In Eugene, Trump environmental rollbacks already divide people; roadless forests could be next

At the summit of Mount June — which towers nearly 3,800 feet above Eugene and Springfield about an hour away — Chandra LeGue looks out on what she calls the cities’ backyard wilderness. 

Forest-covered ridges roll from dark green into pale blue, nearly blending with the hazy sky, broken only by the crags of mountains like Washington and the ice-capped Three Sisters.

LeGue has spent much of her time on peaks like this since she moved to Eugene, where she earned her master’s degree in environmental studies at the University of Oregon in 2001. 

That’s the year the U.S. Forest Service adopted the Roadless Rule, which prohibited road construction and timber harvesting on 44.7 million acres nationwide and 2 million acres in Oregon, including 8,000 acres in the shadow of Mount June, such as Hardesty Mountain and Sawtooth Rock in Willamette National Forest. 

“The roadless area is the last vestige of the natural forest that once grew and thrived throughout the Cascade foothills,” said LeGue, who works for Oregon Wild, the state’s oldest and largest nonprofit group that advocates for policies that manage old-growth forests without logging.

Through the 2001 Roadless Rule, areas typically larger than 5,000 acres were identified as undisturbed landscapes that provide endangered wildlife habitat, public drinking water sources and high-quality ecosystems. Unlike lands designated under federal and state wilderness acts, they were not given the same level of legal protection — meaning that an act of Congress is not required to reverse their roadless status.

“It could be undone by future policy, which is kind of where we’re at now,” LeGue said. 

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose department oversees the Forest Service, announced in June plans to rescind the rule, calling it an obstacle. The move aligns with President Donald Trump’s early executive order to “unleash prosperity through deregulation.” Now, a public commenting period is underway, with more than 78,000 submitted. 

The administration cites wildfire risk, saying that roads provide access to fight fires and carry out prevention work. A regional timber trade group supports the repeal for the same reason.

But LeGue — along with three other Eugene-based organizations, dozens of residents who submitted public comments, and their elected senators — don’t see it that way, asking for other means of addressing the wildfire crisis that don’t open up roadless areas. 

All sides in the debate invoke ‘conservation’ to support their positions. But the effort to repeal the Roadless Rule demonstrates distinct differences in what conservation looks like on public lands, the latest turn in an argument as old as the centuries-old conifers still standing. 

How did we get here? 

Oregon has long been a fire-prone landscape. 

Indigenous peoples, including the Molalla, Kalapuya and Klamath, understood this and stewarded the area in balance with fire. During fall, they burned the land to keep tall grasses from taking over, sustaining their way of life while keeping wildfire away from them. They often didn’t put those wildfires out, because they were part of the natural rhythm.  

Those practices ended when Indigenous people were forcibly removed from the land. In their absence came early 20th century federal policies that mandated fire suppression and logging projects that cut old-growth trees for harvests.  

The Wilderness Act of 1964 established a preservation system that authorized Congress to identify places that could be protected as wilderness. In the 1970s, the U.S. Forest Service inventoried and mapped large undeveloped tracts of national forest land. 

In the following decades came the “timber wars,” when tensions came to a head between timber companies and activists who wanted to keep old-growth standing for wildlife, specifically the spotted owl. 

The conflict became so extreme that the Clinton administration intervened and in 1994 came the Northwest Forest Plan, which redefined where logging could — and could not — happen on federal land. The division deepened between the groups, as economic turmoil for those whose livelihoods depended on the mills came in the wake of the plan. 

Then came the 2001 Roadless Rule, after a nearly two-month public comment period that drew 1.6 million responses, most in favor, according to the decision record in the Federal Register. The decision acknowledged a slight increase of wildfires could happen in the future. 

But in the last 25 years, climate change has intensified weather conditions, turning what was once a regular ecological process in the southern Willamette Valley into destructive wildfire events. Adding to the risk are a growing population and development in areas near overgrown forests. 

Now, the Trump administration and the timber industry have leaned into the need to address wildfire as a policy priority. The 2025 notice in the Federal Register about the repeal proposal states that rescinding the rule would allow for swift and immediate action that protects communities and infrastructure.

“It would allow local managers, as deemed appropriate and consistent with land management plans, to build roads and implement active forest management practices (for example, timber sales and thinning) in inventoried roadless areas,” the notice reads. 

Forestry at its own crossroads 

At the Eugene Science Center, members of the Springfield and Eugene chambers of commerce packed into the planetarium Wednesday, Sept. 10, to watch a 360-degree documentary about the future of Oregon’s timber industry. It explored themes that reckoned with past practices and addressed modern supply-and-demand issues. Among the solutions: the need for reliable roads in forested areas. 

