Here we are again with the nation’s lead hater of our beautiful outdoors, Utah’s very own Senator Mike Lee, trying to silently sneak in his land destruction amendments into current bills like he always has. Readers may remember that I have talked about Mike Lee and his attempts at destroying our public lands using such common tactics as slipping them into larger, important bills, lying about what they will do when one can just simply read the bill to see how two-faced the man is while he attempts to laugh his way to the bank while he is at it.
This time around, Mr. Lee snuck in an amendment to Senator Barrasso’s Wildfire Prevention Act that would nullify the 2001 Roadless Rule. The Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, which Lee is the chairman of, approved the amendment with a strict party-line vote, 11-9. The man who held the gavel wrote the amendment himself. He didn’t announce it. He didn’t have to defend it in a hearing. The coward shoved it into the bill late at night before the vote happened. This would kill the rule. Not change it in any way, shape, or form–just erase it. In fact, the amendment itself would bar the Forest Service from ever issuing similar roadless protection acts in the future.
Let me start by giving a quick explanation of the Roadless Rule. Per the Forest Service, the 2001 Roadless Rule “established prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting in nearly 60 million acres inventoried roadless areas, with limited exceptions.” Now, to be fair, as I write a location-based fly fishing column for North Idaho, this does not directly affect Idaho due to our state making a statewide Roadless Rule in 2008, leaving it in the hands of the state rather than the Federal government. However, it affects our neighbors greatly with Montana having over six million acres fall under the rule, two million acres in Washington, two million acres in Oregon, and over forty eight million acres nationwide. This is land for the nature enjoyers, the outdoorsmen and women, the hunters, the fishers, the backpackers, the foragers to love and enjoy. I always speak out on these issues for everyone, because we are all in this together. If something like this slides and wilderness lands start getting destroyed for more roads and commercial logging and the like, with limited restrictions, it is only a matter of time that we, as humans, do something that we cannot take back.
And if our government sees the federal branch doing such stuff to the once-protected lands, who is to say that the old bootlickers that we continue to hire into our state offices won’t try to pull off a stunt like this in our great state? Think about it. This is bipartisan, folks. I don’t care what team you cheer for (if you are one of those people who treat politics like team sport), but our nature, our lands, our wilderness is ours to enjoy and not have spoiled.
This new Mike Lee amendment threatens to strip protections across thirty-seven states, effectively allowing the destruction of the last great backcountry spots in our national forest system such as the old-growth forests of the Tongass in Alaska, the Elkhorns in Montana, and headwaters to many native trout systems throughout the states, and opening the floodgates to commercial logging and road construction. For us anglers out there, seventy percent of the nation’s roadless areas are habitat for native trout.
And, once again, it would prohibit the Forest Service from ever issuing similar roadless protections ever again. That, folks, is the scariest part.
Mike Lee originally tried to pawn off his repeal to the Rule as “restoring local decision-making to federal land managers”. Well, now his amendment forbids them from managing at all. It handcuffs future foresters, overhead, and the public who may want to keep the forests whole. Mike Lee wants to make sure that when the machinery comes out, nothing can hold them back. When the administration opened up the repeal last year for public comment last fall, more than 600,000 Americans responded, and ninety-nine percent of them opposed it. I was one of the callers for this response, and I hope that most of you were too. In a time when people seemingly can’t wholly agree on anything, they still agreed on this: our public lands are our public lands. Get your grubby fingers away from them.
When Mike Lee wrote a mandate last June into the reconciliation bill (the one that was forcing the sale of 2.2 to 3.3 million acres of Forest Service and BLM land, we all caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. Then he reduced it to around 1.2 million acres of BLM land, pretending it was for a housing program. The people caught him redhanded again, the public lifted their voices, and he withdrew again like a little cowardly mouse. All he does is attempt something, gets caught, shrinks and shrivels, and returns to the darkness of his hole to try again in another outfit. The language will change but the goal stays the same.
But now he is the chairman; the baby in charge with a gavel. He doesn’t have to hide his tantrums, nor does he have to hide his true goals behind legalese. No, this time he will just shove his amendment into a Wildfire Prevention Bill. The snake in the chair no longer has to slither past people in power. The snake wears the crown and shakes his hammer.
Speaking of the Wildfire Prevention Bill, it is a perfect host for Lee to latch onto. The bill speaks of thinning targets, prescribed fires, and other safe language towards the health of a forest that all of us can agree with. But Barrasso’s Wildfire Prevention Act is also built around mandatory thinning and logging quotas that balloon to over forty percent above recent levels by the end of the decade. There is also language in it to include exclusions and carve-outs that let future projects skip environmental review. It isn’t the best bill in the first place, but Barrasso was not going to touch roadless areas. Yet Lee wanted to foul it up like he always does. In fact, backcountry areas should be one of the last places you look for wildfire management.
Trout Unlimited’s Chris Wood, who had played a key role in writing the Roadless Rule as a senior advisor to the Forest Service chief, testified that “85% of all wildfires are caused by people, and 78% of them state within a half a mile of a road”. The Forest Service deputy chief, Chris French, confirmed those numbers under questioning, calling it “a longstanding fact that, if you look at the point of ignition for wildfires, most are human-caused and most are going to be associated [with] where humans go, including roads.” Furthermore, a 2007 study found that fewer than 3 percent of all wildfires start in the wilderness or backcountry. Lee’s amendment proposes that we fight fire by carving roads, the leading delivery system per studies for wildfire ignition, into the tens of millions acres that currently have the fewest of them. We will all suffer, and Mike Lee and his donors will be cozy and paid in full.
People may tell you (or you may be sitting in your chair thinking) that the backcountry sits untreated, locked away from management. But this is false. Trout Unlimited’s Roadless Report found that roadless areas hold close to a fifth of the tree cover in the national forest system yet account for roughly a third of all fuel treatment acres. This is more treatment, not less.
Let us talk about money for a little bit (remember the times of fiscal conservatism? I do). The Forest Service manages 370,000 miles of roads. Half of the agency’s ~$10 billion deferred maintenance backlog is those existing roads crumbling in place. The Forest Service has made statements in the past that they couldn’t afford the road system that they already have. Now, the same administration and movement that destroyed the agency’s budget, purged its workforce, dismantled its leadership, and shuttered tons of research stations is now looking to repeal the rule that helped keep the debt caused by all the roads from growing, and bring forth forty-five million acres of the steepest, remotest country for new roads, machinery, and other fire hazards in itself. The “fiscal” conservatives want to shove more debt on a bankrupt road system by adding, well, more road (and fire danger).
Roads start fires, by the statements of the administration’s own deputy chief. Roadless country has more fuel treatment, per the agency’s own research station. The roads that the Forest Service already has are a $10 billion liability the agency states that it cannot afford, by the word of the chief who wrote the rule.
And where does this leave us? Well, in that majestic forty-five million acres of standing timber and minerals, there are people looking to bankroll the movement that has coveted the areas for generations, and now there is a senator as chairman looking to launder the taking through a fire bill. It is a total Trojan horse, and they want us to fall like Troy all to fill their pocket books up. I mean, that has been Mike Lee’s agenda with all his attempts at our public lands: lining his and his friend’s pockets with more and more wealth. I, along with many other outdoors folks and writers, hope that we can turn the light on about this situation. Once you turn a light on, the rats scatter.
Tight lines out there, friends.
Sources:
https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/senate-committee-votes-erase-roadless-rule/
https://www.tu.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TU-ROADLESS-REPORT_0401_web.pdf
