The Roadless Rule Map

National forests cover 193 million acres across 44 states and Puerto Rico. But "national forest" does not mean "protected." Unlike national parks, the Forest Service manages these lands for multiple uses: timber, mining, grazing, and recreation. The question has always been how to balance extraction against the land itself.

In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration proposed answering that question for the wildest remaining third: 58.3 million acres of roadless areas. These were the last unroaded places in the National Forest System. No logging roads had been punched through. No commercial timber sales had taken place. They represented the largest intact landscapes left in the lower 48 states.

The resulting Roadless Area Conservation Rule, finalized in January 2001, prohibited new road construction and most commercial logging in these areas. It did not create wilderness. It did not close existing roads. It simply said: we will not build new ones into the last wild places.

The scale is difficult to comprehend. The rule protects roadless areas from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the largest in the country, to the Nantahala and Pisgah in the southern Appalachians. From the Superior in Minnesota's Boundary Waters to the Gila in the deserts of New Mexico.

Idaho alone has over 9 million roadless acres. Montana, nearly 6 million. Colorado, 4.4 million. Even states most people do not associate with wilderness hold significant roadless forests under the rule: West Virginia, Vermont, Kentucky.

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex spans over a million contiguous acres of grizzly habitat. The White Mountain National Forest protects headwaters that supply drinking water across New England. Each fills a different ecological role. All are now unprotected.

The argument for rescission is economic: open more forest to timber production. But the economics overwhelmingly favor keeping these forests standing. National forest recreation generates $13.5 billion annually and supports 208,000 jobs. The entire federal timber program generates $300 million.

For every dollar the timber program brings in, recreation generates forty-five. The outdoor recreation economy, concentrated in the kind of intact wild landscapes the Roadless Rule protects, is one of the fastest-growing sectors in rural America. Meanwhile, logging roads cost taxpayers money to build and maintain. The forests they open up never produce enough timber revenue to cover the cost.