Last month, Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins announced the U.S. Forest Service is proposing to rescind the roadless rule.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture told CapRadio repealing the policy is “more important than ever” because of public safety issues, and to improve wildland firefighting access where forests meet communities. The department argues the goal is to remove heavy‑handed national restrictions, while maintaining local forest managers and environmental safeguards.
But the announcement has also raised concerns from state officials and others that repealing the rule could open up land to construction, logging, and more wildfires.
The Forest Service has released an environmental impact report on its proposed change, and is collecting public feedback until Sept. 21.
Susan Norman lives in South Lake Tahoe, and is the board chair of the Sierra Nevada Alliance. She worked for nearly 28 years as a hydrologist with the Forest Service’s Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.
Norman spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez about how the roadless rule has been implemented, and what the impacts of repealing it could be.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
The roadless rule goes back 25 years. Why was it established in the first place?
The roadless rule was established to basically make forest planning easier. [It] identified what we called IRAs, which are inventoried roadless areas. These were large pieces of the landscape that were already relatively unroaded, and should be kept that way because there was very little desire — or need — to build new roads in that area, or open them up for commercial timber harvesting or developed recreation.
These areas are located mostly in the upper watersheds of an area, important for protecting water quality, providing large areas of wildlife habitat, and providing an opportunity for dispersed recreation.
What are some examples of roadless rule projects around the Tahoe Basin?
The largest project that's happening right now is called the Lake Tahoe West project. It's the largest fuels-reduction project planned and beginning implementation in the Tahoe Basin, along the west shore of Lake Tahoe. It covers about 66,000 acres, and 3,000 of those acres actually are in a roadless area, and is identified to receive mechanical treatment to reduce fuels reduction. No permanent roads will be constructed in order to do that work, and that is allowed under the current roadless rule using one of the exceptions that was built into the original legislation.
Given that this federal policy has been around for decades, what are some of its limitations or imperfections?
My understanding is that the burden of proving the need to go into a roadless area through the NEPA process, the National Environment Policy Act, has been seen by some as overly restrictive, placing a burden on the land management agency to make the case for entering into an area like the Lake Tahoe West project. I know there was, and still is, controversy over that. There was a lot of public comment saying that we shouldn't be going into a roadless area.
The forest has changed — there’s no denying that. Since this rule was established in 2000, the effects of climate change on our forest and its health, and the wildfire risk, has been dramatic. The argument is how much is actually needed to be done in these areas, as opposed to the many acres of Forest Service land that are outside the roadless areas, around communities called the wildland-urban interface where most of the fuels reduction work is being focused.
What do you make of the USDA's statements that the removal of the roadless rule is necessary, and that the restrictions are too heavy-handed and outdated?
I've looked very hard at that because I've been on both sides. I know the frustration a project manager feels going through the NEPA process, all the planning and addressing the public comments, to get a project on the ground. But what I've seen is a systematic assault on public lands and public land management agencies, through a variety of attacks on both the federal policy and legislation that was designed to protect public lands, as well as on the public land management agencies themselves through firings and restructuring.
Do you have a sense of what the impact could be in Tahoe or other forested federal land in Northern California?
Tahoe, I have to admit, is very fortunate. Because of Lake Tahoe and the existence of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the active involvement of the regional water quality control board, it would be difficult to open up lands within the Lake Tahoe Basin to more activity that would threaten the health of the water quality of Lake Tahoe.
But in other parts of the country that don't have as much scrutiny and oversight, the worry is that roads would be built in areas where they shouldn't, and the agency wouldn’t be funded to properly manage those roads to protect all the resource impacts that can result… and prevent opening up areas to motorized recreation where it was never intended to exist.
There is also concern from those who don't want the roadless rule rolled back that this could open up areas to businesses like logging. Is that a realistic concern?
I think there's a lot of barriers to that actually happening, similar to some of the things we’ve read in the news about opening up areas to mineral leasing. It's easy to say that these resources are out there, ready to be taken advantage of, but the reality of the impassable terrain, the cost of building new roads in areas that are very difficult, it’s hard to imagine any new road building area in these areas simply because of the geographic restrictions.
However, in the EIS [Environmental Impact Statement], there's actually acknowledgement of that. In one part it identifies that there are about 4.8 million acres where timber harvest could be considered operable and allowed by the current land management plans.
Have you been in touch with former colleagues at the Forest Service? How are they feeling about this proposed change?
I’m very engaged with my colleagues that are still working within the agency and talking about this. They're in a difficult spot. The folks I worked with up here, I have nothing but respect and good things to say about their values and expertise, and the direction that they have been given doesn’t always line up with that. But the folks I know that are in the agency still have a strong desire to stay in the agency, to do what they can to make sure that changes that are proposed like this result in a positive outcome.
There are identified needs to modify the roadless rule that makes sense to me, to make it easier and more transparent about where roadless areas may overlap wildland-urban interface. And, some additional modifications could allow temporary roadbuilding, what we call “level 1 roads” in the Forest Service, which are created just for management use but are not made available to the public. When you're done with your project you do work on the road to make them hydrologically inert, so they don't become a source of sediment erosion into water bodies.
A central argument around these changes focuses on mitigating wildfire risks. But do you think there are perspectives or aspects that we’re missing, particularly here in California?
[During] my years of working in the basin, we became a forest which basically didn’t have a timber management program, because we were focused on recreation and water quality issues. When all the forests around the west began suffering from prolonged drought, and the effects of climate change and resulting disease, our timber program grew exponentially every year to address this very real risk of wildfire.
The question is whether we need to extend that work into roadless areas critically right now. I have not seen in this EIS yet where that has been identified in a clear way. There are 9,500 miles of roads already within roadless areas, and I know that under the current roadless rule you can use the exceptions that are already there to go in and do treatments along those roads to create fire breaks. Having to build new roads to do that is pretty far-fetched at this time.