Brooke Rollins said the Trump administration national forest policy rollback will remove restrictions on logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests, including more than 4 million acres in California. Federal officials filed a proposal and environmental impact statement Tuesday to rescind the roadless rule.
Rollins said the change is meant to reduce barriers to managing fuels on public lands. The rule now bars logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests, so rescinding it would let federal land managers pursue those activities in places that have been off-limits.
California roadless acres
The California share is large enough to affect remote forest land across the Angeles national forest, San Bernardino national forest, Los Padres national forest and Cleveland national forest. Those roadless reaches are part of the broader federal policy change Rollins announced Tuesday.
Last September, California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot told Rollins that more than 240,000 acres of roadless land in California had undergone vegetation treatments to reduce wildfire risk and protect nearby communities. Crowfoot also wrote that opening these areas to construction, timber harvests and mining may put rural communities at increased risk of fire and significantly increase firefighting costs.
Forest Service fire data
Forest Service research adds a different picture. Scientists mapped 26 years of fire ignitions along roughly 850 miles of roads in the Angeles, San Bernardino, Los Padres and Cleveland national forests, and nearly two-thirds of the fires people caused in those forests sparked along roadsides.
A peer-reviewed study by scientists with The Wilderness Society, covering 1992 to 2024, found wildfire ignition densities were lowest in designated wilderness areas, followed by roadless areas, and highest within 50 meters of roads. That pattern cuts against Rollins's claim that more access would reduce wildfire risk.
What Brooke Rollins filed
Rollins said federal officials filed a proposal and environmental impact statement to rescind the roadless rule. Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns for The Wilderness Society, said, "Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is also not a wildfire solution, and never will be."
The immediate result is a formal federal process aimed at undoing the roadless rule for undeveloped national forest lands. If the rescission advances, the practical question for California readers is which roadless areas would be opened first and how quickly federal land managers would move from proposal to action.
