In 1999, Bill Clinton ascended one of the highest summits in Virginia to announce that “the last, best unprotected wild lands anywhere in our nation” would be shielded by a new rule that banned roads, drilling and other disturbances within America’s most prized forests.
But today, this site in George Washington national forest, along with other near-pristine forests across the US that amount to 58m acres, equivalent to the size of the UK, could soon see chainsaws whir and logging trucks rumble through them amid a push by Donald Trump to raze these ecosystems for timber.
The Trump administration has said it will rescind Clinton’s roadless rule, more than two decades after its introduction appeared to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers over the future of America’s best remaining woodland.
The rule is “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, as she outlined its demise in June. The administration is in a hurry – an unusually short public comment period of 21 days for this rescission has just ended, following a Trump “emergency” order to swiftly fell trees across the US’s network of national forests, spanning 280 million acres.
The president has slapped tariffs on lumber imports, and the recent Republican spending bill requires more wood to come from American forests – a 78% increase in the amount of timber sold from national forests in the next nine years, an escalation that could trigger a frenzy of new cutting.
“We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money,” Trump has said. “We have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.”
Yet advocates of the roadless rule argue these areas should not be viewed as mere sources of timber, pointing to their crucial ecological role in protecting and filtering the streams and rivers that provide clean drinking water to millions of Americans. The gnarled old-growth trees that have stood untouched for centuries in these places also act as a home to hundreds of threatened species, and are a vast carbon store in an age of climate breakdown.
The rule protects select fragments of forest, most of it in the US west, that are some of the most treasured jewels of nature found outside America’s storied national parks.
The largest roadless area, in the Tongass national forest in Alaska, is one of the most carbon-rich forests in the world and contains more brown bears than the entire lower 48 states, drawn to an abundance of salmon. Superior national forest in Minnesota, meanwhile, contains miles of crystal clear waters for canoeing, as well as moose, lynx, songbirds and wolves.
Putting such places off limits to new roads and oil and gas drilling – although companies can still access them to push through power transmission or pipelines – came from a rethink in the 1980s and 1990s about the role of US national forests, which were being logged unsustainably.
Map of Roadless Rule areas within US National Forests
Mike Dombeck, who was in charge of the US Forest Service when the roadless rule was drawn up, said there was a blossoming recognition of forest values other than extracting timber – such as recreation, unspoiled vistas, watershed protection and tourism revenue.
“These are some of the best places to hunt and fish and recreate, but also the last refuge for a lot of endangered species and the headwaters for our drinking water,” he said. “There are these other values, too, such as solitude, that are harder to measure.”
“It is such a puzzling, chaotic approach this administration is taking,” Dombeck said. “We are losing this land rapidly. If we don’t conserve it, we will lose it.”
The Forest Service already oversees 370,000 miles of roads, enough to wrap around the world 14 times, and any new roads carved through forests will also have to be funded by an agency that has had its budget cut and has lost about 15% of its staff, some 5,000 people, from Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.
“It costs the public money to create these new roads and the Forest Service can barely maintain the roads it has,” said Dombeck. “Also, the easiest timber to get has already gone. We will be putting new, expensive roads into hard-to-reach areas, which will then erode and pollute the water supply. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
The roadless rule specifically targets roads because they act as a multiplier for forest destruction, often spawning further offshoot roads that slice up connected habitat, as the fishbone-pattern dismemberment of the Amazon rainforest has shown. These roads often bring in new invasive species that can choke out native plants and animals.
One of the entrances to the George Washington national forest. Photograph: Erin Edgerton/AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration and the logging industry claim the prohibition of roads impedes fire suppression activities, although vehicles and other human activity on roads can cause new wildfires in forests which are becoming more prone to blazes due to the climate crisis. Since the 1990s, wildfires have been nearly four times as likely to start in forests that have roads compared to roadless areas, according to a recent analysis by the Wilderness Society.
But unfettered road building is now set to return to American forests, barring legal challenges. Ironically, the place that Clinton announced the roadless rule – called Reddish Knob, a graffiti-covered perch on Shenandoah mountain – could in coming years overlook a patchwork of land torn asunder by new logging, rather than the blanket of undisturbed trees that are the legacy of the rule.
Almost a quarter of the George Washington national forest, which is co-managed with the adjoining Jefferson national forest, is protected under the roadless rule, and local advocates fret over its future. Towering old-growth hemlock, oak and maple is found in nearly 400,000 acres of roadless area that plunges up and down wooded peaks that can reach 4,000ft, steep places once too difficult to access with horses and trucks but could now have trunks removed by helicopter.
“A lot of wise management practices will be overlooked in this brazen rush for more timber,” said a long-term Forest Service manager at George Washington national forest who recently departed and did not want to be named for fear of retribution from the administration.
Map of Virginia’s Roadless Rule areas
“The roadless rule was this truce between competing user groups and it shouldn’t be struck down so quickly. They really want to open it up though. You can almost hear the chainsaws already.”
The roadless areas here contain critical headwaters that feed a large reservoir from which the local city of Harrisonburg draws its drinking supply. In all, more than 2 million people in Virginia – and 60 million people across the whole of the US – get their drinking water from sources that flow from protected roadless areas.
“We are getting more extreme storms and hurricanes, so having these roadless areas here with intact roots to absorb water as it comes in quickly is crucial,” said Ellen Stuart-Haentjens, executive director of the Virginia Wilderness Committee.
“Without the roadless rule we will have more intense flooding events, the water quality would go down, fish species like trout would suffer, and the tourism dollars for local towns will be affected too. Beyond that there’s the spiritual element, the enjoyment of going to hike and look out and not think, ‘Oh, that’s just been logged.’”
One of the roadless areas around Reddish Knob. Photograph: Courtesy Jill Gottesman
Although the Trump administration has demanded a ramp-up in logging, there are still hurdles in its way. The recent, abbreviated, public comment period for the rollback showed that 99% of respondents were against its removal, suggesting broad pushback to its plan. “Public support for the roadless rule has only increased in the quarter century it has been in place,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities.
Furthermore, the timber industry, which currently gets more than 90% of its product from private, rather than federal, lands, may choose to not expand into all of the currently protected areas.
A spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council, which represents loggers, called the roadless rule removal “a long-overdue correction of a one-size-fits-all federal policy that has too often restricted necessary, science-based forest management”.
But he added that even if the Forest Service offers up fresh areas for logging in roadless zones, any new projects will not be immediate. “Even if the roadless rule is rescinded, we think it could take years for such a project to be planned and approved, if it happens at all,” he said.
Still, the revocation of the roadless rule reopens a chapter many thought was closed for good, much like worries over the ozone layer or whaling. A seemingly bygone age of industrial clear-cutting of forests, where muscular extraction was the primary, or only, thought has had an unlikely resurrection.
In seeking to turn the clock back, the Trump administration is waving away years of scientific understanding of the role of forests, as it has attempted to do with our knowledge of the dangers, or otherwise, of greenhouse gases, vaccines and medicines.
“If you show students today pictures of clear-cut areas of forest they will say, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s in the past, we solved that,’” said Stuart-Haentjens. “To have this pop up again now is just shocking.”
