The regime is expected to kill the Roadless Rule at any minute, but Utah’s Mike Lee has already overseen passage of a bill in the Senate Energy and Nautral Resources Committee to kill it in Congress.
While we’re lamentably expecting a full repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule by the Trump regime at any moment, we nevertheless need your help to prevent a corresponding conservation calamity from occurring in the Senate as public lands and conservation enemy Mike Lee of Utah oversaw passsage of an amendment in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in June to kill the Roadless Area Conservation Rule entirely.
Known simply as the “Roadless Rule,” the rule is a wildly successful, and popular, U.S. Forest Service conservation policy that the agency spent three years gathering comments on in hundreds of public meetings around the nation during the late 1990s and into 2000. The Roadless Rule resulted from what was, at that time, the largest information gathering effort undertaken by the Forest Service since the advent of what became the Wilderness Act in the early 1960s.
Implementation of the Roadless Rule in January 2001 effectively put a stop to new road building in most wild and roadless Forest Service lands, and eventually led to a program embraced by the Forest Service to allow nature to “reclaim” long-disused roads in areas managed by the Forest Service that had become too cost-prohibitive to maintain, to allow a natural restoration of forest and meadow conditions, to preserve wildlife and their native habitat, and significantly reduce wildfire risks.
Please call your U.S. senators now. You may be aware every U.S. state has two U.S. senators, and while only 20 of the 100 U.S. senators sit on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, call your senators nonetheless at (202) 224-3121 to tell them to VOTE NO on Mike Lee’s sickening, destructive, unnecessary amendment to kill the Roadless Rule if they’re on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, or to vote no on it if comes before them as part of full Senate consideration or as a rider on another bill.
Call now and ask your friends and family in other states call their U.S. senators too, then call and email YOUR senators again! We need volume: LOTS of calls, lots of emails, and lots more calls! If this amendment passes the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, passage by the full Senate is almost a certainty. From there it goes to Trump’s desk. And if you think it’s bad now, once the proverbial toothpaste comes out of the tube — it’ll never go back in.
Please TAKE ACTION on this today, and check out my Treehuggers International episode I produced years ago when I was on the air at FM 94/9 in San Diego to mark what was then the 10th anniversary of the Roadless Rule with one of the rule’s initial advocates.
Silver Star Mountain banner photo © 2023 Tommy Hough, all rights reserved. Mt. Hood National Forest road decommissioning photos © 2012 Tommy Hough, all rights reserved.
