Roadless Rule recission appears to undermine public opinion
The roadless rule may have a significant impact on the national forests in Western North Carolina.
Acroterion photo
The National Forest Service, housed under the United States Department of Agriculture, plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule instated by President Bill Clinton to protect national forests’ roadless acres.
Drawing opposition from 99% of public commenters, this recission is part of a series of opaque federal actions and policies instituted in the face of significant public outcry.
Before the Roadless Rule made its way into the national conversation, Western North Carolina conservationists battled a 2023 proposal to increase logging. The Nantahala-Pisgah Forest Plan, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, would expand timber production in the region by 500%. The CBD release went on to state that “the plan has been deluged by widespread public opposition … more than 23,000 people have spoken out.”
In a statement to The Smoky Mountain News, a USDA representative wrote that “currently, timber harvests in the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests average about 800 acres per year — less than one-tenth of one percent of the forest.”
Nonetheless, the Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of four other conservation groups, sued the Forest Service in March for its 2023 proposal on the grounds of wildlife endangerment and violation of federal law.
Sam Evans, SELC senior attorney and leader of the national forests and parks program, told SMN that the federal agency’s motivation to increase timber production is driven by a national timber quota.
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MountainTrue Resilient Forests Director Josh Kelly explained that the Trump administration is “calling on the Forest Service to increase timber harvest by 25% annually for the next 10 years,” despite what Kelly claimed was ample historical evidence of the poor economic outcomes of logging and roadbuilding in remote areas.
Evans added that quotas increased under President Biden, too, and have been “higher than is sustainable for almost 10 years.”
And while he said theoretically, timber volume is a measurable marker of how well the NFS is doing its job, it should be encouraged as a target, not a quota.
“If the Forest Service did more hazardous fuels reduction and removed more small diameter fuels from western forests and did more restoration … timber volume would increase,” the SELC lawyer explained.
But that’s not what’s happening under a nationwide quota.
Instead, he said, the Forest Service “is cutting more timber in the South and the Pacific Northwest — the places where the biggest trees grew,” including the Pisgah and Nantahala forests.
Evans chalked up the quota itself to “a small but influential political constituency that is able to steer the public conversation about what the Forest Service needs to be doing … and turn that into something that benefits a particular industry.”
Once the second Trump Administration took office, this “political constituency” had its eyes on a bigger fish: the National Environmental Policy Act first implemented in 1970, also known as the “Magna Carta” of environmental law. Trump had attempted to redefine NEPA at the end of his first term, but the changes were reversed in 2022 by Biden.
Clues the new administration would overhaul NEPA, however, were present as quickly as March. According to The Asheville Watchdog, an NFS press release declared the agency’s intention to “pursue salvage projects on about 2,200 acres of the Pisgah National Forest.”
The agency did not seek public input, nor did it detail the exact location of the projects. The Watchdog reported that this decision was permissible under the grounds of a “public safety emergency” — fallen trees destroyed by Hurricane Helene — allowing the Forest Service to fast-track a lengthy NEPA-mandated process.
While the Forest Service used Hurricane Helene to justify harvesting timber without public input, SELC in its March 2025 lawsuit cited widespread damage from Helene as yet another reason the agency should not implement its 2023 increased logging proposal.
Then, in July, the United States Department of Agriculture made it easier for the Forest Service expedite its work — even without a natural disaster attached.
The interim Trump-era NEPA, which applies to all USDA-supervised departments, included a 30-day comment period, during which it received nearly 155,000 comments. A large majority expressed significant concern for revised legislation, criticizing its potential to constrain public participation and encroach on tribal sovereignty, among other things.
The revised NEPA removed a specific clause outlining “American Indians and Alaska Native religious or cultural sites” as “extraordinary circumstances” that mandate the adoption of specific environmental analyses to determine potential impacts of any project.
Yet, the legislation also stated that “interim final rule will not have substantial direct effects on Indian Tribes,” therefore “consultation and coordination with Indian Tribal governments is not required.”
Kelly explained NEPA’s impact on logging projects in Nantahala and Pisgah National Forest.
“Going forward, the Forest Service will decide about the project and then tell the public what they’ve decided, and that will be the end of it,” Kelly said.
As a result, “there’s less opportunity for the public to influence how their public lands are being stewarded,” he said.
In short, 2025 reinterpretation of NEPA — preceded by recent NFS actions — cleared the way for the Roadless Rule recission, including its historically short public comment period and a foundation critics allege is not based in science.
Logistics of the legislation
The 2001 Roadless Rule, issued after a three-year Forest Service planning process and involving an 18-month road construction moratorium, prohibits road-building and commercial logging in designated ‘roadless’ areas.
In North Carolina, these areas span more than 170,000 acres — about 14% of statewide national forest but less than 1% of the nation’s roadless land mass.
The recission was marketed by USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins as a means of “reducing wildfire risk, protecting infrastructure, and keeping forests healthy,” but Evans spoke to the contrary.
“Roadless areas are one of the best defenses we have against uncharacteristic wildfires,” he said, adding that “the number one risk for wildfire ignition is proximity to roads.”
