What's the Roadless Rule and Who Wants To Scrap It?

In late 2023, during the wettest winter in years here in California, my friend and I took care of thousands of people arriving in the country to claim asylum. In huge open-air detention camps, the Biden administration corralled humans in the desert without food, water or shelter. So we built them shelters, took them food, and destroyed the suspension in our trucks hauling water across the desert to keep people safe.

One night, with my friends Haval and James, I was out there in a storm, desperately trying to build fires in the rain to keep people warm, and holding babies inside my jacket, trying to keep the biting wind off them. I remember passing my coat to a woman who was breastfeeding while I heated up baby formula in my camping stove, and thinking there was nothing that the state could ever offer me that would make me accept the way it had treated these people. A few days after that particularly cold and stormy night, I hopped on a 30-something hour flight to southern Kurdistan. I travelled by plane, bus and automobile across Bakur, Kurdistan, across the Tigris River to Rojava. There, I nervously sat awake at night as death came from

the night sky to Kurdistan in the form of Turkey's Bayraktar drones and the fighter jets that the United States sold to the Turkish military. In the mornings, I surveyed the damage my tax dollars helped fund and then watched as US forces in the region did nothing to help their allies and as people in Kamishlo stood in line for ages to donate blood. I think I arrived in Kamishlo just on or after October 7th, 2023. By the time I left, Israel had already begun its genocidal violence in Gaza. And while the world looked at Israel and Palestine, Turkey and the Assad regime both took their chances to take a swing at Rojava. Every day I would call Sophie and Robert and our friend Jake Hanrahan and my family,

and tried to work out what was sensible and safe, how to deal with the fact that every night drones were picking people off, one by one, and the people I was going to meet were the people they were trying to kill. After that, I travelled across Kurdistan. I met Kurdish leaders in public spaces and in little apartments.

They took great risks to their lives to meet me, and I worried about them until I heard they were safely home. Then we would drive home, at night, wondering where in the region someone wouldn't wake up the next morning. By the time I got home, I wasn't doing well. I was on a super short fuse and prone to shout or want to cry at the most trivial shit.

I wanted to go back and help my friends out in the mountains, but I needed to help myself first. So I talked to Sophie and she gave me some time off work. I loaded up my backpack, threw it in my truck and drove as far as I could on the tarmac. And then as far as I could get and fall low on the dirt roads. Then I threw my pack on my back and dropped down thousands of feet into a valley where I knew there'd be water.

That's how I deal with my shit, just being in nature and observing. I don't need to hike some heroic distance or carry some super heavy load. I just need time away from the state, away from my phone, away from the petty bullshit of life under capitalism. I always find healing in the wilderness, so that's where I went.

I've always loved topo maps too. When I was 22 and a broke bike racer living in a small town in the Baix Camp, I had a huge topo map of Catalonia and I pinned it to my wall. I trained most of the day, And when I got home, I'd map out my routes on there with a pencil, trying to find roads I hadn't ridden and mountains I hadn't climbed. It's not the best way to approach training, but even at that early stage in my career, I'd realised I wasn't really going to the big leagues for bike racing, and I might as well have as much fun as possible until I had to do something much less fun to pay my bills. With a few other like-minded cyclists, I'd head off into the mountains, searching for the tiniest, windiest roads, and ride past the olive orchards

and through the walnut groves. stopping at little village wells to fill our water bottles, and buy food from bakeries and farmsteads. Over time, the map got more colourful, and the people who spent their days doing intervals and performance-enhancing drugs got faster, while I just got a reputation for being quixotically uncoachable, and a more wicked suntan that effectively branded the sponsor logos from my jersey onto my back.

I have a real job now, and 200km a week days are a thing of the past for me, but I still love maps. These days, my maps live on my phone and a computer, not my wall. But I still love to look at them for areas I haven't been. Mostly, I use a mapping software called Onyx. But there are tons of others. I like Onyx because it has a filter for roadless areas. And that's where I tend to focus my exploration. I'm always trying to find parts of the county or the state where cars can't go and I haven't been. I like to get as far as possible from roads and trails and just observe. I'm not retraining for shit anymore. I just like being outside. And sometimes the greatest joy I find in nature is just to sit and watch. But to sit and watch wild

animals being wild, I have to get away from people being people. And often that means getting away from roads. Most of the time, when I'm exploring far from the beaten path, I'm not in a national park. Indeed, in the developed areas of many parks, you can't really go off trail. I tend to spend most of my adventure time these days in the expansive national forests that sit to the east of many of the big cities in California.

