USDA Opens 44 Million Acres of Protected Forest to Logging, Blames Wildfires

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins filed a proposal yesterday to open 44 million acres of America’s last unroaded national forest to the logging industry. She says it’s about wildfires. It’s about four billion board feet of timber a year.The Forest Service has already committed to a 25 percent increase in cutting, with a target of four billion board feet annually by 2028. And USDA’s own press release lists the executive orders this carries out. One of them is Executive Order 14225, Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production, which says our problem is that we’ve failed to fully exploit our timber supply. When these people say manage, they mean log. Rollins says she wants to return our forests to health and productivity, and productivity there isn’t counting squirrels.They need somewhere to cut. The last 44 million acres with no roads in them is where the big trees still are. Fire is the sales pitch.And fire is the third pitch they’ve tried. In March of last year they told us this was national security, that foreign lumber was a threat to the country. That didn’t move. Now everything is a tinderbox.It’s a bad pitch, because roads are how forests catch fire. Roads bring people, and people bring cigarettes, trailer chains throwing sparks, engine blocks parked on dry grass, and campfires somebody definitely put all the way out. Greg Aplet, senior forest scientist at the Wilderness Society, published three decades of ignition data in the journal Fire Ecology this January. Ground within fifty meters of a road burns at about four times the rate of roadless country. Roadless areas are the least flammable land the Forest Service has, and Rollins has a plan to fix that.The agency knew. When it wrote the rule in 2001, its own environmental impact statement said roads into roadless areas would likely increase human caused fires because of the increased presence of people. They’re repealing the rule for working.Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who came to the job out of the logging industry, says only five percent of the highest hazard roadless areas have gotten fuels treatment since 2014, and hands you that like the rule did it. Here’s what he leaves out. The Forest Service lost sixteen percent of its workforce last year, about six thousand people, and hazardous fuels work fell 38 percent in a single year. Twelve senators put that in a letter to him. He didn’t lose access to those acres. He lost the people, because this administration fired them.And then there’s the photo they picked for the announcement. It’s Montana’s Basin Creek watershed, and USDA’s own caption tells you it supplies Butte’s drinking water. They put a town’s drinking water on the poster for a logging rule.They already ran a comment period on this. 625,957 people commented. More than 99 percent said no. They filed anyway.So we go again, louder. Comments close at midnight on September 21st. Jim Pattiz at More Than Just Parks broke this story and built a map with the Sierra Club of all 2,901 roadless areas, so find the one nearest you and name it. The lawyers fighting this in court need a record, and you’re it.Sources:https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2026/08/18/usda-acts-remove-roadless-rule-restrictions-exacerbate-rising-wildfire-riskhttps://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/29/2025-16581/special-areas-roadless-area-conservation-national-forest-system-landshttps://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/05/29/usda-invests-200m-expand-timber-production-strengthen-rural-economies-secure-american-industryhttps://www.hickenlooper.senate.gov/?p=251555https://gearjunkie.com/parks-and-public-lands/usda-moves-to-repeal-roadless-rule-44-7-million-acres Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe