The Trump admin claims roads in forests prevent wildfires. Researchers disagree.

The Trump administration announced its intention earlier this week to cancel the conservation policy of the 2001 -free area, also known as “Roadless Rule”, which restricts the construction of roads, logging and mining on 58 million acres in the country’s national forests.

The justification for the administration was that the “outdated” road rule exacerbated the risk of forest. In a statement announcing the change of policy, the secretary of the American agriculture department, Brooke Rollins, said that “the correct management of our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to take advantage of the advantages of this great land.”

Fire environmentalists agree that the United States must intensify land management efforts to reduce the probability of dangerous conflagrations. But experts do not think that more roads enter the country’s protected national forests is the best way to do so. Most fires – especially those that considerably affect communities – start on private land that are not affected by the Roadless rule, and remote areas can generally be managed for the risk of fire using advanced firefighters.

The cancellation of the Roadless rule “does not change our current current land management capacity to improve management and stop forest fires,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, interim director of Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and Associate Professor for Forest Management and Stewardship of the Colorado State University. “What the opening of the areas currently without road is really done is to allow the extraction of wood.”

Before the forest service – an USDA agency – finalizes the rule without a route at the very end of the Clinton administration in 2001, the agency had trouble paying for the maintenance of existing roads in national forests, not to mention the construction of news.

But the policy has been controversial, faced with several challenges of states, private companies and GOP legislators who considered the rule as an obstacle to commercial forest exploitation. He was repealed in 2005 by the administration of the president of the time, George W. Bush, but reinstated the following year by a court of federal district. The legal proceedings such as Alaska and Idaho have tried to carve out exemptions for their forests, and certain republican legislators have facilitated the transfers of land of federal property in order to bypass the protections of rules without road.

More recently, in 2020, during the first term of President Donald Trump, the forest service returned the rule -free rule for the Tongass National Forest of 9 million acres in Alaska. The Republican senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska praised the repeal “favoring the opportunities for the Alaskans to earn a living”. But this decision was canceled in 2023 under the president of the time, Joe Biden.

This time, the Trump administration supposes logging as a justification to nix the rule without a route. The USDA press release on the decision only briefly affects industry, affirming that the rule -free rule “harms jobs and economic development” and that the repeal will allow a “responsible production of wood”. Communication devotes more attention to the risk of forest supposed that the rule creates, stressing that 28 million acres of land covered by the rule are at high risk of forest fire, and by arguing that the repeal “will reduce the risk of forest fire and will help protect communities and infrastructure”.

The head of the forest service, Tom Schultz, in a chronicle published on the forest service website, said that the quantity of lands lost against forest fires in areas without route each year has “more than doubled” since the creation of the rule without road, although it does not prove that it because Roadless rule and not other factors such as climate change and warmer and dry conditions associated with it. Schultz did not respond to a request for comments.

The involvement of USDA and forestry statements is that roads can help bring firefighters and equipment to distant forests to reduce their risk of fire or fight fires when they break out. It is true that land managers sometimes need to access densely wooded areas to get rid of invaded plants and dead wood which could feed a small fire and transform it into an uncontrollable fire. They do this with practices known as the slimming of trees, which implies the elimination of small shrubs and trees, and prescribed burns – intentionally adjusted and carefully managed fires.

But five experts told Grist that the relationship between roads and forest fires was not as simple as the USDA announcement said it. Although the roads can help transport firefighters and their equipment to the desert – whether it is to combat existing forest fires or lead prescribed burns – they also increase the risk of involuntary fire and camp fire.

“If we are going to say which leads to a higher risk” – roads or no roads – “I do not think we have a complete image to assess this,” said Chris Dunn, assistant professor of forest engineering, resources and management at Oregon State University. “These two components could counter each other.”

In a research document in 2022, examining transversal forest fires – which means those that move between private land and land managed by forestry service, including road without road – Dunn and its co -authors have found that the vast majority of forest fires begin on private land, with ignitions rising according to the road density of a region. In other words, more roads are associated with more fire. This research has also shown that most fires that destroy 50 or more buildings are launched by humans on private land.

Another study, that of 2021, focused on roads and roads without road in the 11 national forests of Western states. Dunn and its co -authors found that most forest fires between 1984 and 2018 began near the roads, not in road without roads, and that there was no link between the defect and the “gravity” of a fire – the quantity of vegetation he killed. However, fires in road without roads were more likely to escape the initial abolition efforts, and they tended to burn a larger area.

Dunn noted that all large, serious and distant fires are not bad. Certain ecosystems depend on occasional combustion, and his research suggests that the largest size of fires in road without road can make landscapes more resilient to climate change. A problem arises when forest managers look exclusively for forests “through the objective of wood and signs of a dollar on trees,” he said, which can create a bias against trees mortality-even if it is ecologically healthy for trees to burn or light up by workers. This economic perspective seems to correspond to that of the Trump administration, which has repeatedly referred to public land and waters in terms of “resource potential”.

Steve Pyne, fire expert and emeritus professor at the Center for Biology and Society of Arizona State University, agreed with other experts that Grist was maintained with the fact that the cancellation of the rule without a road “does not concern fire protection; This is the logging ”. In April, the USDA secretary, Rollins, ordered the regional forest service offices to increase the extraction of wood by 25%, in accordance with a decree that Trump signed in March by ordering federal agencies “immediately increase national wood production”.

In response to the request for comments from Grist, a USDA spokesperson said that: “Although certain research indicates that the roads can increase the probability of fire caused by humans, they also improve access to forest management to reduce fuels and for fire deletion efforts.” They refused to answer a question on the opening of public land for the interests of logging, except to say that the agency “uses all the strategies available to reduce the risk of forest fire”, including harvesting wood.

Even if it was certain that more roads attenuate the risk of fire, it is not clear that the cancellation of the rule without road will lead to a larger part of them. James Johnston, assistant research professor at the Institut de Résilient, communities and environments of the University of Oregon, said that the forest service did not have staff and funding to maintain the road system it already has, and build new ones is probably a challenge. The Trump administration has exacerbated the problem by dismissing 10% of the agency workers since its entry into office.

“No one is going next week next month, or at any time in the future and build roads in an area the size of the state of Idaho,” he said, referring to the 58 million acres covered by the Roadless rule. Private companies wishing to build new roads on public lands are also faced with obstacles to the construction of roads, as they must obtain environmental permits, he added. New roads on the land of the forest service should comply with the statutes such as the endangered species law and the Clean Water Act. Johnston has also noted that many road without roads are not suitable for roads because they are too steep or rocky.

Ryan Talbott, defender of the northwest Pacific conservation for non-profit Wildarth guards, noted that it will take time to the USDA to legally cancel the rule without a road. “There is a process,” he said. “In ordinary time, they would put an opinion in the Federal Register by announcing that they intended to cancel the rule without a route, and then there would be a process of public comments, then they would eventually make a final decision.” The USDA spokesman told Grist that an official opinion would be published in the Federal Register, the Daily Journal of the government which publishes newly promulgated and proposed federal rules, “in the coming weeks”.

Stevens-Rumann, at the Colorado State University, said that if the Trump administration was serious about the attenuation of forest risks, it would be more logical to increase funding and the staff of forest services, and, critically, to lead burns and prescribed in areas that already have roads. “We have a ton of work that we could do in road areas before even going to roads without road,” she said.