Below is a copy of my comment opposing the USDA’s recent proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (“Roadless Rule”). I include this here because these lands are where my adventures take place. Spending time in wild spaces feeds my soul and helps me sustain type 1 diabetes management. See below:

When I was a child growing up outside of Atlanta, Georgia, a development company came with little warning and bulldozed the woods behind my home. This was not a narrow stand of trees; it was an acres-wide forest that my parents and I had ventured through countless times. It was a deep expanse of land that provided a refuge from road noise and offered instead birdsong, rustling wind, and the soft crunch of pine needles under my feet. Being bombarded by the crash and crack as the machines plowed through, watching the trees be scraped from the earth while I was powerless to stop the complete and utter destruction of this ecosystem that I loved, was a trauma that left me with an early sorrow. I realized then that once the trees are down, the land bulldozed and razed, it is an erasure that cannot be undone.

This early experience influenced my lifelong love of trees, mountains, and wild spaces, and impacted my decision to build a life in the mountains of North Carolina. Now, the lands I love are threatened by the USDA’s recent decision to roll back the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, and I am writing to urge the USDA to reverse this plan. Rescinding such a groundbreaking policy would be a huge mistake for our country and its future. At its inception and since, the “Roadless Rule” has had wide-sweeping support across the political spectrum. When the proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule was introduced this time last year, a statistical analysis of public comments by the Center for Western Priorities demonstrated an estimated 99.2% of commenters opposed the rescission (Center for Western Priorities, 2025). When the rule was originally introduced in 2001, a whopping 95% of its approximately 1.6 million comments were in favor of its passing (Defenders of Wildlife, 2026). I join with millions of others in strong support of keeping the rule completely intact and strongly oppose opening up any of the federal lands currently protected by the Roadless Rule to road construction. In the rest of my letter, I address only a few of the many scientific, economic, and cultural reasons that maintaining roadless spaces is essential for America.

No one should have to live with the fear of wildfires destroying their homes and threatening their lives, or breathe wildfire smoke, which is full of harmful particulates and irritants, on the way to work or school. Effectively extinguishing wildfires and reducing wildfire risk should be a huge priority for the United States and the whole of North America. The administration has argued that rolling back the Roadless Rule is part of a strategy to improve the Forest Service’s ability to maintain forests with the intent of preventing wildfires. Yet the administration’s other actions directly threaten existing efforts to mitigate wildfire risk. Earlier this year, the administration closed over 70% of its research stations that study wildfires and wildfire prevention (Niiler, 2026). In 2025, the Trump administration “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”), eliminated nearly 6,000 employee positions at the Forest Service, an agency whose motto is “caring for the land and serving people” (USDA, Forest Service, n.d.-a) and of which a key function is fire management (USDA, Forest Service, n.d.-b). Clearly, these are not actions in keeping with a desire to prevent or mitigate damage from wildfires. 

In its article, “Wildland fire investigation: common wildfire causes,” the National Interagency Fire Center states that, “As of 2023, the 10-year average of human-caused fires account for 88 percent of all wildfires nationally” (National Interagency Fire Center, n.d.). More roads mean more human activity, and experts have pointed out that this leads to more wildfires (Martin, 2025). Furthermore, even if road access were essential to fire mitigation, leading expert in the ecological impact of roads, Ben Goldfarb, describes in his book “Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet,” that roads in national forests are redundant due to rapid development of roads early in the forest service’s history (Goldfarb, 2023). In the “How Much Forest Management Matters in Wildfires” episode of podcast, The Decibel, Dr. Jen Beverly, associate professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta, Canada, explains that climate change expands the wildfire season and drives the increase in wildfires overall (Raman-Wilms, M., 2026). Yet, the Trump administration has failed to invest in renewable energies despite their availability and economic promise, and in fact has moved the country backwards towards coal, which significantly contributes to air and water pollution and drives climate change (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2017). Investing in renewable energies and fire prevention resources is where federal funding should go in order to address the very real issue of wildfires impacting people, animals, ecosystems, and industry in our country. Instead, the Trump administration has been explicit about its agenda to expand logging and deregulate the timber industry (The White House, 2025), which comes at the complete disregard of human and animal life and wellbeing.

Moreover, building new roads will be costly, and there is already an estimated 8.6 billion in “deferred maintenance,” according to the Forest Service’s website, needed to make all existing roads serviceable (USDA, Forest Service, n.d.-c). There are far better investments for this money, including in research, training, and support for firefighting teams around the country. 

Roads permanently alter and damage habitats and ecosystems in a multitude of ways, regardless of whether or not they lead to logging. Building a road through a national forest is as disruptive to the multitude of species that live and depend on the ecosystem as it would to build a road between a living room and a bedroom. Building a road contributes to habitat fragmentation, the breaking up of a continuous ecosystem, which is associated with fewer plant and animal species, interrupted migration and pollination, and reduced quality of ecosystem functions, such as nutrient retention (Haddad et al, 2025). Roads impact all species greatly, in a myriad of different ways. On the November 18, 2025 episode of the podcast, Threshold Conversations, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb described how roads disrupt and threaten life for species up and down the food chain. Goldfarb explained that many large predators innately avoid roads, as they associate these with human activities; deer, small mammals, and even birds are frequently struck by cars; reptiles and amphibians, unaware of the danger of roads, are often crushed while crossing in an attempt to reach parts of their habitat, such as bogs or higher ground, that are vital to their reproductive life cycle (Martin, 2025).

