Your Comment essential to save forest-protective Roadless Rule!

We the undersigned urge you to retain the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, and not to weaken it in any respect or rescind it.

This is to address Document ID FS-2025-0001-0001.

The publicly owned Inventoried Roadless Areas now protected by the Roadless Rule represent the few remaining strongholds of relatively undisturbed, though not yet fully preserved, forestland in America. In them we have our best resource in helping to overcome the current crises of global warming and species extinction.

The Forest Service approved the Roadless Rule in 2001, arguing that these protections safeguard essential habitat for many threatened and endangered species and help store and purify clean drinking water for all or parts of some 354 municipal watersheds nationwide. This essentially remains true today.

The more time forests are given to grow, the more time a robust, interconnected forest ecosystem has to develop. Older forests in roadless areas provide high quality recreation that sustainably supports local economies. People love to rock climb, hike, hunt, fish, canoe, and ski in these remote places.

Rolling back the Roadless Rule will in all likelihood lead to more wildfires, which are four times more likely to start in areas with roads than in roadless forest tracts. Some 90 percent of all wildfires nationwide start within a half mile of a road.

Roadless Rule-protected areas serve as a buffer against the spread of nonnative invasive species.

Road building, logging, mining and drilling, and other developments will only degrade or destroy these irreplaceable natural sanctuaries and resources. Please do not to rescind or weaken the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.