The Angeles, Los Pazdos, and the Cleveland Forest have tens of thousands of combined acres of public lands. Lands that are accessible to all of us, and don't require non-citizens to pay an obscene fee or me to purchase an annual pass with the face of the guy destroying our public lands on it. You do need an adventure pass, but at least the graphics aren't so obnoxious. I drive my truck, which is probably older than most of the people listening to this, to the end of the pavement, and then I drive it along dirt roads. seeking out the ones that are just too rowdy for most people and far newer, fancier trucks and cars. Then, when I can't drive anymore, I park up, lock up my truck, and head into the wild places. Ideally, I'll find a

spot with no roads and no cell signal, and enjoy my time in nature without distractions or bother. Wild places are valuable for many reasons beyond my recreation. They're the watersheds for our rivers and the water we drink. the lungs that our planet needs as it struggles to breathe, the homes of animals, birds, plants and insects. They're valuable not just because we use them, but just because they're there, and because they are little parts of our country not made amenable to capital and exploited for every last cent that can be pulled out of the ground. They have an inherent value, and that value is one that we can never extract, we can never own, and we can never take away from anyone else. The value of wild

places is that they are for everyone, and that they belong to no one. Edward Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire, We can have wilderness without freedom. We can have wilderness without human life at all. But we cannot have freedom without wilderness. We cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men. When I say wilderness here, when Ed Abbey says it, We both mean small W wilderness. Not Wilderness at Wilderness, which requires an act of Congress to be considered wilderness, but little W wilderness,

which doesn't care about the state or Congress or even capitalism. It's not untouched or pristine. These are clichés that stand on a foundation of colonial ignorance that erases the presence of indigenous people on every inch of what is now the United States for tens of thousands of years. These places have been touched, walked on, and cared for by people since long before the Wilderness Act, long before the concept of public lands, long before the existence of the United States or the state at all. The wild places matter because they're set apart from the state and capitalism, not from people. Today I want to talk about the people who want to take all of that away from you.

I know it can be hard to keep up with the public land stories right now. It feels like there's a barrage of stories about threats to our wild places. And that's because the Trump administration is doing what it does. It's flooding the zone. But amidst the flood and the feel of drinking from a fire hose, this one stands out.

Rescinding the 2001 roadless rule will have an irreversible and massive impact on our wild spaces. And that's what I want to talk about today. But first, when I talk about places to escape the petty bullshit of capitalism, I can't do that here. So here are some advertisements. To better understand what's at stake here, I spoke to Jason Dovemark.

Hi, I'm Jason Dovemark. I'm a veteran environmental journalist and I'm the author of a new book called The Earth Said Remember Me, How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet.

Like many of us, Jason has been following this for a while. The Trump admin has been clear about its goals here. So to begin with, let's discuss what the roadless rule is.

So the roadless rule is arguably one of the most important protections for American public lands. It wasn't a law. It is truly just a rule. It was an administrative action put in place in the very last days of the Clinton administration. So established in 2001, right before Bill Clinton left office. The Roethlis rule covers 58 million acres of Forest Service lands across the United States. This rule has been in place more or less for 25 years.

The Bush administration tried to suspend it. It got hung up in court. But it's basically been in place for 25 years, which is important to understand because this, if it goes through, if it survives court challenges, it will go to court, would be arguably the largest rollback of existing environmental protections in U.S. history. The Trump administration want to take 44 million acres out of that total pie of 58 million acres and remove the roadless rule for those 44 million acres.

There are also state-level roadless rules in Idaho and Colorado, and that's why the acreage of roadless areas is not the same as the acreage of areas which would lose protection. Now, if you're wondering why anyone would want to do this, the answer isn't entirely clear. The claim that they're making on the face of it is this would help with wildfire suppression, and that claim is, to put it bluntly, bollocks.