Additionally, roads contribute to noise pollution, which impacts wildlife of all kinds and humans. Noise pollution is more than unpleasant; it is disruptive to an animal’s ability to communicate and survive. Goldfarb highlights research that has demonstrated how noise pollution threatens survival and diminishes health for songbirds, explaining how for every moment a bird has to look rather than listen for predators, it is missing an opportunity to forage (Martin, 2025; McClure et al., 2013). Noise pollution is associated with poorer health outcomes for humans as well, including heart disease and premature death (Razai et al., 2025). Preserving spaces free of road noise is part of our cultural heritage and a unique feature of our amazing, expansive nation.

It is easy to imagine some of the ways road construction could immediately and directly affect humans. Less predators near roads could lead to larger deer populations in these areas, which in turn could increase risks to humans associated with deer-related automotive accidents and tick-borne illness. Sediment and runoff from construction projects impact stream ecology and water quality (Martin, 2025). Road construction and subsequent logging and mining activities contribute to water degradation and air pollution, affecting every species, including humans!

Protecting the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, now and for future generations, is vital to protecting our cultural heritage and wellbeing. I have had the good fortune to travel to various beautiful places around the world, Costa Rica, Canada, France, Switzerland, to name a few, and yet I always, always miss the wilderness of America. Wild spaces are what make me proud of America. Land that is roadless, allowed to exist as it is without the impact of construction and human alteration, this is the body of America. Rolling back this forward-thinking policy would be a grave injury to our land and a legacy of destruction that cannot be undone.

Rescinding the roadless rule is like draining the ocean rather than building a boat. We have too much to lose. Instead, we must act to prevent wildfires through adequate funding of the U.S. Forest Service and investment in research and science that continually improves our knowledge of the best wildfire management strategies. Furthermore, we must be honest about the motivations for rolling back the Roadless Rule and instead redirect our attention away from logging old growth forests and other federal lands, and invest instead in sustainable forestry and development to meet these needs.

Thank you,

Katherine (Katie) J. Souris

References

Center for Western Priorities. (2025, September 23). Comment analysis finds over 99% opposition to repealing 2001 Roadless Rule. https://westernpriorities.org/2025/09/comment-analysis-finds-over-99-opposition-to-repealing-2001-roadless-rule/

Defenders of Wildlife. (2026, August 19). Trump Administration Advances Roadless Rule Repeal at the Expense of Wildlife, Clean Water and Public Will. https://defenders.org/newsroom/trump-administration-advances-roadless-rule-repeal-expense-of-wildlife-clean-water-and

Goldfarb, B. (2023). Crossings: how road ecology is shaping the future of our planet. WW Norton & Company.

Haddad, N. M., Brudvig, L. A., Clobert, J., Davies, K. F., Gonzalez, A., Holt, R. D., … & Townshend, J. R. (2015). Habitat fragmentation and its lasting impact on Earth’s ecosystems. Science advances, 1(2), e1500052. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1500052

Martin, A (Host). (2025, November 18). Threshold Conversations: The Roadless Rule with Ben Goldfarb. [Audio podcast episode. In Threshold (Threshold Conversations Series). Auricle Productions. https://www.thresholdpodcast.org/conversations-ben-goldfarb

McClure, C. J., Ware, H. E., Carlisle, J., Kaltenecker, G., & Barber, J. R. (2013). An experimental investigation into the effects of traffic noise on distributions of birds: avoiding the phantom road. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1773), 20132290.

National Interagency Fire Center. (n.d.). Wildfire Investigation: Wildland fire investigation: common wildfire causes. https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/fire-prevention-education-mitigation/wildfire-investigation

Niiler, E. (2026, April 3). Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/climate/forest-service-research-stations.html

Raman-Wilms, M. (2026, July 16). The Decibel: How Much Forest Management Matters in Wildfires. [Audio podcast episode. In the Decibel. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/the-decibel/article-how-much-forest-management-matters-in-wildfires/

Razai, M. S., King, E., Majeed, A., & James, P. (2025). The impact of noise pollution on health. bmj, 391.

The White House. (2025, March 1). Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/immediate-expansion-of-american-timber-production/

Union of Concerned Scientists. 2017, November 15; updated 2019, July 9). Coal Power Impacts. https://www.ucs.org/resources/coal-power-impacts

USDA, Forest Service. (n.d.-a). About the Agency. What We Believe. https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/what-we-believe

USDA, Forest Service. (n.d-b). Managing the Land. Wildland Fire. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire

USDA, Forest Service. (n.d-c). Infrastructure. Maintaining Infrastructure. https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technology/infrastructure/maintaining