Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
I write to urge the continued protection of the Western roadless areas first identified and set aside beginning in the 1970s, when the U.S. Forest Service’s Roadless Area Review and Evaluation process, known as RARE, recognized what remained of America’s unbroken wild forest and had the foresight to leave it that way.
These lands are not empty space waiting to be put to use. They are among the last intact ecosystems in the continental United States, and their value only grows as development pressure increases elsewhere.
Why do these lands matter? Here are a few reasons:
Clean water at the source. Roadless areas are the headwaters for countless Western rivers. Undisturbed forest soil filters and regulates water flow far more effectively than logged or roaded terrain, which is prone to erosion, sedimentation and landslides that degrade drinking water and salmon habitat for millions downstream.
Carbon storage and climate stability. Mature, undisturbed forests sequester carbon at rates young, replanted stands cannot match for decades. Keeping these forests standing is one of the most effective, lowest-cost climate strategies available to us.
Wildlife corridors and biodiversity. Roadless areas provide unfragmented habitat essential for wide-ranging species — elk, wolves, grizzly bears, native fish — that cannot thrive in the small, isolated patches left by road-building and clear-cutting.
Wildfire resilience. Contrary to the claim that roads help fight fires, a 33-year, nationwide analysis of Forest Service wildfire records found wildfire-ignition density is lowest in wilderness and roadless areas and roughly four times higher near roads, because roads bring people, and people cause the large majority of wildfires. The researchers concluded that building roads into currently roadless areas is likely to increase the number of wildfire ignitions, while also recognizing that existing roads can provide tactical advantages for fire management.
Recreation and rural economies. Hunting, fishing, hiking and backcountry tourism generate sustained revenue for gateway communities, revenue that doesn’t disappear once a resource is extracted. In Oregon, tourism now supports nearly twice as many jobs as the entire forest sector (roughly 123,000 versus 62,000), even though forest-sector jobs pay a higher average wage. Unlike a timber sale or a mine, a roadless watershed keeps paying dividends every year, indefinitely.
Irreversibility. A road, once built, fragments habitat permanently. A clear-cut forest may take over a century to functionally recover as old growth. Timber and extraction profits are immediate and short-lived. The ecological cost is measured in generations.
On the economic argument:
Timber sales and mineral leases in these remote, steep and difficult-to-access areas are frequently subsidized. Since 1975, taxpayers have spent more than $5 billion building logging roads into national forests, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office found the federal timber program cost taxpayers over $2 billion between 1992 and 1997 alone.
Meanwhile, the “standing” value of these forests — clean water, carbon storage, flood control and recreation — rarely appears on a ledger, yet it is worth far more over time than the one-time revenue from cutting or mining.
Protecting these roadless areas is not an obstacle to prosperity. It is an investment in the ecological systems that all prosperity ultimately depends on: clean water, stable climate, healthy soil and the wild places that renew us.
I ask that you stand with the legacy of the 1970s roadless designations and continue to defend these lands from new road construction and resource extraction, for the sake of the ecosystems, the communities and the generations who will inherit what we choose to protect.
