Last summer, Southeast director at the Center for Biological Diversity Will Harlan spotted an eastern hellbender through his fogged snorkeling mask during a river survey. “It’s magical to see them in the wild,” said Harlan of the elusive and threatened creatures which depend on clean water. The foot-long salamander was curled around a clutch of eggs beneath a rock in a streambed in the South Mills River watershed in the Pisgah National Forest, roughly 5 miles from Hendersonville. Portions of that watershed are within an Inventoried Roadless Area, or IRA, a designation intended to protect backcountry areas and watersheds within national forests. The federal designation restricts road building and logging in undeveloped portions of national forests, including tens of thousands of acres of IRAs in Western North Carolina.
That protection, however, may end later this year.
The US Department of Agriculture is weighing rescinding the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, commonly called the Roadless Rule, potentially opening tens of thousands of IRAs within the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forest to future road development.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ Daily, Weekend and Election 2026 newsletters.]
Rescinding the Roadless Rule is intended to return some land management decisions to local Forest Service officials.
Critics of the rule argue that in addition to limiting local control of federal land, it hinders wildfire management, restricts access to timber, and complicates the active management of public forests.
Nick Smith of the American Forest Resource Council, who favors rescinding the rule, said the forest products industry wants public lands to stay in public hands. But easing or eliminating the rule “gives some flexibility to local public land managers to consider limited access where it's necessary for things like forest health, wildfire mitigation or emergency response,” he said.
Supporters of the Roadless Rule, however, such as Harlan, say it protects wildlife habitat, safeguards water quality, preserves scenic landscapes and supports the Western North Carolina outdoor recreation economy.
“Rescinding the rule would be the single largest evisceration of public lands in US history. It’s been around for 25 years and protects millions of acres” including some of the Southern Appalachian’s best hellbender habitat, Harlan said. “It’s now all on the chopping block.”
Environmental response
In 1999, the USDA Forest Service placed a moratorium on road construction within areas identified as roadless. The agency released a draft rule the following year for public review. Attorney Kristin Gendzier of the Southern Environmental Law Center said about 95% of the 1.6 million public comments supported it.
“It was just wildly, wildly popular,” she said. While a decade of litigation challenging the rule followed, a federal appeals court ruled in 2011 that the Forest Service legally adopted the Roadless Rule. The U.S Supreme Court declined to review the rule in 2012, upholding the regulation.
The Roadless Rule is straightforward, Gendzier said: “It's just a couple of paragraphs and it says, for the most part, don't build roads and log in these special areas.”
Josh Kelly, the resilient forests director of MountainTrue said IRAs in Western North Carolina include some of the region’s best-known places such as Cheoah Bald near Bryson City, portions of the Black Mountains in Yancey County, the South Mills River watershed in Henderson County, Dobson Knob in McDowell County, and upper Wilson Creek in Caldwell and Avery counties.
“One of the justifications for the Roadless Rule is that it covers places that perhaps shouldn't be wilderness, but also shouldn't be developed,” he said. “It's this middle ground of places where the Forest Service has the latitude to do controlled burns, thinning, manage insect and disease control” yet the designation is not as restrictive as federal wilderness.
Gendzier said rescinding the rule is unsound from both an environmental and economic standpoint. “They're roadless for a reason. These are areas that are rugged and steep. Cost effective timber is either gone or the forest service has already set it aside. So we're talking about a pretty small subset of timber that’s difficult to access in areas that are providing tremendous benefits.”
Forest industry responds
Smith of the AFRC supports a review of the Roadless Rule in order to better address severe wildfires, declining forest health, climate stress, and to expand access for the timber industry.
“Our industry is not as big as it was 20 or 30 years ago, but we're still here,” Smith said. “We recognize that federal lands aren’t industrial tree farms, but our members still depend on lumber and wood fiber from federal lands to keep their doors open and workers on the job.”
North Carolina has more than 18 million acres of timberland, much of which is privately owned. A labor force of roughly 70,000 work in forestry and logging operations, sawmills, furniture mills and pulp and paper industries across the state.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule doesn't mandate building new roads or logging, Smith said.
“The big picture is that we think the Forest Service is right to take a hard look at the rule, because in our opinion, it reflects an older way of thinking about forests as static landscapes which doesn't align with today's realities of severe disturbance” such as exotic pests and climate change, he said.
The Pisgah and Nantahala national forests contain nearly 152,000 acres of IRAs within their 1 million acres. Under the Pisgah–Nantahala Forest Plan, IRAs are managed primarily as “backcountry” or under more restrictive designations such as the Appalachian Trail Corridor, Heritage Corridors or designated Wilderness.
In an email response to Carolina Public Press a USDA spokesperson said the intent to rescind the Roadless Rule is to return land management decisions to local authorities, such as district rangers.
Future land management decisions would still have to comply with existing forest plans, federal law and public review requirements. A land management plan for Pisgah and Nantahala was completed in 2023. Plans are revised every 10 to 30 years.
