"Trump’s latest upending of conservation policy will be a disaster for wild landscapes and the creatures who live in them"

The Trump administration is plotting to undo a quarter-century of policy for the protection of national forests against new road building. This is a terrible turn for our public lands and needs to be stopped. 

When I lived in the little town of Moab, Utah, my habit on hot summer days was to drive into the nearby La Sal Mountains, a mostly roadless island of pines and firs and freshwater streams floating over the oven of the red rock desert. 

The La Sals, public land overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, include vast stretches of woods accessible only by foot. The thing to do there was to dump your car on one of the few dirt roads that cross the mountains, shoulder your pack and give oneself over to the habitat of the cougars, lynx, black bears and elk, none of whom like roads (or, for that matter, people who go backpacking). 

Much of the forest of the La Sals was designated to be protected from new development under the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Policy issued in the final days of the Clinton administration.

The roadless rule, as it became known, ended road construction, logging and coal, gas, oil and other mineral leasing on 58 million acres of some of the wildest remaining undeveloped national forest lands — an area equal in size to all of Pennsylvania and New York State combined.

The roadless rule happened not because the federal government happily opted to stop giving public land to industry for private profit. It was the result of a decade of conflict between the federal government and mainstream environmental groups and enviro direct actionists who engaged in tree sits and blockades and other forms of civil disobedience.

Some 600 public hearings were held across the nation to discuss the roadless rule, with the public providing more than 1.6 million comments over two years. The proposed rule received more comments than any other environmental rule on public lands in U.S. history.

What had taken two years to put together would now be put asunder in three weeks. In June, the Trump administration announced that it intended to rescind the roadless rule, and this month it instituted an accelerated three-week public comment period, set to end on Sept. 19.  What had taken two years to put together would now be put asunder in three weeks. 

The most important thing to understand about President Donald Trump’s endeavor is that every new road blazed into a previously unroaded landscape is a disaster for wild landscapes and the creatures who live in them. In two decades, reporting on the exploitation of American public lands, I’ve found that the most important first effort in destruction of habitat and the fouling of clean air and water is the building of a road. 

A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It doesn’t matter if it’s paved or unpaved, though a paved road always brings more traffic. Then again, it doesn’t matter whether a road is heavily trafficked or lightly used. The very presence of a road alters the environment around it.

This is especially true in high-altitude forested landscapes, such as the La Sals, as roads divert the natural downstream flow of precipitation, producing heavier runoff and more erosion that disrupts the hydrology and sedimentation of nearby waterways. 

Road runoff carries the poisons that automobiles drip from their chassis. The grinding engines and the sound of rattling metal terrify wildlife. From the tailpipes comes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, heavy metals. You get more roadkill. You get more hunting and poaching. Roads scare off the cougars and wolves and bears, who learn that death awaits on roads.

Reed Noss, one of the premier conservation biologists in the United States, writes that the cumulative effect of roads blazed into previously unroaded ecosystems is “nothing short of catastrophic.” For the sake of wild things, Noss recommended that most existing roads on public lands “should be closed and obliterated.”

He especially liked the idea of keeping out road-attracted humans who “bring along their chainsaws, ATVs, guns, [and] dogs,” who “harass virtually every creature they meet, and leave their mark on every place they visit. The more inaccessible we can keep our remaining wild areas to these cretins, the safer and healthier these areas will be.” 

A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding. Noss is one of a host of conservation biologists to come to this conclusion. Biologists publishing in the journal Science found that roads “fragment landscapes and trigger human colonization and degradation of ecosystems, to the detriment of biodiversity and ecosystem functions.” 

In the American West, even a few dirt roads built near streams on public lands where native trout spawn can produce terrible damage. The fish depend on a properly functioning riparian system, with its panoply of vegetation, its resistance to erosion. The fish rely on intricate gravel substrates where eggs lodge in nests called redds, and on clean, cold water that carries off the waste discharge of the embryos and oxygenates the eggs.

Now a road comes through. The water is clouded with eroded soils. Fish eggs suffocate in the fine silt and clays and sand. They rot in their waste, as the smothering cloud prevents it from being washed away.

The fine sediment, like a wave of glue, cements the gravels, impeding construction of the redds. The available light in a trout stream must be just so.

The roadless area nearest my house in the Catskill Mountains is the Slide Mountain Wilderness, some 50,000 acres of forest, hills, cliffs, peaks and clean water. It’s the place people around here go if they wish to escape the machines of industrial Homo sapiens. There are no roads and no mechanized travel, in keeping with the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” 

Lands designated as wilderness under the act retain their “primeval character and influence.” Not only are roads prohibited in wilderness areas, so is extractive industry, and there are severe restrictions on commercial activity. No business, no money making, also no cars, no motorcycles — hell, you can’t even ride a bicycle in designated wilderness because it’s considered a form of mechanized transport.

The 2001 roadless rule was an extension of the wilderness protection ethic of the 1964 law. For an administration hell-bent on exploiting land to make as much money as possible, the roadless rule is anathema. If our last wild places are to stand a chance of surviving this century, it must remain in place.

-Christopher Ketcham / Truthdig