I mean, honestly, I was trying to think about it myself. It's so lame. It gives concern trolling a bad name. I mean, it's just like really crude concern trolling because as many people pointed out, the predominant cause of fires are humans, right? Are human activities. The deeper humans get into the forest on roads, the more likely they're going to be to accidentally create fires. So yeah, some fires are natural and you have lightning strikes and that happens and that can spark a fire. But typically it's something, you know, pretty innocent. It could be someone who's inappropriately put out a campfire. It can be hunters or marksmen who are target practicing in the woods and a spare spark goes and ignites a fire. It can be something

as simple as a spark off of a wheel on a truck, right? Getting into the undergrowth. So basically more roads equals more chances for fire. And according to one study that's still in peer review, if you have a road that's you're four times as likely to have a fire in that area. And 90% of wildfires are within one quarter of a mile of a road.

The explanation you'll hear most often is this is just a straight-up gift to timber companies. I think maybe that's part of it, but that's not all of it.

I mean, the U.S. timber industry has been in decline for 25 years, and that's not primarily because of the roadless rule, right? That's because of these macroeconomic forces that are far beyond... The roadless rule. One part is actually a lot of furniture manufacturing being offshored in the early 2000s.

Some of it had to do with there was never really a rebound in sawmills after the housing crash of 2008, 2009. That was a huge dip. That was a huge body blow to the timber industry. It basically never really came back. The number of both pulp and paper mills and then sawmills for hardwood are dramatically down from what they were 25 years ago. There's just not the industry here to support necessarily logging all of these places. I don't want to say there's no risk. I do think there's probably some old growth stands with very valuable 600-year-old cedars or 500-year-old Sitka spruce. There is valuable lumber that people want to extract.

The other thing is that building sawmills takes time and costs money. And If companies were to build a sawmill right now, even if they built a super modern one that could cut small diameter timber, they would have to do so thinking that the next administration would not just reverse this ruling. And as the Trump administration has shown us, it's very easy for an administration to reverse these rulings, which really undermines the confidence any business would need to undertake such a massive investment. Most valuable timber, lots of old growth stuff, has been accessed before 2001. And a lot of the timber that's left isn't going to be able to pay for roads that might be needed to bring it out. As Jason says, there are probably some

exceptions to that. Areas where that might happen and we will lose something truly valuable. But it seems like a lot of this rural recession is even stupider than that.

I think the threat of logging in some very environmentally sensitive and ecologically valuable places is real. And yes, I think some of this, as I said earlier, is kind of concern trolling. And it's sort of a form of, you know, the Trump administration's kind of ideological penchant for, you know, owning the libs or whatever it may be.

For some members of the Republican Party in the Trump administration, and much of the domestic rights since the sagebrush rebellion of the 1970s and 80s, public lands and protections on them are simply wrong. They're opposed to them on principle. And because this is a rule, not an act of Congress, it's an easy target for them. And it will have a massive impact. economically, there just isn't a case to be made for doing this.

So according to the best available studies, the outdoor recreation industry, and that's, you know, backpackers, birdwatchers, hunters, fishermen, etc. That's about a $ 13. 5 billion a year industry. The timber industry in this country is a fraction, it's about 300 million, right? 300 million is the logging industry in the US. And a lot of that is taking place in tree plantations, whether that's in the deep south in Georgia or Maine or here in the Pacific Northwest, it's much more expensive to go log in remote public lands than it is on a Weyerhaeuser or Georgia Pacific plantation.

For what it's worth, the road dust rule already has exceptions and allows for fuel removal and cutting small diameter timber and some other emergency road builds as well. Nor has the Trump administration set aside funding for fire suppression, fuel removal, or even building these new roads.

And one thing that's really important for people to understand is the US Forest Service is the largest road management jurisdiction agency like on earth. They have 370,000 miles of existing roads. Most of those are like the gravel road you drive on to get to the trailhead or the gravel road you drive on to get to the rock climbing or fishing spot, right? They have 370,000 miles of those already and they can barely maintain what they have.

So it's hard to see that there's a pressing need for more roads. There just isn't.

So what are we losing to this concern trolling? It's tens of thousands of acres of wild places. Not the kind of wild places you'll find on those silly top 10 lists. Hikes which are beautiful, and which I'm happy people are taking, but which are a fundamentally human experience, shared with thousands of other people. These are places where you'll feel small, where human-created things like the state, capitalism, roads, and the waiting list you have to sign up for a slot on to do some national parks hikes can be forgotten for a second. Places set apart from the things that we have done to our home planet.

This is really high-quality wildland habitat, right? I mean, you know, this isn't Wilderness Capital W. Like, Wilderness Capital W... says no roads, but you need to pass a law through Congress. You need to pass a bill through Congress to establish a federal wilderness. But these 58 million acres of existing roadless areas, it's de facto wilderness, right? It basically is, you know, very high quality habitat for all kinds of birds, mammals, etc.

