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The Trump administration’s plan to repeal a rule prohibiting logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests would strip protection from more than 4 million acres within California’s borders.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced on Monday that she will act to rescind the “roadless rule,” developed during the Clinton administration, to allow “for fire prevention and responsible timber production” on more than 58 million acres of national forests.

But experts are divided about whether allowing road development and timber harvest in national forests will help prevent wildfires. Though roads can aid in firefighting and fuel reduction and serve as fire breaks, roads can also mean more people — and people mean more sparks that can ignite wildfires. And some experts say timber harvests may not reduce fire severity because they can promote growth of more flammable fuels in forests.

California has more national forest acreage than any state other than Alaska. At stake are the roadless reaches of wild areas throughout the state: From dense coastal forests in the far north, to alpine conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada, to Southern California’s great expanses of brush in the Cleveland, San Bernardino and Angeles national forests.

The Department of Agriculture has not said how it plans to rescind the rule, and how long the effort is expected to take. Reversing federal rules usually is a long process, requiring publication in the Federal Register and a long public comment period. The agriculture department did not respond to an inquiry from CalMatters.

Most U.S. Forest Service land — about 69% or more than 135 million acres nationwide — isn’t covered by the rule’s protections against roads and timber cutting. In California, about 21% of its 21 million acres of national forest — 4.4 million acres — are considered roadless, ranking behind Alaska, Idaho and Montana.

These roadless areas are considered important for providing habitat for more than 200 threatened or endangered species of wildlife, including owls, salmon and frogs, and for protecting vital watersheds.

Trump Administration Cites ‘Common Sense’

The Trump administration says revoking the rule is a “common-sense” way to help local officials protect communities from wildfires.

“Of the 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas covered under the 2001 Roadless Rule, 28 million acres are in areas at high or very high risk of wildfire. Rescinding this rule will allow this land to be managed at the local forest level, with more flexibility to take swift action to reduce wildfire risk and help protect surrounding communities and infrastructure,” according to the agriculture department’s statement.

Conservationists call this a ploy to further unfetter logging by an administration that called for an “immediate expansion of American timber production” and ordered drastic cuts to the very agencies that study and fight fires.

“This move is the most irresponsible, because opening up these forests to logging roads and logging is going to degrade them. It’ll actually increase wildfire risks. It’ll harm numerous species and harm watersheds,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s just a big handout to timber companies.”

Courts Will Have a Say

Sharon Friedman, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who was a planning director in the Rocky Mountain region and worked on Colorado’s state-specific roadless rule, said she could see why the announcement caused consternation, but she expects that any outcomes that survive in court will likely be long-delayed and less severe than feared. Roadways for fuel management are often temporary and, if done correctly, should bar entry to the public, she said.

She also said she doesn’t expect that it would lead to a boom on logging in roadless areas. “It’s not like people are going to suddenly discover that, in these areas without roads, there’s a lot of desirable timber —  because if it had been there, people would have gotten to it in the first place,” she said.

California officials aren’t ready to say what it means for the state.

David Acuña, a Cal Fire battalion chief and public information officer, said “we are simply going to respond if we’re called. Other than that, it is how they choose to handle their roads and/or fire management.”

“Picture somebody attempting to redo your personal living room in your home. It would be inappropriate. In the same way, we are not going to attempt to navigate what a partner agency, a neighboring agency, does,” Acuña said.

Tony Andersen, a spokesperson for the California Natural Resources Agency, said the agency is reviewing what rescinding the rule would mean for California. He would not provide further comment.

Dusty LaChapelle, an engineer with the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities near Lake Tahoe surrounded by national forestland, said his  department already can access remote areas in the South Tahoe basin, including with helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.

“We can get a hold of a lot of the fires already without having to build more roads,” LaChapelle said. “Personally, that’d be hard for me to justify going in there to punch in more roads for the possibility of a fire happening there.”

Many of the fires his department fights are caused by people — often, a campfire.

Multiple studies have found that roads actually seem to concentrate the risk of wildfires — increasing it up to four-fold in forest areas with roads compared to those without, according to an analysis by the Wilderness Society.  And the fires that people spark tend to spread faster and kill more trees. 

LaChapelle said he sees the benefit of removing dead and diseased trees, including those damaged by bark beetle infestations. But, he said, “there’s fuels reduction, and there’s logging. If you get in there and thin out some of the forest, then that’s certainly beneficial. But clear cutting — yeah, it will reduce fire risk, because there’s not going to be any trees to burn.”

Timber Industry Supports Repeal

Matt Dias, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association, said the timber industry supports the repeal. Dias has previously called for more funding for fuel breaks to combat wildfires, and said that the roadless rule is part of a landscape of environmental rules and regulations that limit forest management.

Still, Dias said, “the roadless rules in California, as far as I know, were not a significant impediment.” He said “most of the areas” where the timber industry is working with the Forest Service on fire management  “are not in areas that would be considered roadless.”

The roadless rule already allows for roads to be constructed or rebuilt to protect health and safety when threatened by wildfire. And it allows for smaller diameter timber to be removed to improve habitat and reduce the risk of severe wildfires.

The Karuk Tribe, which has ancestral lands in Klamath and Six Rivers national forests, also supports rescinding the rule.

Tribe Chairman Russell “Buster” Attebery said burned, downed and hazardous trees should be removed. “There’s a sustainable economy out there — and those logs need to go somewhere,” Attebery said. “We believe that rescinding the roadless rule will be a good thing, but it needs to have tribal input.”

Attebery and his father worked in the timber industry for decades. It was an economic driver for the region, but also a source of environmental damage.

“They had one thing on their mind. They didn’t care whether they covered over the creeks and streams that fed the rivers. They didn’t care if they blocked them or muddied them,” Attebery said. “You have to put ecology first, and then the economy will follow.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat representing Northern California coastal communities and parts of Trinity and Six Rivers national forests, said the revision would threaten watersheds that provide clean drinking water, the rights of tribes and local communities, and the power of forests to hold onto climate-warming carbon.

It “puts millions of acres of forests on the chopping block to serve (President Donald Trump’s) billionaire cronies in the mining and logging industries.”

But U.S. Rep Doug LaMalfa, a Republican whose district includes Modoc and Klamath national forests, said in a statement that the roadless rule has “done more harm than good in the West” and repealing it is “a major step toward restoring common-sense forest management.”

Even as the Trump administration pushes for more logging, its tariff policy has “created anxiety and uncertainty” for the timber and forest products industry, according to one financial analysis. In California, wildfires, high costs, low income and reduced use of wood products are destabilizing the industry, which saw a 25% drop in softwood sawmill capacity in recent years.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.