We need your help to put out a five-alarm fire and stop a major conservation calamity from occurring in the U.S. Senate as public lands and conservation enemy Senator Mike Lee of Utah attempts to pass an amendment in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to kill the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, i.e. the Roadless Rule — the wildly successful U.S. Forest Service conservation policy that the agency spent three years gathering comments on in hundreds of public meetings around the nation.
The rule effectively put a stop to new road building in most wild and roadless Forest Service lands upon its implementation in 2001, and eventually led to an effort 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 natural forest and meadow conditions, to preserve wildlife and their native habitat, and significantly reduce wildfire risks.
Please call your U.S. senators now. Every U.S. state has two U.S. senators, and while only 20 of the 100 U.S. senators sit on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, call yours nonetheless at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to VOTE NO on Mike Lee’s sickening, destructive, wholly unnecessary amendment to kill the Roadless Area Conservation Rule if they are on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, or to vote no on it if comes before them as part of full Senate consideration.
Among other matters, the Roadless Rule is a policy of the U.S. Forest Service, whose parent agency is the U.S. Department Agriculture that’s managed and overseen by the executive branch of the U.S. government, not the legislative branch, i.e. Congress. This is an administrative matter — not legislative! No one is asking for this.
CALL NOW, and also have your friends and family in other states call their two U.S. senators, 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 Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, passage by the full Senate is almost a certainty. And then 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 enjoy the Treehuggers International show I produced years ago when I was at FM 94/9 in San Diego to mark what was then the upcoming 10th anniversary of the Roadless Rule with one of the rule’s initial advocates.
Photos of forest road decommissioning in the Mt. Hood National Forest © 2012 Tommy Hough, all rights reserved.
