On October 6, the US Forest Service closed the window on a 45-day public comment period for its proposed repeal of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Established in 2001, the rule prohibits some forms of road building and all commercial-scale logging on approximately 45 millions acres of USFS lands across the country.
Conservation groups like Trout Unlimited (TU) have long argued in support of keeping the Roadless Rule intact. They say the rule’s rescission would severely degrade some of America’s best public-land hunting-and-fishing destinations by stripping away key habitat protections for game and fish.
While the Federal Register only shows some 371,000 public comments on the plan to repeal the Roadless Rule, various conservation organizations collected a huge amount of additional comments that aren’t reflected in Forest Service’s final online tally, TU tells Field & Stream.
“These conservation groups created a tracking system to tally up the total number of comments gathered and submitted from each organization,” says Corey Fisher, Public Lands Policy Director for Trout Unlimited. “This tracking system reflected more than one million comments collectively gathered and submitted by more than 100 coordinating partners.”
All told, Americans submitted roughly 1,037,000 comments between August and October, Fisher says. The Center for Western Priorities combed through the 370,238 public comments submitted directly through regulations.gov and found that 99.1 percent oppose the plan to fully repeal the Roadless Rule. Their full analysis shows that 367,043 commenters oppose the Trump Administration’s plan to overturn the rule, while 1,922 commenters support it. An additional 1,273 comments were either neutral or off topic.
Through its channels, TU collected and submitted more than 17,000 public comments in support of the Roadless Rule. “Roadless areas represent the best of America,” said TU President and CEO Chris Wood in a statement shared with F&S. “They test our mettle and toughness as a people while providing clean drinking water, fish and wildlife habitat, and some of the most amazing hunting and fishing experiences on the planet. It’s no surprise that millions of hunters and anglers and Americans from all walks of life have banded together with simple message: keep it roadless. When the dust settles, it’s this outpouring of support that will make it easier to reinstate protections for roadless areas down the line.”
Conservation groups don’t expect a final decision from the Forest Service until early 2027. Given its recent messaging, the Administration is likely to move forward with a full repeal of the Roadless Rule despite the public pushback. If that happens, Fisher says there’s a chance individual states could retain their Roadless acreage by creating state-level versions of the Roadless Rule. Both Idaho and Colorado implemented state-level Roadless Rule protections during the Bush Administration. Those states have therefore been exempt from the current push to repeal the Roadless Rule.
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“I think we’re going to at least see some support for those kinds of state-level rules going forward,” Fisher says, “that could potentially include a number states that have opposed the repeal and would like to put protections back in place, as well as states looking for additional management flexibility. Even if the Roadless Rule is repealed, there are still opportunities before us to maintain protections for these landscapes.”
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