The USDA decision to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule is making waves in Madison County

“On June 23, 2025, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins announced the intent to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. That rule established prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvests on nearly 60 million acres of national forests and grasslands. Today, the 2001 Roadless Rule pertains to nearly 45 million acres of national forests and grasslands,” reads the USDA and USFA website that describes the Roadless Rule with the following description. 

Now, Jonathan Klein, an author and retiree from the USFS in Madison County, who along with The Wilderness Society and members of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers are working to help get the word out about an upcoming public comment period about the removal of the rule. They have a meeting scheduled at Burnt Tree Brewing on Tuesday, May 12 starting at 5:30 p.m.  

The history of the Roadless Rule

“The 2001 Roadless Rule established prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting in nearly 60 million acres inventoried roadless areas, with limited exceptions. Today, the 2001 Roadless Rule applies to nearly 45 million acres of National Forest System lands,” reads the USDA site. Klein goes on to give the history of how the bill came to be. 

“Back in the 1920s Aldo Leopold worked for the Forest Service, and he had an ecological view of the land,” Klein began. “He was a hunter and a fisherman. He got worried early on in the 1920s that fragmentation of big, large, roadless areas was occurring with timber extraction and road building, which was really an emphasis of the Forest Service.” 

“The Forest Service saw it as a win-win,” he continued. “Firefighters could go in and you could get the wood out, and then people could recreate without having to walk. But there was so much being lost. It was wildlife habitat being lost. Opportunities for solitude were being lost. Opportunities to hunt and fish. He was worried about degradation of water quality back in the 1920s so he really lobbied hard to start protecting some large expanses of roadless areas.”

Klein lays out the results of Leopold’s efforts which included the establishment of the Gila Wilderness area in New Mexico in 1924. The first of its kind in the country. 

“From that beginning, there was a lot of concern to protect large expanses of roadless areas, because those were being lost, rapidly being lost,” he said. That concern turned again to action in the 1960s according to Klein. 

“With the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, 9.1 million acres were designated as wilderness. But the Wilderness Act said that areas of 5,000 acres or more should be studied for possible inclusion into the National Wilderness Preservation System and a report was to be made to the president within 10 years.”

Klein goes on to lay out a series of studies and legal challenges that pushed the issues through the 1970s.

“This huge issue on what to do with these roadless areas continued to be fought over by those that wanted to extract and those who wanted to preserve, and it was just not going anywhere,” he said.  

“In 2001 Bill Clinton and his Chief of the Forest Service, Mike Dombeck, who was a fisheries biologist and was seeing what roads would be doing to watersheds, particularly the fish, said, " ‘We're going to invoke a roadless rule in 2001. The roadless rule will allow no road building in these areas, no timber extraction in these areas, and mean that they were going to pretty much be maintained as they had been,’” Klein explained. 

“That's been the case since 2001, for 25 years now, and it's been very popular with the bulk of the public,” he stated. 

The case for rescinding the Roadless Rule

“This outdated administrative rule contradicts the will of Congress and goes against the mandate of the USDA Forest Service to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands. Rescinding this rule will remove prohibitions on road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest on nearly 59 million acres of the National Forest System, allowing for fire prevention and responsible timber production,” reads the June 23, 2025 post to the USDA website announcing that the Roadless Rule will be rescinded. 

“This rule is overly restrictive and poses real harm to millions of acres of our national forests. In total, 30% of National Forest System lands are impacted by this rule. For example, nearly 60% of forest service land in Utah is restricted from road development and is unable to be properly managed for fire risk. In Montana, it is 58%, and in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest in the country, 92% is impacted. This also hurts jobs and economic development across rural America. Utah alone estimates the roadless rule alone creates a 25% decrease in economic development in the forestry sector,” continued the USDA post. 

The case for opening more areas to roads and more advanced management is being made in Montana as well as Washington D.C.  In the 2025 legislative session Senator Tony Tezak, whose district overlaps with the forests that Klein helped manage in the USFS, introduced SJ 14 the Resolution to Release Wilderness Study Areas. 