If this revocation happens, of roadless protections for 44 million acres were to go through, and some of that does get chopped up, chopped up meaning sort of sliced through the death of a thousand cuts that are roads, yeah, you're going to see real impacts to, I think, watersheds is the most obvious one, right? All that stuff, that gravel, that sediment goes down into the streams. That's going to impact fish populations, salmon and trout, etc. That's why groups like Trout Unlimited are against this. That's why backcountry hunters and anglers are against this. You will also see, speaking of backcountry hunters and anglers, you know, people who love wildlife, whether to just look at them or to harvest their meat,

that's going to be another major impact, right? The more you slice roads through an area, the more you disrupt animals' habitats. So the impacts will be real.

In his book, Jason talks about something called shifting baseline syndrome and how it applies here. I want to talk about it. So I asked Jason to explain what it means.

Yeah, so shifting baseline syndrome is just a kind of fancy sounding academic term for something we've all experienced, which is the great getting used to, right? So the way that environmental conditions, whether it's climate change or the loss of biodiversity can happen so slowly that you start to not notice it any longer or you get used to it.

you accommodate and you normalize. And the argument that I make in my book, The Earth Said Remember Me, is that this creepy normalization may be one of the main reasons why we've not dealt with climate change or the extinction emergency, is we just keep getting used to degrading environmental conditions. And in that accommodation, we start to accept them, and acceptance is the road to apathy. And I think You could see that in something that if you want to connect it to the roadless rule, you could see that in something like, you know, fish populations, right? Where the fish numbers in the size of the fish to go down and down. But it's hard to notice. And suddenly what used to be small fry is suddenly considered

a big deal.

Music There's a John Prine song that I really would have liked to have my friends play as a theme tune for this show. But IP being what it is, that wasn't going to happen. Still, I think the song... we have now is even more beautiful because people I care about came to my home and sat there on a sweltering July afternoon to make something to help me with my little project. I do want to mention that those of them I didn't name, I appreciate as well.

They just didn't want to be on my podcast. Anyway, that song, I think, perfectly explains how I feel about what we're facing. So instead of explaining it myself, I'll share it with you through the lyrical genius of John Prine.

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land ¶ Well, they dug further cold till the land was forsaken ¶ Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man ¶ And Daddy, won't you take.

Me back to Muhlenberg County ¶ Down by the Green River where paradise lay.

¶ Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late to ask me ¶ Mr. Peabody's coal train is hauled away ¶.

I remember sharing that song with a Gwich'in friend a couple of years ago when we talked about what it would mean for the Trump administration to be promoting drilling in the sacred place where life begins for Gwich'in people. She said it made her feel like she was mourning for something she hadn't lost yet. That's how I feel now.

Jason's idea of shifting baseline reminded me of my time in the Gwich'in village of Vashraiko, or Arctic Village if you're looking on a map. I remember having dinner with an elder there, Gideon James. who told me he grew up with people who had lived experience of seeing buffalo on their lands. In his life, he'd seen a salmon stop running in a river, which made it harder for people to run dog teams, which meant they had to buy snow machines. And you can't run snow machines on salmon.

The baseline has shifted so far in his lifetime, but he remembered exactly how. He'd adapted and continued to thrive in his home and on his land, but his baseline hadn't changed. I think that speaks to perhaps how we can sometimes better understand climate change through indigenous experience, and time on the land, rather than charts and graphs. But for many of us, the baseline of acceptably fucked up shit has changed. We can see this in the swinging of the Overton window to the right, the hotter and hotter summers, the bigger fires and the larger floods. We can also see it if we look at places where people did lose land that was more wild. Where I come from, in the UK, we don't have vast expanses

of land set apart from capital and the state. A few years ago I was home with my mum helping trim the feet of some of her sheep. It occurred to me as I slipped in the wet mud and slid on my ass down the hill like an idiot, that people who have been caring for sheep could be falling over like me in this very field, behind these same hedges, for far longer than the US has made the country. That's beautiful in a sense, but it also means I never got to experience our wolves, our bears, many of our old gross forests too. I never got to walk through the woods and wonder if I'd see a bear or watch a wolf chase a herd of caribou as I did on the Gwich Inlands. The fields around my dad's house have walls that are centuries old.

