover them.”
   Many of these forests are critical habitat for endangered and threatened species. “The charismatic megafauna—the bears and the wolves and the cougars and the pumas—need a lot of space to do what they do. And they’re territorial, so they need their own territory. So if you bring in roads and you start breaking that up into fragments, they can’t live in that territory very well. So they likely will leave, go locally extinct, and then you have a disruption of the entire food web, right?” said Woods. She stressed that once ecosystem disruption such as logging occurs, it is often impossible to undo. “One change of the system has downstream effects that are felt for centuries.”
   Beyond their ecological significance, roadless areas are also popular for recreation. The repeal could have impacts on student recreation through Puget Sound Outdoors (PSO) trips as well as club activities. “Repealing the roadless rule would have adverse effects to a lot of our backpacking trips, our climbing trips, mountain biking access in the area, and some skiing in the area,” said Reggie Westgate (’27), a PSO leader and former PSO program coordinator. “I know for Kayak Club, a lot of the headwaters for the rivers that they paddle are roadless.” Recent PSO trips in roadless areas include climbing in Leavenworth, backpacking on the Dosewallips River, and popular day hikes such as Mount Elinore, Lake Cushman, and Lena Lake. Because roadless areas have less strict protections than designated wilderness areas or national parks, they are open to recreation options such as mountain biking or snowmobiling that can’t be done elsewhere. “Roadless is that sort of in between for a lot of these activities that you can’t do in wilderness, but you also can’t do in a city park,” said Westgate.
  Because the Roadless Rule concerns public land, any members of the public can submit a comment with their input. Although submitting an individual comment may seem like a small act, collective action can have a large impact. “There’s a big difference between a comment period where no one engaged and trying to sue based on that, versus a comment period where there was clear public support and they went ahead anyways,” Brewster said at the panel discussion last year. The comment period for the draft environmental impact statement was extended 15 days and closes on October 6th. Comments can be made at www.regulations.gov/document/FS-2025-0001-223869.