Forest fires follow roads. The Trump administration wants to build more

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The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is rolling back a rule prohibiting logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests, including more than 4 million acres of federally managed forest lands in California.

The change could open some of California's most remote backcountry to new roads and development — even as U.S. Forest Service research shows that roads are a major source of wildfire ignitions in the state's national forests.

People start most of California’s wildfires, including on federal land — and it’s not just sparks from faulty power lines. Fires can start in many ways: A hiker might burn toilet paper in the backcountry, a hot tub might be miswired, or someone might drag a tow chain or pull a hot car onto dry grass.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who first announced the plan last year, said Tuesday that federal officials filed a proposal and environmental impact statement to rescind the rule in order to reduce barriers to managing fuels on public lands.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Rollins said in a statement.

But in California, the U.S. Forest Service’s own research points to a complication: Roads and the people who travel on them are known conduits for fire.

Scientists with the U.S. Forest Service mapped 26 years of fire ignitions along roughly 850 miles of roads in the Angeles, San Bernardino, Los Padres and Cleveland national forests. All of them, according to a Forest Service map, also contain roadless reaches.

The mapping effort revealed that nearly two-thirds of the fires people caused in these forests sparked along roadsides — places where people, the sparks they create and fuel in the form of flammable, invasive grasses often converge.

California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said that the roadless rule has not hindered California’s forest management and prescribed fire efforts.

“In fact, more than 240,000 acres of roadless land in California have undergone vegetation treatments to reduce wildfire risk and protect nearby communities,” Crowfoot said in a letter to Rollins last September. He cited an example in the Caples Creek roadless area south of Lake Tahoe, which he said helped shield communities during the 2021 Caldor Fire.

Crowfoot warned that opening these areas to construction, timber harvests and mining “may put rural communities at increased risk of fire and significantly increase firefighting costs of California.”

A national pattern

It’s not just California. A recent peer-reviewed study by scientists with the Wilderness Society reported earlier this year that wildfire ignitions in national forests across the country are four times more likely near roads. From 1992 to 2024, wildfire ignition densities were lowest in designated wilderness areas, followed by roadless areas. They were highest within 50 meters of roads.

“Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development and therefore more ignitions is also not a wildfire solution and never will be,” said Josh Hicks, the Wilderness Society’s director of conservation campaigns.

The Trump administration said rescinding the rule doesn’t automatically mandate timber harvests or building roads. Instead, it would leave decisions to local national forest managers.

“Future land management decisions would be based on natural resource conditions and needs and informed by states, tribes and communities,” the Agriculture Department’s announcement said Tuesday.

Why more roads?

Environmental advocates are skeptical, especially in light of the Trump administration's executive order last year calling for an “immediate expansion of American timber production.”

The roadless rule also already allows for roads to be constructed or rebuilt to protect health and safety from the threat of wildfire.

Retired U.S. Forest Service chiefs, including one who served during the first Trump administration, said in an opinion piece last year that repealing the rule threatens key watersheds and wildlife.

“Why build more roads when the agency, strapped for resources, can’t even maintain the ones that already exist?” they asked. “Let’s not forget the reasons these backcountry areas do not have roads. The easily accessible high-value timber from national forests has been harvested. What little that remains in these roadless backcountry areas is difficult and costly to access.”

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, blasted the Trump administration for moving forward on rescinding the rule during a catastrophic fire season following the Trump administration’s slashing of the U.S. Forest Service. He vowed to fight it in Congress.

“The Trump administration is at again, selling out our public lands to corporate polluters, ignoring the overwhelming objections of the American people,” Huffman said in a statement. He added: “It’s reckless.”

The public has until midnight on Sept. 21 to comment.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.