The Problem With Trump’s Plan to Fight Forest Fires With Roads

The United States has more roads than you could possibly imagine. Eighty-three percent of the land in the Lower 48 lies within one kilometer of a road; if you’re seeking isolation, the furthest you can get away from one is likely only about 25 miles, in a far-flung corner of Yellowstone National Park.

The Trump administration wants to build even more. Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture filed to rescind the nearly quarter-century-old Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protects about 45 million acres of pristine national forest lands from the construction of — and dissection by — new permanent roads. The USDA’s given reason? That new roads will provide the access forest managers and fire practitioners need to better prevent wildfires in the nation’s most remote locations.

Fire ecologists immediately cried foul. Researchers have long understood that roads enable wildfire ignitions by bringing people — who are responsible for starting nearly 85% of fires — into the landscapes. Just this past January, new research found that wildfires ignited four times more often within 50 meters of a road than in an untracked, intact forest. “The notion that you can prevent fires by building roads seems to me precisely backwards when you look at what the science says,” Ben Goldfarb, the author of the road ecology book Crossings, told me.

But this past spring, Americans got a good idea of what wildfires look like when there aren’t roads around. Lightning storms in Northern Ontario ignited fires in an area so remote that officials found it “impossible to get firefighters on the ground” to fight them, per The New York Times, or even to react early with airplane water tankers. The result? More than 1.8 million acres burned in the province so far this year, with the resulting smoke causing the Midwestern U.S. and New England to experience some of its worst air pollution in decades.

“There’s a duality — roads are neither necessarily good nor bad from a fire perspective,” Eric Kennedy, an associate professor of disaster and emergency management at York University, told me. “They bring opportunities for ignition and they bring opportunities for firefighting.” Those opportunities include the aforementioned access for fire personnel, as well as serving as a fuel break so crews can gain a foothold against an approaching conflagration. In a populated area, more roads can also mean more evacuation routes when there is a disaster, preventing potentially deadly traffic jams.

Forest defenders were already suspicious of the administration’s motivations when it comes to wildfire policy. “There’s all of the Trump administration directives to increase logging on public lands, which rescinding the Roadless Rule helps to facilitate,” Goldfarb noted. Environmental groups have pointed to attempted legislation such as the Fix Our Forests Act, which removes obstacles for forest management methods, including timber harvest, as another example of how the administration is allegedly using wildfire as a cover to cut down and sell more trees.

Viewed in the context of recent changes by the administration to weaken the Endangered Species Act — namely, narrowing the definition of “harm” to a species to exclude disturbances to its habitat — rescinding the Roadless Rule can appear to follow a kind of rapacious internal logic that “wildlife doesn’t need habitat, and we can build roads wherever we want to disrupt” the forest, Goldfarb went on.

Fires igniting in remote areas is also not a new problem. Agencies adapt to the fire conditions in their areas, such as Quebec, which has an entire apparatus for fighting fires in tractless wilderness, including shuttling in fire crews via float plane. “You can fight fires via helicopter. You can also build temporary roads under the Roadless Rule,” Goldfarb said. As one Montana-based National Forest manager of 25 years recently wrote for a local newspaper, in his experience, “the Roadless Rule doesn’t pose an insurmountable barrier to good land management; it simply requires baseline analysis and thought before impacting the landscape.”

Those who are cynical about the Trump administration’s motivations also pointed me toward the grandiose scale of the Roadless Rule rescission. Fire managers frequently talk about the need for tailored, local, and precise responses to America’s wildfires, which run the gamut from grass fires to chaparral fires to forest fires in regions that both do and do not have histories of regular burning. Policymakers would more appropriately approach wildfire management fireshed by fireshed, they say, and through proposed management plans. Perhaps most notably, the Roadless Rule protects about half of the nearly 17 million acres of the Tongass National Forest, a temperate rainforest and one of the wettest locations in North America, which “does not experience wildfires like those in other places,” the Alaskan environmental conservation group SalmonState wrote in a statement with other advocates and business groups.

Most cynical, though, is the argument that the Trump administration is proposing rescinding the Roadless Rule at the same time that it has gutted the Forest Service that is supposed to maintain all those roads. The agency already struggles with an overwhelming backlog of maintenance projects, from washed-out bridges to erosion problems that impact the water quality in drought-stressed areas. If the USDA were really interested in using roads to combat wildfires, the line of thinking goes, then it would be investing more in the Forest Service, people told me, not less.

“The wildfire challenge really calls upon us to be able to hold different dimensions and different layers and seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time,” Kennedy said, again emphasizing that one can make the case that roads have benefits in certain contexts and scenarios. But while there may be a valid line of debate about when, where, and how roads can help with wildfire management, using the cudgel of a rescission, it doesn’t appear to be one the administration is interested in having.