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The Trump administration is formally launching an effort to build more roads in national forests by rescinding a decades-old rule. More roads and fewer forest protections, it argues, are needed to fight worsening wildfires. But as NPR's Nate Rott reports, fire science shows it's not that simple.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: There's an old axiom that Alexandra Syphard likes to bring up when she's talking to people about forest management and wildfires.
ALEXANDRA SYPHARD: The Sevareid Principle.
ROTT: Coined by the late author and CBS journalist Eric Sevareid, it essentially says many intended solutions create their own problems.
SYPHARD: The law of unintended consequences is a very real law.
ROTT: Syphard is the director of science for the Global Wildfire Collective, a research group focused on connecting fire science with wildfire managers. She's been studying fire for almost 30 years.
SYPHARD: And one of the most fundamental concepts in fire, especially in terms of fire geography, is that roads are the dominant place where you see ignitions.
ROTT: Where there are roads, there are people. And where there are people, there tend to be fires. And Syphard says that's just part of the problem.
SYPHARD: Once you construct a road within an otherwise roadless area, it changes the nature of the vegetation.
ROTT: Instead of unbroken forest with dark canopies, you often get sun-hungry grasses growing beside roads that dry out quickly and are extremely flammable.
SYPHARD: So when you add all of these things up together, you get a lot of ignitions along roads.
ROTT: A study that's still undergoing peer review mapped fire ignitions in national forests over the last 32 years, and it found that's true. Greg Aplet with The Wilderness Society is the lead author of the study.
GREG APLET: The density of ignitions was up to four times higher within 50 meters of a road than it was in wilderness areas. And roadless areas were close behind.
ROTT: Aplet says his organization, a nonprofit environmental group, expected to see the Trump administration target regulations it doesn't like.
APLET: But this time, they tried to link the reversal of protections for roadless areas to wildfire mitigation, and it just - we knew that didn't hold water.
ROTT: The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which includes the Forest Service, did not respond to a request for comment. In its most recent press statement about the proposed rescission, Forest Service chief Tom Schultz said, for nearly 25 years, the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action, prohibiting road construction, which has limited wildfire suppression and active forest management.
Matt Thompson is a former research forester at the Forest Service and the vice president of wildfire risk analytics at Vibrant Planet, a public benefit corporation. And he says, sure, you could make an argument for more roads.
MATT THOMPSON: Fires that start near roads tend to be controlled more quickly and smaller, for obvious reasons of more rapid detection and access.
ROTT: And he says if roads are managed smartly, built in places where they could be used as a barrier to stop fires or as a way to get crews in to pre-emptively manage vegetation along them...
THOMPSON: You can derisk that environment. The question is, like, will we have the resources, and can we get it done in time so that it's not just a new risk sitting out there?
ROTT: Part of the reason the so-called Roadless Rule was created in 2001 was because the Forest Service didn't have the money to maintain the roads it already had. President Trump's budget request for 2026 cuts Forest Service funding by more than 60%.
DALE BOSWORTH: Just doing away with the whole thing puts us back into the timber wars and stuff like that.
ROTT: Dale Bosworth was the chief of the U.S. Forest Service under President George W. Bush, so he's familiar with the fights between logging interests and environmental groups. And he says removing roadless protections won't necessarily increase timber production.
BOSWORTH: The areas that were left roadless were left roadless for a reason.
ROTT: They were hard to access, or didn't have great timber to start with. Today, he says, those areas now have recreational value. And the idea that removing their protections will prevent fires?
BOSWORTH: The Forest Service is already suppressing 98% in initial attack. Putting roads into all the roadless areas isn't going to increase that to 99.
ROTT: A 21-day public comment period for the proposed recission begins tomorrow.
Nate Rott, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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