It's nearly all owned by someone, and it's impossible for me to imagine experiencing it as a truly wild place. Maybe think of that John Prine song, and how much of what was wild there has gone, and can't come back, carried away to Walter Market and sheep to the butcher. Don't get me wrong, I love sheep. I love how deeply connected the land and the people I grew up with are to caring for those silly little animals that love to find new ways to die. I hope you keep downloading this podcast and encouraging your friends to do the same so that one day I have enough money to have some sheep of my own and buy some land in the mountains where I can build a little house and hopefully never have cell signal. But I don't

want the land here to be bought to heel like that. One of the things I love most about this country, as someone who chose to come here, are the wild parts of it. I love to walk in the woods and see a black bear, to look in the dust of the meadows and see where a mountain lion came down to the creek to drink, while mule deer walk with her fawn. There's no amount of timber that you could ever sell to pay me enough to give that up.

If you like to spend time outdoors too, or maybe you just derive a sense of well-being from knowing that these wild places exist, Axton suggests two excellent resources for seeing exactly what these people want to take from you, from us, from everyone. The first is one Jason suggested.

The tool that I've actually been playing around with for the past couple of weeks is is, and listeners should go check this out. It's an amazing interactive map. It's more than just parks.com, which was a film, more than just parks.com forward slash roadless rule. They've got an interactive map where you can zoom in by zip code and find the U.S. Forest Service lands currently protected by the roadless rule that would be at risk from this Trump administration plan. It's super granular. And from each one, They've got different layers that you can explore in terms of like, okay, what are the old growth forests there? What's the wildlife?

What in many places is the watershed, right? I mean, healthy forests are the cradle of healthy waters and healthy rivers.

The second is Onyx Maps. They make a mapping software that I mentioned earlier. I particularly like their map because it correctly identifies San Diego County as a habitat for black bears. And in a time when far too many corporations who make money off people going outside have shown a frankly disgusting amount of cowardice, I'm glad that some haven't.

So what can you do? Well, the OnX page contains a link to public comment. And I've included a link here to the comment page as well. Comment is valuable, even if right now it feels like the government doesn't care about us or the land. Because at least when historians like me look back at this moment, they'll know how mad this made us all, how much we hated it, and how much we didn't want it. Comment, for what it's worth, is something that has consistently shown support for the roadless rule.

When they established the rule in the late Clinton administration, the federal government received 1.6 million public comments. Everybody used to say that was a record. I've noticed that some of the environmental groups no longer say it's a record. Maybe somebody else got it. But that's a huge number.

I mean, that's a huge number of public comments. 1.6 million people had to submit public comments to establish this the first time around. Well, if we're going to protect the protections, as it were, right, if we're not going to let this rollback happen, a equal to or greater than number of people are going to have to comment this time around. And it is important for listeners to know that there is a federal comment period open right now.

where people can submit to the federal government their own views. The federal government is required by law to respond to every single one of those original comments. So if you write an original comment and you write about a roadless area, a Forest Service roadless area in your state or in your region, and you make specific claims for why you care about that area and why you are against this proposed rule change, well, they have to answer. They have to respond to that.

Also, you can just go out there. Be out there. Be on the land that they want to take from you. Simply hiking or rolling, moving however you move in these areas, at least gives the government and the Forest Service a sense of not just what they are taking, but who they are taking it from. Outside is for everyone, and I want everyone to feel safe and welcome in the outdoors.

We're going to address that more in some future episodes with things about skills and how to get outside. But please don't feel scared to be out there. Be safe, of course. Take the right supplies and a way to navigate and a way to call for help. And remember that the top of the mountain isn't even halfway through the hard part of the day. But if you can, get out there. Better yet, take someone with you. If you feel safe and happy in wild places, it's a great gift to share that happiness with someone else. It doesn't cost you anything. And the more of us who are out there, the harder it is for them to take it away from all of us. Thanks very much for listening this week. Next week, I want to talk

about the border wall and the terrible thing that it's doing to our public lands, to our animals, to our environment. If you'd like to email us, you can do so. We have a Proton mail address, naturalcausespod at proton.me, or you can email coolzontips at proton.me. If you've enjoyed this podcast, I hope you'll subscribe. We have lots more exciting things to come in the next few weeks. I hope you enjoyed your Labor Day, and I hope you got outside.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Thanks for listening.

What's the Roadless Rule and Who Wants To Scrap It?

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin