America’s last wild forests — the towering old growth that takes centuries to grow and minutes to fell — are facing their most serious threat in a generation. The federal government is moving to tear down the single rule that has shielded them since 2001, opening tens of millions of acres to road-building, logging, and development.
The rule that kept the wild wild
The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule bans new road construction across roughly 58 million acres of national forest. Because you can’t run industrial logging without roads, that ban has worked as a firewall protecting some of the most intact wild forest left in the country. It survived two decades of lawsuits and multiple administrations — until now.
What’s happening now
The rollback has moved fast, on several fronts:
- In early 2025, an executive order targeted Alaska’s forests for development, followed in March by a national order directing a sharp increase in timber production across federal land.
- In June 2025, the Secretary of Agriculture announced plans to rescind the Roadless Rule outright, dismissing it as an “absurd obstacle” to development.
- The U.S. Department of Agriculture then opened a formal process to repeal the rule nationwide — and to strip the Tongass National Forest of its protections specifically.
- A federal spending package now requires a roughly 78% increase in timber sold from national forests over the next nine years, with new tariffs on imported lumber adding pressure to cut at home.
The Tongass — and it doesn’t stop there
The crown jewel at risk is Alaska’s Tongass, the world’s largest temperate rainforest: 17 million acres of old-growth Sitka spruce, hemlock, and cedar, some of it standing since the Middle Ages. It shelters salmon runs, brown and black bears, bald eagles, and Sitka black-tailed deer, and it is one of the most carbon-rich forests on Earth. Stripping its protections would reopen millions of roadless acres to logging. But the Tongass is only the headline — the same rollback exposes treasured forests across the country, from George Washington National Forest in Virginia to the Superior National Forest and Boundary Waters in Minnesota and old-growth stands throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Sidestepping the rules meant to protect us
What makes this especially dangerous is how it’s being done. Protections built through years of public process are being unwound through emergency orders and rushed rulemaking — including an unusually short public comment window that gave Americans only weeks to weigh in on a decision affecting forests the size of a small country. Environmental review under bedrock laws like NEPA is being compressed or sidestepped, and the cuts are sold as commonsense forest management while the practical effect is to clear the way for the chainsaw. Conservation and tribal groups, led by organizations like Earthjustice, are challenging the rollback in court.
Why old growth can’t be replaced
A 500-year-old forest is not a crop. Old growth stores enormous amounts of carbon, filters the water that salmon and communities depend on, and provides habitat that exists nowhere else. Replant a clear-cut and you get a tree plantation — not a forest — and an ecosystem that took centuries to assemble is gone within a human lifetime, if not for good.
What we’re calling for
- Keep the 2001 Roadless Rule intact, with full protections for the Tongass and all designated roadless areas.
- Honest, complete environmental review — no emergency loopholes, no rushed comment periods — before any change to forest protections.
- Respect for the treaty rights and stewardship of the Indigenous nations whose homelands these forests are.
- A forest economy built on restoration, recreation, and sustainable management — not the liquidation of irreplaceable old growth.
How to help
These decisions move through public comment periods and the courts — and public pressure has beaten back Roadless Rule rollbacks before.
- Submit comments when the Forest Service opens them, and tell the USDA and your members of Congress to keep the Roadless Rule.
- Support the legal organizations fighting the rollback.
- Stand with the tribal nations and forest communities on the front lines.
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