Yesterday, Montana’s conservation community delivered a petition signed by over 4,000 concerned citizens to Tom Schultz, chief of the United States Forest Service, asking the Forest Service to hold public meetings on its proposed rescission of the Roadless Rule.

When the Forest Service was developing the Rule in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, they held over 600 public meetings across the country, including 34 here in Montana. Now the Forest Service is sprinting to rescind the Rule by limiting any meaningful public engagement, including public meetings where people can learn from the agency and each other, and share perspectives about how they think our precious few remaining backcountry areas should be managed. 

We think the public deserves to have our voices heard about how our shared public lands should be managed.  

Thus, Montana’s conservation community, including Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, is asking the Forest Service to host at least one public meeting in communities where a national forest is headquartered in Montana, including Kalispell, Libby, Missoula, Hamilton, Helena, Bozeman, and Dillon, and preferably elsewhere.  These meetings should happen ahead of, or shortly after, the draft Environmental Impact Statement and proposed new Rule is released, expected in March or April

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule was established in 2001 after an extensive environmental analysis and public engagement process that generated over 1.7 million comments, 95% in favor of establishing the Rule. Last fall, a scant 21-day public comment period on the proposed rollback of the rule generated over 625,000 comments, 99% in favor of retaining the Rule. 

The Roadless Rule has been a highly effective policy tool for safeguarding healthy, intact forests and watersheds, protecting vital fish and wildlife habitat, and providing outstanding backcountry recreation opportunities. The Rule’s basic premise is simple: no new road building or commercial logging in undeveloped, mostly road free areas of our national forests. Other activities including mining, oil and gas development, grazing and motorized recreation may continue, unless prohibited by a different law or policy. 

At the same time, the Rule provides managers flexibility to remove small diameter timber to reduce the risk of wildfire, address disease, or improve forest health. The Trump Administration claims rescinding the Rule is necessary to address the wildfire crisis, a claim not supported by science or practice. National forest managers regularly conduct fuels projects in Inventoried Roadless Areas. According to an analysis by Montana Trout Unlimited, 20% of all hazardous fuels treatment projects that have occurred on national forest lands in Montana since 2001 have occurred in Inventoried Roadless Areas.  Right now, the Forest Services is proposing fuels reduction projects in Inventoried Roadless Areas along the Middle Fork Flathead river.

Rescinding the Roadless Rule is not about responsible public lands management, it is about opening up some of our last remaining wild country, the places where people in our communities hunt, fish, practice ceremony, or just go for a hike with their families, to new road building in order to increase commercial logging and facilitate other industrial activities. 

The Bader-Two Medicine is one of those places that could be at risk. About 75% of the Badger is protected from new road building by the Roadless Rule. If the Rule is rescinded, decades of work by the Blackfeet Nation, Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, and others to stop oil and gas development, limit motorized recreation, and undue the scars on the land left by past eras of road building and industrial activity, could be at risk of being undone someday. 

You can learn more about the importance of the Roadless Rule to the Badger-Two Medicine, and other places like it, on this episode of the Wild Idea podcast, that features GTMA’s executive director Peter Metcalf and Blackfeet leader and long-time champion for the Badger-Two Medicine Terry Tatsey.