This is a series on Roadless Rule misinformation. Read: Part 2 Here | Part 3 Here
With the announcement by the US Forest Service that they plan to rescind the Roadless Rule, we are seeing a flood of social media posts from anti-access advocates encouraging their supporters to oppose rescinding the rule. These posts aren’t designed to invite a responsible public debate or scrutinize the actual effect of this 25 year experiment in non-management of our forests. Instead, they are designed to repeat the same lies frequently enough and loud enough that they persuade public opinion through brute force— not persuasion.
This isn’t advocacy. It’s an aggressive form of coordinated social programming. Based on the response we’ve seen, it’s clear there are very powerful and well-funded sources who do not want to see America actively manage and utilize her natural resources.
We acknowledge that our position on the Roadless is biased by our mission: to protect your access to well-managed public lands. We encourage everyone to research these issues for yourself.
However, in the course of our work of analyzing hundreds of land management agency planning actions every year, we encounter a lot of information that we believe can help you better understand issues like the Roadless Rule and sort through a lot of the bad information that we are encountering.
We will be covering the most misleading claims over the coming days, and we hope you will join us in using this information to challenge these falsehoods when they appear online. We need your voice to make a difference on this issue! To be notified about the next drop, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter.
Roadless Rule Rescission: Do More Roads Cause More Fire?
One of the primary reasons we support rescinding the Roadless Rule is because roads are used to access forests for thinning projects, vegetation treatments, prescribed fire, and fire containment. All of these activities promote healthier forests, and recreating in healthy forests is far more enjoyable than recreating in apocalyptic burn scars of forests obliterated by catastrophic fire.
Whenever, we raise this point, we get a flood of comments of people who point out that more roads create more access for more people, who start more fires.
This is an important point, that we should all carefully consider. By default, we wouldn’t concede that roadlessness and banning people from public lands is the answer, but human caused fire is a problem that can be reduced by education, enforcement, and innovative management.
Nevertheless, we wanted to dive into this issue to understand it better, and this is what we found.
First of all, the “study” that is being circulated to draw this conclusion is this document:
The document isn’t actually a study, it’s a synopsis of an unpublished study conducted by Greg Aplet. Greg Aplet is an employee of The Wilderness Society.
The second red flag is that we don’t have access to the actual study. We can’t scrutinize the methodology. The only thing we know for sure about this study is the rigid bias of the organization who paid for it and is now spreading it to drive a policy outcome that conforms with the policy bias of The Wilderness Society. This is called agenda driven science, and it’s purpose is to influence public narratives and policy – not advance human understanding of the natural world.
The main claim of the study is that more wildfire ignitions start in the proximity of roads, and so roads cause more wildfires.
By focusing on ignitions, the study diminishes the correlation between road density and the actual impact of wildfires. The total acres burned is a much more meaningful data point than the number of ignitions.
A separate study published by the much less biased Congressional Budget Office in 2022 emphasizes the importance of this distinction and undermines the claims made by the Wilderness Society.
According to the CBO, “Over the past three decades, the number of wildfires each year has declined somewhat, and the total area affected by those fires has increased substantially.”
Since the Roadless Rule was enacted the number of wildfire ignitions has slightly declined, however the average number of acres burned has almost doubled!
CBO confirms this conclusion in the study by finding, “Most fires are caused by human activity, including negligence, arson, burning debris, and malfunctioning equipment. From 2001 to 2021, human activity sparked 86 percent of wildfires, and lightning accounted for the remaining 14 percent. (Fire authorities identify the ignition source of a wildfire as either human-caused or lightning-caused.) Fires ignited by lightning tend to be larger and in more remote areas, accounting for 59 percent of the acres burned over the 2001–2021 period.
These findings are bolstered by another published and peer-reviewed study conducted by Ganapathy Narayanaraj and Michael C. Wimberly. Their study is somewhat dated and was limited by its focus on one the eastern Cascade Mountains in Washington State. Nevertheless, they found, “The mean size of human-caused wildfires was 16.7 ha and the range was 6646 ha. Human-caused wildfires accounted for 8% of total acres burned (222003 ha). The mean size of lightning-caused wildfires was 187.7 ha and the range was 45,734 ha. Lightning-caused wildfires accounted for 92% of total acres burned.”
While it is true that there is a correlation between road proximity and fire ignition, it is also true that fires ignited near roads are extinguished rapidly and contained to a much smaller size than fires that burn catastrophically through unmanaged roadless areas and wilderness.
These studies confirm our position that the Roadless Rule has been a failed experiment in mismanagement and that roads are critical tools for maintaining healthy forests.
Read more…
More to come— so stay tuned! But don’t delay letting your representatives and the USDA know that you support rescinding the Roadless Rule. You can do both via the form below. Comments are due September 19th!