A panel discussion followed, and it included Seth Barnes, director of forest policy at the statewide trade group Oregon Forest Industries Council. The council commissioned the film as part of their years-long campaign “For the Trees” campaign. 

“On private lands, we work really hard to keep our infrastructure and make sure that it’s maintained in a way that can be utilized for fire access,” Barnes said. “The federal lands, they struggle with that, because for years they’ve struggled with having enough money to maintain their roads.” 

The Oregon Forest Industries Council does not have a position on the 2001 Roadless Rule, as it focuses on private and state properties, and defers to the American Forest Resource Council for stances on federal policy. The resource council is a regional group that represents lumber manufacturers, forestland owners, and other product producers across the northwest region. It is in support of repealing the rule.

“The Roadless Rule is a rigid, one-size-fits-all and outdated policy that isn’t up for the challenges we face in 2025, namely wildfire,” said forest resource council spokesperson Nick Smith. “With the proliferation of insects and disease, we’re seeing these in forests, drought, climate change impacts, the Roadless Rule isn’t serving a conservation purpose, in our opinion.” 

For the council, conservation means “the wise use of natural resources” and restoring forests includes “thinning and selective harvesting.” Those approaches as a way to reduce wildfire are supported by some research at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry.

The college’s dean, Thomas H. DeLuca, testified in D.C. during a hearing Wednesday before the House Committee on Agriculture. He spoke for nearly five minutes about opportunities to increase timber production and reduce fire, but added that the Forest Service can’t deliver a science-backed, regionally tailored approach without people and resources to do the work. 

He also questioned the administration’s justification for repealing the Roadless Rule.  

“Using wildfire mitigation as the justification to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule is a distraction from where treatments are most urgently needed,” DeLuca said.

“Rescinding the rule also won’t significantly mitigate wildfire risk,” he continued, explaining reducing fire risk where people live should be the highest priority. “By contrast, dedicating scarce resources to build roads into steep backcountry for timber and fire suppression diverts attention from where it matters most.” 

If the rule is rescinded, areas would be governed under the Northwest Forest Plan, which guides national forest managers who oversee commercial logging contracts and decisions. 

The administration has yet to specifically explain how it would reduce fire risk through projects, a question an upcoming analysis could answer. Some elected leaders and their constituents are skeptical that clarity will ever come.

‘A divergence’ 

For many local wildfire policy leaders, including those who have worked on the frontlines as firefighters, they agree that reform is needed in federal land management. However, they say doing so without thorough research is reckless. 

Over the last few months, Oregon’s U.S. Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden have been critical of budget cuts and policies that they believe put people in danger during wildfire season. 

In a statement to Lookout Eugene-Springfield Thursday, U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle said the effort to repeal the Roadless Rule is “yet another clear example of the Trump administration gutting long-standing policies without any boundaries.”

“I’ve seen this administration take this haphazard approach time and time again. Instead of making a clear, science-based case for where changes might be needed, they are pursuing the wholesale rollback of hard-fought protections for our forests and public lands. I’m always open to honest discussion about land management, but this is not that,” she said. “I encourage Oregonians to make their voices heard.”

People in Eugene and Springfield are doing just that, though they were given a 21-day period to weigh in, until Sept. 19. 

As the first significant rain of the season fell Tuesday, about 15 residents gathered around a table with their laptops and tablets as if they were studying for a late-night exam, slowly making their way through the public commenting process — and a few pizzas. 

“Imagine Oregon’s forests as a pizza,” LeGue said. “The logging industry, over the last several decades, got to eat all but one of the slices of pizza. We’re being asked what is a fair way to share the last slice of pizza with them.”

Oregon Wild, Cascadia Wildlands, and Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology organized the event. They too, shared concern over wildfire but from a different perspective: The Roadless Rule could introduce more people and equipment that could trigger more ignitions.

Additionally, in their concept of conservation, mature and old-growth forests are the most resistant to fires. That’s why they believe places like Hardesty Mountain should not be logged, as some trees there are 250 years old. It’s a wild place that offers more than just timber value; it offers opportunities for recreation and the benefits that come from untouched tracts of land. 

And should a fire break out in a roadless area, those groups point to helicopters and smokejumpers who have accessed remote terrain like it before, without the benefit of roads. But proponents of repealing the rule believe that increasingly intense wildfires are best fought with boots on the ground accessing better roads — another division in what it means to protect land. 

“There can be (and is) certainly overlap and agreement on some of the things one might do, on the ground, that could meet both ends,” LeGue said. “But when the end goal is so different, there’s going to be a divergence.”

What’s next? 

People have until Sept. 19 to submit comments through the Federal Register. The U.S. Forest Service will then review them in preparing an environmental impact statement, which is meant to analyze how development could affect land, water, wildlife and communities. Then another public commenting period could open.