“A joint resolution of the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Montana to release certain wilderness study areas in Montana from consideration for inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System,” read the purpose of the resolution. 

The resolution reads:

“That the Legislature supports scientific adaptive management to implement the multiple-use mandate of public land use as mandated by the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 to ensure the protection and improvement of public land health and to maintain and improve the sustainability of federal lands, including forests, located in Montana.”

SJ 14 continues: 

“Be it further resolved, that the Legislature formally petitions Congress to enact legislation releasing all wilderness study areas identified and specified in the Montana Wilderness Study Act of 1977 and in the National Landscape Conservation System and all inventoried roadless areas identified by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule in order to secure the rights of Montana citizens to use these public lands for public purposes, including multiple uses, unless Congress confirms a study area for inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System.”

Noah Marion with Wild Montana described SJ 14 as “the largest-ever rollback of federal land protections in Montana” that affects some 7 million acres of wilderness study areas and inventoried roadless areas in a Mar. 26, 2025 Montana Free Press article about the bill. 

“Centennial Valley resident Mel Montgomery argued there is already plenty of wilderness in the state and there is a ‘vast menu of options’ available to land managers to tailor a management approach to specific landscapes, such as ‘primitive’ designations that preclude motorized use,” continued the article. 

“‘We need to release these WSAs because it’s a limbo situation,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford to lock up land that could be used for other purposes,’” continued his quote in the article. 

The resolution was tabled in the Senate Energy, Technology & Federal Relations Committee with a vote of 9-4. 

Local control and wildfire mitigation

“Local control, what does that mean?,” asked Klein. “Does that mean that all the people here in Ennis, Montana, or the Forest Service here in Ennis Montana are going to be looking at what the best, highest and best views of these roadless areas are? Or does that mean that somebody in the higher levels of the Forest Service, or some political appointee in a position of authority within the Forest Service, is just going to carte blanche say we're going in there and we're going to cut down these trees, because the whole purpose of this is to extract.”

Tezak supported SJ 14 with concerns about wildfire mitigation. 

“He argued that without more management, WSAs near his community will turn into wildfire ‘infernos,’” read the MFP article. 

“We have got to get these areas managed,” Tezak said. “Right now, you put them into a wilderness study area, there’s no management at all,” the article continued. 

Klein pointed out that the existing Roadless Rule does have provisions for wildfire concerns. 

“There's nothing in the current roadless world that prevents any firefighting activities,” said Klein. “Already you could go in. You could build roads for emergency use firefighting. You could use any methods that you need, that that you deem appropriate or necessary to go out and reduce the fire.”

The USDA post points towards fire prevention as a benefit to removing the Roadless Rule.

“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,” the post reads. “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.”

Klein references a handout from RoadlessRuleMT.org that states that “78% of human-caused wildfires on National Forests nationwide start within a half mile of a road.” It also states that 85% of all wildfires are human caused. 

The handout also says that since the Roadless Rule went into effect in 2001, 20% of all hazardous fuels treatments have been conducted in roadless areas within Montana. 

Public comment and what’s next? 

“In the final hours of the Forest Service’s truncated public comment period, an analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that over 99 percent of the 183,000 comments submitted to regulations.gov as of Friday morning oppose the Trump administration’s plan to repeal the 2001 Roadless Rule,” reads a Sept. 23, 2025 release by the Denver based Center for Western Priorities that describes itself as a “nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization.”

Klein expressed frustration with what he considered a shortened period for public comment held in 2025 and is hopeful that the release of Environmental Impact Statements about the project will give more opportunity for public input. 

“I'm really trying to get people interested in writing about this during the last public comment period before this is a done deal,” he explained. 

The EIS and additional public comment information has not been released by the USDA at this time. If you are interested in learning more, Klein will be hosting a meeting for the Wilderness Society and members of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers as well as the general public at Burnt Tree Brewing on March 12 starting at 5:30 p.m.