Defend Roadless Lands. Keep Public Lands Public.
By Michael B. Dunn | Brandywine Forest
The push to repeal the Roadless Rule and sell or transfer public land threatens forests, watersheds, wildlife habitat, public access, and the ability of future generations to experience these places for themselves.
I spent much of my early career as a wildland firefighter and hotshot defending public lands. I learned what those words meant through the work itself: early mornings, long hikes, smoke-filled drainages, steep ground, changing weather, and the steady awareness that the line had to hold.
I learned it while protecting communities, watersheds, timber, and the people working beside me. I learned it from crews that understood the difference between talking about a landscape and being responsible for it.
A public forest is not simply acreage on a map. It is a place where someone can hunt, fish, hike, camp, work, or find quiet without owning a second home, paying a membership fee, or asking a corporation for access. It is a watershed that serves communities downstream. It is habitat that can recover after fire. Its value cannot be measured by a mineral claim, a lease payment, or a development appraisal.
Public lands may be our greatest American institution: a democratic commitment that extraordinary forests, waters, wildlife habitat, and cultural landscapes will be held in common rather than reserved for the wealthy or converted into private assets.
The Roadless Rule Is Worth Defending
The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule—commonly called the Roadless Rule—limits most new road construction, road reconstruction, and commercial timber harvest in designated inventoried roadless areas of national forests. It applies to nearly 45 million acres of National Forest System land.
The administration has proposed rescinding the rule through a formal rulemaking process. That proposal would remove the national baseline that has protected roadless areas for a generation and make future road-building, commercial logging, and development decisions easier to advance one forest and one project at a time.
Roadless areas are not unused land. They are unroaded country: headwater drainages, backcountry hunting ground, places to fish, intact habitat, and forest where the public can still get away from pavement, industrial activity, and subdivision pressure.
Roadless does not mean untouched, inaccessible, or impossible to manage. Firefighters, restoration crews, hunters, anglers, hikers, researchers, and local communities use these places. The rule does not prohibit wildfire response, prescribed fire, forest restoration, or necessary work to protect communities. It limits most new permanent roads and commercial timber harvest because roads permanently alter a forest.
Roads fragment habitat. They can increase erosion and sediment in streams. They create new routes for invasive plants, illegal dumping, and development pressure. They require maintenance long after the project that justified them has ended. In fire-prone country, roads can improve access in specific places, but they are not a universal fire-management solution. They can also bring more human ignitions into the backcountry.
The question is not whether firefighters and land managers need access. We do. The question is whether the answer to every management challenge is permanent new roads through some of the country’s remaining large, unroaded public forests.
It is not.
What the Gila Taught Me
In 2006, I spent 14 days on a wildland fire in the Gila Wilderness, scouting line while completing my Squad Boss task book. We were flown into the fire. For nearly two weeks, I worked ridges and drainages, read terrain, and scouted routes through country where there was no easy way in or out. I was probably averaging 15 to 20 miles a day.
By the end of the roll, my feet were trashed. It was the first year, on our crew, that we could wear modern mountaineering boots instead of traditional fire boots. Mine were Gore-Tex lined, and in desert conditions they never dried properly. I had trench foot.
As we approached our 14th day, we were no longer a valid firefighting resource. We had to hike 32 miles out with all of our gear.
That experience did not teach me that every acre of public land needs a road. It taught me the opposite.
Remote country demands good judgment. It demands people who can read fire, weather, fuels, terrain, fatigue, and the limits of a plan. It demands crews who work together and leaders who understand the difference between what sounds good in an office and what makes sense on the ground.
The Roadless Rule did not prevent firefighters from responding to fire in places like the Gila. It includes exceptions that allow road construction, reconstruction, and tree cutting when necessary to protect public health and safety in the event of wildfire, as well as for certain forest-health and restoration needs. The rule is not a ban on firefighting or thoughtful stewardship; it is a safeguard against treating new roads and industrial entry as the default answer. See the Federal Register notice, the 2001 Roadless Rule, and the USDA Forest Service summary analysis.
As a firefighter, I know that tactical access, emergency response, and carefully designed restoration matter. As someone who has worked in remote public country, I also know that opening roadless landscapes to blanket road building and commercial extraction is not the same thing as protecting communities from wildfire.
