The U.S. Forest Service filed a proposed rule today to erase a 25-year-old federal restriction covering nearly 45 million acres of national forest. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says overgrown stands, insect outbreaks, and disease have turned healthy landscapes into tinderboxes. I’ve lived in California since 1990, long enough to watch the same story repeat itself every fall when the Santa Ana winds pick up. I’ve packed a go-bag more than once when a red flag warning went up near Ladera Ranch. The brush grows all year while the lawyers argue, and then October shows up with a lighter.
The 2001 Roadless Rule bans new road building and most logging on undeveloped national forest land. It sounds tidy on paper: keep the wilderness wild. In practice, it locks up almost a third of the National Forest System, including 60% of Utah’s forest land, 58% of Montana’s, and 92% of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest in the country, and hands veto power to whoever can find a sympathetic judge. Idaho and Colorado carved out their own state-specific rules years ago and kept local control. The other 48 states got the one-size-fits-all version, written in Washington by people who will never evacuate a canyon at 2 in the morning.
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I’m not opposed to conservation. I grew up idolizing Teddy Roosevelt, and I want my sons and the generation after them hiking in these same forests. But conservation and abandonment are not the same policy, no matter how often the Sierra Club insists otherwise. Roosevelt understood that managing land is how you protect it. Locking the gate and walking away just guarantees a bigger fire later, paid for by the people who live closest to the trees.
California offers the case study nobody asked for. In January 2025, the John Muir Project and the Center for Biological Diversity sued to block a brush-clearing and logging plan in Plumas National Forest designed to reduce wildfire risk near mountain communities. The same organization’s parent, Earth Island Institute, later won a court order halting a forest-thinning project in Yosemite meant to clear dead trees. Every one of these fights follows the same script: an agency proposes fuel reduction; an environmental group sues under decades-old procedural statutes, and the underbrush keeps piling up while the case works through the docket. Meanwhile, the country is having one of its worst fire years on record, with more than 7 million acres already burned in roughly 49,000 fires as of this week, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
To be fair, the opposition isn’t purely obstructionist, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a punchline. Roads do bring people, vehicles, and sparks into landscapes that would otherwise stay quiet, and a badly sited logging road can do more harm than good. Nobody serious is proposing pavement through every wilderness meadow in the country. But the fix for a badly sited road is better siting, not a blanket federal prohibition written in 2001 by planners who never anticipated the fuel loads we’re carrying today. Targeted access for firebreaks, thinning crews, and evacuation routes is not the same thing as strip-mining the Sierra Nevada, whatever the fundraising email says.
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The better path is the one the Trump administration is proposing: hand authority back to local forest managers and the states, who actually know which ridgelines threaten which towns. Idaho and Colorado have run their own roadless programs for two decades without turning into clear-cut wastelands. There’s no reason Utah, Montana, or California’s own national forests can’t do the same, with citizen input that doesn’t require a law degree and a five-year docket to be heard.
This proposal still has to survive a public comment period, an environmental impact statement, and almost certainly a lawsuit before it becomes final. That’s how it should work. But the underlying argument is sound, and it’s overdue. Conservation is good. Locking the gate and walking away is just abandonment with better branding. The people who live next to these forests, not the people who visit them once a decade for a hashtag, are the ones who should get the final say in how they’re managed.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