David Whitmire of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Council, an organization advocating for more active forest management to improve wildlife habitat in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests said there “is no need to change the plan or management concerning roadless areas. The plan identified enough acres outside of IRAs to support active management. We can’t get the work done where we can go, so I don’t see the benefits of going into roadless areas.”
The USDA acknowledged that due to “steep terrain, remote locations and statutory limits, road construction in these areas is generally impractical, and the effect of rescinding the Roadless Rule on current management is expected to be minimal.”
The statement said repealing the Roadless Rule nationally “is more important than ever because 24.5 million acres of the wildland urban interface are within or near IRAs”. The wildland urban interface, or WUI, refers to places where the built environment intermingles with nature. North Carolina has more WUI acres than any other US state.
“Roads improve access for wildland firefighting when timing is critical and lives are at risk,” said the statement. According to the Forest Service, between 1984 and 2024, 13% of IRAs nationwide experienced high or moderate severity wildfire.
However, opening more roads, Harlan said, may instead increase wildfire risk.
“Wildfires are four times as likely in areas with roads than in roadless tracts, and 90% of all wildfires occur within half mile of a road,” he said, adding that road building in national forests is “reckless and dangerous. Roads are expensive to build and the Forest Service can’t maintain what we already have.”
Taxpayers for Common sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said the USFS reported a $5.9 billion maintenance backlog for road maintenance in 2024 and recommends the agency focus limited funds on repairing necessary transportation infrastructure rather than build new roads.
“Rural economies have flourished because of recreation and tourism,” Harlan said. “Let's allow logging in places where it makes sense and protect the biologically and recreationally important places within IRAs.”
Roadless Rule repeal proposal part of pattern
Without the rule, forests could drop roadless protections either through a project-specific plan amendment or during the next forest management plan revision, Gendzier said.
“Don't worry ‘we have forest plans and that nothing changes’ is not true,” she said. “Forest management plans are no substitute for the Roadless Rule. In fact, plans that protect IRAs generally do so because the rule requires it.”
Gendzier also questioned whether the USDA’s stated push to rescind the rule is genuine.
“This isn’t about wildfire and it’s certainly not about a need for more roads,” she said. “The Forest Service already has over double the miles of our federal highway system. This proposal is another move to elevate the interests of extractive industries above those of the public when it comes to managing public land.”
Kelly of MountainTrue said he believes a nationwide effort is underway to push regulatory boundaries and pressure local rangers to implement a Project 2025 vision to roll back environmental rules and favor industry.
Project 2025 is a set of conservative policy recommendations for Trump’s second term. Among their recommendations was to update the “endangerment finding”, the scientific conclusion that greenhouse causes threaten public health and welfare. The Trump Administration revoked the finding on February 12.
“I would expect to see further envelope pushing locally from top down pressure from Washington,” Kelly said.
Gendzier also believes the proposed recision of the Roadless Rule is part of an across-the-board attack on public lands that include the adoption of loopholes exempting national forest projects from environmental review and staffing reductions.
The Trump Administration has taken steps to reduce environmental regulations and long-standing land protection rules to promote the active management of forests and increase timber sales. Among several actions, Trump has weakened the National Environmental Policy Act, considered the bedrock of environmental law, by reducing the scope of environmental reviews, shortening project approval timelines, and limiting public participation.
“On its own, rescinding the Roadless Rule is a terrible idea that would do irreparable harm,” Gendzier said. “But in tandem with the other rollbacks, it’s mind-boggling.”
What’s next for Roadless Rule?
Changing a USDA administrative rule requires a formal, public process, usually initiated by submitting a petition for rulemaking and influenced by thousands of comments received during a 21-day comment period.
A proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule and a draft Environmental Impact Statement are expected in March 2026. Following another public comment period, a final decision is expected in late 2026.
“It's a big decision, and one that shouldn't happen quickly if done responsibly,” Gendzier said. “That is not the kind of stability and rational policy decisions that our public lands need and deserve.”
Gendzier urged the public to contact elected officials and submit comments opposing any proposal to rescind the Roadless Rule.
Congressional Democrats have also proposed legislation, the Roadless Rule Conservation Act, to cement the Roadless Rule in law.
Harlan supports a new law, but regardless of congressional action, he predicts that a deluge of public comments will win the day. “Roadless areas are far too valuable to the American public,” he said, pointing out that the rule has survived multiple repeal attempts over the last two decades because of overwhelming public support.
“Each time, the public and a few key leaders have stepped up to save it,” he said
A Susquehanna Poll released on February 2 surveyed attitudes and opinions toward the Roadless Rule regulation. It found that 72% oppose repeal. Opposition to repeal is broad-based; including 71% of Republicans, 73% of Democrats and Independents, and 71% of Trump voters.
Despite strong public support for the rule, Smith of the AFRC said they will also continue to share their expertise about best forest practices they believe are necessary to improve forest health and support the timber industry.
“Everybody deserves a voice, whether it's AFRC or an environmental group. We're going to continue to speak our truth and we think it’s a good time to look at policies that are 20 or 30 years-old,” he said. “We represent an industry that has been in the forest for a long time and see ourselves as an important part of the equation when it comes to public lands.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.