The Brotherhood of Fire
Wildland fire creates a brotherhood of fire—a fireline family built through shared hardship, mutual accountability, and the understanding that every person on the crew must be able to rely on everyone else.
You work together, eat together, sleep on the ground, carry the same gear, and make decisions in conditions where people need to speak clearly and pay attention. That bond is not about bravado. It is about responsibility.
It means watching the person beside you. It means recognizing when conditions are changing. It means saying something when a plan no longer fits the ground. It means carrying your share when the shift stretches on and the work still needs to be done.
The brotherhood of fire taught me that defending land is never an individual act. It depends on people willing to show up for one another, do difficult work, accept responsibility, and protect something larger than themselves.
That is the obligation before us now.
Selling Public Lands
The fight over the Roadless Rule is part of a broader effort to weaken public ownership and public stewardship.
In 2025, a Senate budget-reconciliation proposal would have required the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands. The Senate parliamentarian ruled the provision out of order, and it was removed—but the episode made clear that large-scale public-land disposal is an active political idea, not a hypothetical one. Read the Senate ruling summary and the Trust for Public Land response.
Land-transfer campaigns use the language of local control. Disposal proposals invoke housing, deficits, or efficiency. Land exchanges are presented as technical transactions. Expanded leasing, mining, drilling, and commercial development are framed as economic necessity.
Call it disposal, transfer, exchange, leasing, or “flexibility.” The result can be the same: land once managed for the public becomes less accessible, less protected, and more valuable to whoever can profit from it.
Once land is sold, developed, fenced, fragmented, or degraded, restoring the public interest is difficult and expensive.
Fire Requires Long-Term Stewardship
Fire does not respect political slogans, budget cycles, or property lines.
Wildfire behavior is shaped by weather, fuels, drought, topography, forest condition, invasive plants, roads, development patterns, and the capacity of land-management agencies to conduct restoration and prevention work before an emergency begins.
Reducing wildfire risk requires long-term work: forest restoration, prescribed fire where appropriate, defensible space around homes and communities, road and trail maintenance, watershed protection, invasive-species control, and capable public agencies with trained field staff.
Selling or fragmenting public land does not solve a watershed problem. Weakening the institutions responsible for managing public land does not make a community safer. It shifts risk and expense into the future—often onto firefighters, local governments, taxpayers, and rural communities.
The forest will still carry fire. The question is whether the public will retain the people, funding, access, and authority to manage it before the next emergency.
Public Land Is Public Life
The value of public land is not limited to scenic overlooks or family vacations.
Public lands protect headwaters and drinking-water sources. They allow wildlife to move across large landscapes. They provide access for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and quiet recreation. They support guides, outfitters, restoration crews, forestry workers, small businesses, and rural communities. They safeguard cultural and historic resources that should not be reduced to private amenities.
In a country where more land is gated, posted, subdivided, and priced beyond the reach of many people, public land remains a place where the public can still belong.
A child should be able to stand in a cold stream, catch a fish, walk a trail, or sit beneath a large tree without first having to purchase access. That is part of the civic value of public land.
What We Must Do
The proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule is subject to public review, and the existing rule remains in effect while USDA considers the proposal. The public-comment process is where concerns about access, water, wildlife, roads, fire, and forest management become part of the administrative record. Submit comments through the Federal Register docket.
Submit a substantive comment opposing repeal of the Roadless Rule.
Identify specific local values at stake: drinking water, roadless character, wildlife habitat, hunting and fishing access, recreation, forest resilience, and future management options.
Ask elected officials whether they support retaining Roadless Rule protections and keeping public lands in public ownership.
Reject the false choice between wildfire safety and conservation. Demand investment in community protection, restoration, prescribed fire, defensible space, and trained public-land staff.
Watch for future land-sale, transfer, exchange, leasing, and development proposals.
Support organizations and local groups defending roadless areas, watersheds, public access, and science-based public-land management.
Show up before decisions become permanent.
I still think about the people I worked beside—the ones who carried their load, checked on the person next to them, and did not need a speech to understand what responsibility looked like.
I spent much of my early career as a wildland firefighter and hotshot defending public lands with tools in my hands and fire at my back. That experience is why I believe we have an obligation to defend the places that remain public, intact, and available to the people who already own them.
Resist the repeal of the Roadless Rule. Reject the sale of public lands. Keep public lands public.
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