The Roadless Rule

In the January of 2001, Bill Clinton, in his last days in office, made a monumental decision that would affect conservation and environmentalism for the next two decades. On January 12, 2001, Bill Clinton, with his Secretary of Agriculture, issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule which would be constituted over all the National Forests in the United States. The Rule, when fully implemented, would eventually protect over 58.5 million acres of wilderness areas in the United States. These areas would become known as Inventoried Roadless Areas. The Rule would then prevent any further development or degradation in these inventoried areas.

However, like many regulations passed, the Roadless Rule did not come without controversy. Since Clinton instituted the Rule so late, much of the responsibility for taking care of the Rule fell into the hands of the Bush Administration. After a 60 day period, the Administration finally decided to implement the Rule. This, though, came with a twist. The Bush administration, being Republicans and generally anti-regulation, decided that they were going to amend the Rule. This decision was in part developed thanks to a great legal uprising that had been pushed forth by the State governments of Idaho and Alaska.

The amended version that they created included a State Option which allowed the States to petition the Government to allow them to take part in the Roadless Rule either fully or in some form. The Administration thought that this would be a great compromise because it allowed the more conservative states to stay out of the Rule and the more liberal states to take part in the Rule. They, however, did not foresee the great backlash the would ensue from the environmentalists. Environmental groups, over the years that followed, struck back and were able to win a series of cases at the local, state, and federal level that got the original Rule, the one without the State option, back in place. By 2010, much of the original Roadless Rule was back in place. The only state that did not fully implement the Rule was the State of Alaska.

Alaska, since the start of the Rule, had worked to remove the Rule from its two National Forest, the Tongass and the Chugach. For most of the first decade of the 21st century, they were able to get their way. They were able to use the legal system to exempt themselves from the Rule. Yet, by the turn of the decade, the tide began to shift. In 2011, the Alaska District Court vacated the original 2003 decision to exempt the Tongass. This was immediately challenged and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by a 2-1 decision reinstated the Roadless Area exemption in the Tongass. Nonetheless, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided that they were going to rehear the decision. They ruled that the exemption was illegal and that the Tongass will have the Roadless Rule. In 2016, the State of Alaska made a last-ditch effort to get the Supreme Court to hear the matter but it failed.

By the end of 2016, much of the controversy had ended and the Roadless Rule was fully in effect. Besides a few recent efforts by Alaska's Senator Murkowski, the Rule larger in the last two years has gone unopposed and people have seemed to move on. Overall, the Rule does a lot of good by protecting some of the last wildlands that we have remaining in our country. Over the next few years, it will interesting to see if the Trump administration tries to launch a surprise attack to dismantle the Roadless Rule.


A River in the Tongass National Forest- The largest remaining Temperate Rainforest in the World


Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho


https://earthjustice.org/features/timeline-of-the-roadless-rule
https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/nezperceclearwater/recarea/?recid=16476