There’s nothing remotely conservative about Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’s plan to do away with the 25-year-old Roadless Rule that protects America’s most ancient stands of forest. Not only will the proposed rollback undermine our natural wealth and betray common sense conservation, it would be a fiscal nightmare.
Opening up new remote areas to expensive road building is the last thing the U.S. Forest Service needs.
The harsh reality is that the agency doesn’t have the budget to take care of the 368,000 miles of roads already on our national forests. It’s in a deep road maintenance backlog hole. Just to fix all of the Forest Service’s existing roads will cost taxpayers an additional $10.8 billion.
It’s also worth noting that taxpayer-funded forest roads are often built specifically to subsidize logging operations that would be unprofitable otherwise. In fact, the Forest Service spends far more taxpayer money preparing timber sales and building logging roads than it earns from selling timber.
Logging operations on Forest Service managed lands—many of which provide timber to China—are subsidized with our tax dollars to the tune of $1.6 to $2 billion yearly. That is the equivalent to four Solyndra-type defaults annually.
Repealing the Roadless Rule would only exacerbate this problem, fleecing taxpayers and further ballooning our national debt. Additionally, the Secretary’s justifications for repealing the Roadless Rule don’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.
For example, she claims that doing away with the protection will help “manage fire risk,” when in fact, roadless areas experience far fewer incidences of wildfire that areas with roads.
This logically follows from the fact that more than 90% of all wildfires occur within a half mile of a road, and that roughly 88% of wildfires are caused by people.
It is also true that, contrary to logging industry talking points, the older, more dense stands of trees protected by the Roadless Rule hold more moisture and resist wildfire better than previously logged areas.
Since the cost of suppressing wildfires is currently costing taxpayers around $4 billion per year and growing, why would anyone want to expose more of our forests to increased wildfire risk by building roads and logging our most fire-resistant trees?
When you put all of this together, eliminating the Roadless Rule would facilitate costly new road building, add to our $10.8 billion road maintenance backlog, subsidize more uneconomical logging at taxpayer expense, and make our most fire-resistant forests more vulnerable—likely increasing our already out-of-control wildfire costs.
To paraphrase former GOP Senator Everett Dirksen…a billion here, a billion there, and suddenly we’re talking about real money.
Then there are the other societal benefits provided by roadless areas to consider, such as providing clean water, wildlife habitat, and unique outdoor recreation opportunities.
And as the good Lord designed, these ancient stands of trees are particularly adept at cleaning pollution, including greenhouse gases, out of the air we breathe. So, for anyone not thrilled with expensive policies to reduce air pollution, here is a case where doing nothing—and preserving our God-given natural air cleaners—offers a free solution.
Speaking about America’s great forests and mountains, Ronald Reagan once said, “This is our patrimony. This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.”
Reagan understood that the responsible stewardship of our natural wealth and fiscal health were core tenets of conservatism. Secretary Rollins would do well to remember that and abandon her ill-conceived effort to roll back the Roadless Rule and eliminate common-sense forest protections that benefit us all.
David Jenkins is President of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship.
Opening up new remote areas to expensive road building is the last thing the U.S. Forest Service needs.
The harsh reality is that the agency doesn’t have the budget to take care of the 368,000 miles of roads already on our national forests. It’s in a deep road maintenance backlog hole. Just to fix all of the Forest Service’s existing roads will cost taxpayers an additional $10.8 billion.
It’s also worth noting that taxpayer-funded forest roads are often built specifically to subsidize logging operations that would be unprofitable otherwise. In fact, the Forest Service spends far more taxpayer money preparing timber sales and building logging roads than it earns from selling timber.
Logging operations on Forest Service managed lands—many of which provide timber to China—are subsidized with our tax dollars to the tune of $1.6 to $2 billion yearly. That is the equivalent to four Solyndra-type defaults annually.
Repealing the Roadless Rule would only exacerbate this problem, fleecing taxpayers and further ballooning our national debt. Additionally, the Secretary’s justifications for repealing the Roadless Rule don’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.
For example, she claims that doing away with the protection will help “manage fire risk,” when in fact, roadless areas experience far fewer incidences of wildfire that areas with roads.
This logically follows from the fact that more than 90% of all wildfires occur within a half mile of a road, and that roughly 88% of wildfires are caused by people.
It is also true that, contrary to logging industry talking points, the older, more dense stands of trees protected by the Roadless Rule hold more moisture and resist wildfire better than previously logged areas.
Since the cost of suppressing wildfires is currently costing taxpayers around $4 billion per year and growing, why would anyone want to expose more of our forests to increased wildfire risk by building roads and logging our most fire-resistant trees?
When you put all of this together, eliminating the Roadless Rule would facilitate costly new road building, add to our $10.8 billion road maintenance backlog, subsidize more uneconomical logging at taxpayer expense, and make our most fire-resistant forests more vulnerable—likely increasing our already out-of-control wildfire costs.
To paraphrase former GOP Senator Everett Dirksen…a billion here, a billion there, and suddenly we’re talking about real money.
Then there are the other societal benefits provided by roadless areas to consider, such as providing clean water, wildlife habitat, and unique outdoor recreation opportunities.
And as the good Lord designed, these ancient stands of trees are particularly adept at cleaning pollution, including greenhouse gases, out of the air we breathe. So, for anyone not thrilled with expensive policies to reduce air pollution, here is a case where doing nothing—and preserving our God-given natural air cleaners—offers a free solution.
Speaking about America’s great forests and mountains, Ronald Reagan once said, “This is our patrimony. This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.”
Reagan understood that the responsible stewardship of our natural wealth and fiscal health were core tenets of conservatism. Secretary Rollins would do well to remember that and abandon her ill-conceived effort to roll back the Roadless Rule and eliminate common-sense forest protections that benefit us all.
David Jenkins is President of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship.