When SMN reached out to the USDA for a comment on the recission, a spokesperson wrote that “there is a large body of research — including a recent intensive review of over 40 case studies — showing that fuel reduction activities can change how fires burn and reduce fire severity by more than 60 percent.”
Indeed, the importance of fuel reduction is supported by extensive scientific analysis. But while the Roadless Rule protects 58.5 million acres of forested land nationwide, MountainTrue’s Josh Kelly explained that “it’s flexible enough to allow for cutting of small diameter trees, and in very limited emergencies, temporary road construction.”
In other words, the Roadless Rule already allows fuel reduction to take place.
The real danger of axing the 2001 regulation is the threat logging poses to both North Carolina’s diverse range of endangered wildlife — and to its residents.
“2 million people in North Carolina can trace their drinking water directly back to a roadless area that would lose protection,” Evans said.
Kelly added that while the 2023 Forest Service Nantahala-Pisgah management plan designated roadless lands as “backcountry,” thereby discouraging timber harvest, he doesn’t think it “is going to be a protection for many of these areas.”
According to the USDA spokesperson, however, the backcountry management practice “limits road construction and allows timber harvest only for specific purposes, such as protecting endangered species … roadbuilding in these areas is generally impractical, so the impact of rescinding the Roadless Rule is expected to be minimal.”
Evans noted that even existing North Carolina mountain roads are in poor condition and create “the biggest risk of erosion, water quality, damage and landslides.”
He chalked it up to the Forest Service’s lack of funding — about 13% of what’s necessary to conduct ongoing maintenance.
Public input seemingly discouraged
Like the administration’s NEPA revision, the roadless recission deeply impacts tribes — many of whom have sacred sites in protected roadless areas — while excluding indigenous voices from the equation.
In response to Rollins’ notice, a statement from the Tlingit & Haida peoples of Alaska affirmed that the tribal nation does “not recognize the validity of federal actions impacting our traditional homelands when undertaken without meaningful government-to-government consultation, as required by law and respect for our inherent sovereignty.”
In addition to forcing key stakeholders out of the decision-making process, some Roadless Rule advocates were frustrated by what they interpreted as an attempt to dissuade public opinion.
Rollins announced the rescission on Aug. 28 — the Thursday before Labor Day weekend. But data analyst Nick Holshouser, who conducted the 2025 Roadless Rule comment analytics study, surmised that many didn’t see the notification until Tuesday, Sept. 2.
His theory aligned with the numbers: based on the comment analytics study of 223,726 online comments, daily submissions between Aug. 28 and Sept. 1 averaged at 3,654, but reached 10,203 on Sept. 2.
The comment period closed on Sept. 18, a little over two weeks later.
“This is the shortest period that the Forest Service has ever offered for anything having to do with the roadless rule,” Evans said, adding that the second Bush administration, upon a proposal to weaken the act, eventually allowed a four-month window for public comment.
The explanation behind the nontraditional length of public comment, once again, comes right back to NEPA. Notably, the revision of the National Environmental Policy Act terminated the Council on Environmental Quality — and the public participation it solicited.
According to a GT Law alert, “the statutory language … does not explicitly require public review of and comment on draft NEPA documents.” Alhough, agencies are still required to solicit public comment on draft EIS notices, the notice of intent for the recission included.
“The administration is having a comment period because they’re required by law,” Kelly said.
But Evans noted that the agency made it difficult for people to comment.
“They disconnected the API for the regulations.gov portal so that you couldn’t go to somebody else’s web page, submit your comment and then have it pushed into their system. You had to go and navigate through the regulations.gov portal yourself, which is … not very user friendly at all,” he explained.
In response to these “anti-public comment” tactics, SELC began allowing people to give them comments, which the organization physically took to the Forest Service.
“We mailed thousands … we kept getting more and more than we could possibly stuff envelopes for, so we delivered them in boxes,” Evans said.
In the end, SELC delivered around 8,000 submissions. The legal nonprofit’s contribution is part of the reason why, in addition to the federal register’s 223,726 initial online count, the agency received 625,930 total comments.
Part of Holshouser’s analysis involved grouping original and campaign-generated comments. When only accounting for the first group, the opposition-to-supporting ratio drops from 99% and 1% to 97% and 1.8%, with some neutral submissions. That’s “still overwhelming support by people who took the time to actually write” the comments, Holshouser noted.
But the difference in ratios could point to something a bit more insidious: logging corporations and enthusiasts aren’t investing in campaigns of public comment. Holshouser described their thought process as, “we don’t want to make a big deal out of this, because we already know what [the Trump Administration is] going to do” — and it’s on the side of timber production.
After all, “this isn’t about what the public wants. This is about industry and it’s about ideology,” Kelly said.
But Evans was quick to underscore that SELC and other likeminded groups aren’t going anywhere.
“There’s no way we are going to stand by and let the most important conservation rule for public lands of a generation be taken away over the objections of what comes to as close as to unanimity as you can find in a democracy,” he said. “We will not stand for that, and we will not be alone.”
