Why We Need the Roadless Rule, and What You Can Do Before October 6

There is a stretch of the Siuslaw National Forest around Mount Hebo, more than 13,000 acres of it, that is protected by exactly one thing. Not a wilderness designation, not a park boundary. A single federal rule, written in 2001, that says you do not build new roads there. The Sierra Club’s Oregon chapter has done the counting, and for that ground the Roadless Rule is the only protection standing.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has proposed to erase that rule in its entirety, across about 45 million acres of national forest nationwide and nearly 2 million acres here in Oregon. There is a public comment window before the decision is finalized, and it closes soon. It was going to close September 21. After a letter to the Forest Service signed by 164 members of Congress and led by Oregon’s Representative Andrea Salinas, the agency extended it. It now closes Tuesday, October 6 at 8:59 p.m. Pacific. That is fifteen more days than we had, and a longer comment is a better comment, so we should use them.

If you want the background before you do anything else, watch the film. Aidin Robbins made a half-hour documentary called Why We Need the Roadless Rule, and it walks through what the rule does and what losing it would mean, in plain terms. Half an hour, and you will understand this better than most of the people deciding it.

Why this matters here

Roads are the first cut. Almost everything else that goes wrong in a forest, the logging, the sediment in the streams, the invasive weeds, the fragmenting of old-growth that certain birds cannot live without, follows the road in. Keep the road out and you keep most of the rest out with it. That is the whole quiet logic of the Roadless Rule, and it is why removing it is a bigger deal than it sounds.

The places at stake here have names. The Oregon Dunes. Hardesty Mountain, east of Eugene. The stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail near Waldo Lake. The Rogue and Siskiyou country to the south. This is Oregon backcountry people already know and already use.

Oregon Wild’s analysis puts 91 percent of Oregon’s roadless forest, roughly 1,659,000 acres, inside municipal watersheds that supply drinking water to about 800,000 people. So this is not an abstraction about faraway backcountry. It is the water that comes out of the tap in a lot of Oregon towns, and it is the cold, clean headwater streams that our coho and our marbled murrelets depend on.

The comment period is the last scheduled chance for the public to weigh in before the rescission is finalized. More than 625,000 comments came in during the 2025 stage of this rulemaking. Volume matters, and so does specificity: a comment that names a real place and says what you do there is much harder to set aside than a form letter. Here is what is worth saying.

The wildfire rationale does not hold up

The agency is calling this wildfire policy. Its own research does not back that up. A 2020 study by Forest Service scientist Sean Healey, published in Environmental Research Letters and hosted on the agency’s own research site, found that roadless and roaded forests have burned at similar rates since the rule took effect, that fuel-management work in roadless areas has actually happened more often per square kilometer than elsewhere in the National Forest System, and that non-native invasive plants are twice as common within 500 feet of a road. Its conclusion, in the agency’s own words, is that the idea eliminating road prohibitions would improve forest health is not supported by nearly twenty years of monitoring data. The Forest Service’s own Smokey Bear campaign says nine out of ten wildfires are started by people, and recent research finds fires are about four times more likely to start in areas with roads than in roadless forest, with more than 90 percent of wildfires nationwide igniting within half a mile of a road (Aplet et al., 2026).

This is about our drinking water and our fish

About 91 percent of Oregon’s roadless forest, some 1.66 million acres, sits in municipal watersheds serving roughly 800,000 people. Roads send sediment into the streams below them. Marbled murrelets, a threatened species, nest in the unfragmented old-growth on this coast and fly out to the ocean to feed, and Oregon Coast coho need cold, clean water in the headwaters. Fragmenting those stands and silting up those streams are foreseeable results of new road construction, and both fall on species already listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The public already weighed in, and the money runs the other way

Keeping the rule is not a fringe position. A national poll commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts in February 2026 found 76 percent of American voters want the Roadless Rule kept, including 77 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Trump voters. The dollars point the same direction. The Forest Service already carries a deferred maintenance backlog of roughly 11.2 billion dollars on the roads it already has, up from 8.4 billion in 2000, and the administration’s own 2027 budget request would cut road capital improvement and maintenance from 153 million dollars to 99 million while proposing to allow more road building. Building more road you cannot afford to maintain, on land the public has asked you to leave alone, is not a plan.

These forests are a last stronghold for wildlife

Roadless national forests are among the best remaining habitat for species already in trouble. They give refuge to hundreds of vulnerable wildlife species (Dietz et al., 2021). On the Oregon Coast that means salmon, elk, and seabirds like the marbled murrelet, all of which depend on unroaded, unfragmented forest and the cold, clean streams that roads degrade. Once those places are cut through, the animals that needed them whole do not get them back.

These are some of the best forests we have for the climate

Roadless forests store carbon far out of proportion to their size. On national forest lands, inventoried roadless areas hold about 22 percent of the mature-forest carbon and 27 percent of the old-growth carbon (Birdsey et al., 2025). Logging them releases carbon we cannot afford to lose and cannot quickly get back. A road opens a stand to exactly that.

Protecting these forests protects Oregon jobs

Outdoor recreation is a major Oregon industry, supporting about 192,000 jobs, 16 billion dollars in spending, and 12.4 billion dollars of the state economy (Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, 2022). Roadless backcountry is the setting for a lot of the hunting, fishing, and hiking that keeps that economy going. New roads and logging trade a recurring economy for a one-time cut, and the coast has watched that trade play out before.

Here is how to say it, before October 6

You do not have to turn any of this into a comment on your own. We built a guided tool on our Act Now page that does the assembling for you. You pick the points above that matter most to you, add a sentence or two about your own connection to these forests, the creek you fish, the trail you walk, the ridge you can see from your window, and the tool drafts a comment in your voice. You read it, edit it, and it hands you straight to the official Regulations.gov form with the text ready to paste. A few minutes, start to finish.

Two things worth knowing while you are there. You are allowed to send more than one comment, and the groups working this docket all recommend it: file several, each on a different point, each in your own words. And that page carries the rest of the fight too, not just the comment: a five-minute action to ask Representative Val Hoyle to co-sponsor the Roadless Area Conservation Act and to tell both senators to strip the Roadless Rule repeal out of S. 140, plus the roadless petitions, and a separate, tighter-deadline action on the travel management rule that closes even sooner.

The window closes Tuesday, October 6 at 8:59 p.m. Pacific. The extension happened because enough people made noise. The same will be true of whatever comes next.

Write your comment before October 6

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