AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
A decades-old conservation mandate is on the chopping block. It's known as the Roadless Rule, and the Trump administration is expected to formally repeal it any day now. Signed by President Bill Clinton, the rule banned new logging and road building on tens of millions of acres of national forest. Trump's Forest Service is arguing its repeal will give forest managers more tools to prevent wildfires. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: About a year ago, President Trump signed executive orders aiming to boost logging on public lands in western forests, while also directing a fast-track repeal of the Roadless Rule. This would normally take years, but very little is normal right now in Washington. And in the West, there's pressure to revive a long-struggling timber industry and thin and clear out tinder-dry forests near communities.
TOM SCHULTZ: Sure. Tom Schultz, chief of the Forest Service.
SIEGLER: Chief Schultz, sitting at headquarters near the National Mall, is overseeing a controversial reorg and relocation of the Forest Service to the West, while also writing a plan to throw out the Roadless Rule. He wants to replace it with a new edict that he says will give his local forest managers more flexibility to allow for more recreation or logging or wildfire prevention in these once closed-off forests. Not all roadless areas, the agency says, are way out in pristine, hard-to-reach places.
SCHULTZ: Ultimately, closing areas off and not allowing for management, we think is problematic. And that's been a focus of this administration, trying to open up access for activities that we care about.
SIEGLER: But the Forest Service is behind its own targets for brush clearing, thinning and prescribed fires in forests with roads already in them. And lately, the big destructive wildfires, like those again engulfing Southern California this week, tend to ignite in wildlands in and around cities.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: Let's protect our public lands.
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SIEGLER: Environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers staged this small protest recently in front of the U.S. Capitol. New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich says the 25-year-old Roadless Rule already has exemptions for building temporary roads to do wildfire work.
MARTIN HEINRICH: This is just being used as a pretext to scare people to say, we've got to get in those areas, which is about industry. It's not about wildlife, and it's not about fire suppression, and it's not about people, frankly.
SIEGLER: And yet it's an open question how interested most logging companies even are in a lot of these protected roadless forests. They'll be expensive to access or just too controversial. The Roadless Rule has been synonymous with controversy and lawsuits since it was enacted in 2001, and now another round of legal battles is expected soon.
Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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