For years, my job was to think about our national forests on a timescale of decades. Not just the forest in my own backyard — the rugged Salmon-Challis in Idaho — but forests across a dozen western states. The kind of places many people plan their summer vacations around: the Bridger-Teton in Wyoming, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem; or the Lolo in Montana, one of America's most recognized western landscapes.
As a biologist on a specialized planning team within the U.S. Forest Service, I helped develop long-range management blueprints called “forest plans.” These documents guide how a national forest is managed for 15 years or more: where people can go for remote or developed recreation experiences, where timber can be cut, where wildlife gets room to roam. There is something quietly hopeful about forest planning. You are, in effect, shaping the experiences of people and species who will be out in these woods in 2040 and 2050 — trying to ensure the places they inherit will still be whole.
Planning meant juggling competing uses for the same landscape, trying to craft a forest's future that could hold them all at once. It's slow, deliberate work — I analyzed hundreds of at-risk species, thinking through how to keep their habitat intact while balancing other valid uses of the forest. To some people, it may sound like bureaucratic drudgery. To me, it was a dream job.
In the spring of 2025, I left it.
I didn't leave because I stopped believing in the work. I left because I could see, from inside the agency, what direction the wind was shifting. I sensed that my job was about to pivot away from building a resilient future for these lands to dismantling the safeguards that took decades to develop. I think of it as “unplanning” — the systematic dismantling of protections carefully built over decades. And I worry about what fills the space left behind, much as I’ve watched rush skeletonweed spread across the landscape, crowding out the native sagebrush steppe.
In August 2025, the Trump administration announced its intent to repeal the Roadless Rule — a bedrock 2001 regulation that protects roughly 45 million acres of national forest from new road construction and industrial logging. I understood what this loss would mean for our forests, and the gravity of it kept me awake at night.
The administration's stated reasons for wanting it gone were a bit of a grab bag: maximizing timber and energy production, reducing wildfire risk, returning decision-making to local officials and a general desire for "flexibility." None of its reasons held together particularly well. The Roadless Rule protects mostly remote, steep country with low-value timber and a long, well-documented history of landslides and erosion. In other words, it protects exactly the places where we already learned, the hard way, that roads and logging don’t belong.
A year later, in August 2026, the administration's argument swiveled. The U.S. Department of Agriculture released its proposed rule and draft environmental impact statement — the next formal step toward eliminating the Roadless Rule outright. This time, the pitch was largely about forest plans, the same documents in which I specialized. The agency claimed that the "land management planning framework ensures each land management plan addresses similar conservation objectives as the 2001 Roadless Rule was intended to address."
I wish that this were true. It would be a relief to believe that the forest plans I loved working on could simply absorb this responsibility and carry on. But I know forest planning too well to believe it.
Forest plans matter, don’t get me wrong. They set out a vision for what a forest should look like and, in theory, steer projects toward that vision. But forest plans were never built to be a national conservation strategy. Every forest plan is its own, relatively small-scale document, shaped by its own local pressures, its own local politics and its own planning team working through its own set of tradeoffs.
That's precisely the patchwork approach the Roadless Rule was created to fix in the first place: the agency recognized the need to protect roadless areas consistently across the National Forest System. Trading one national standard for 126 separate, locally negotiated plans doesn't preserve those protections. It invites their incremental dismantling, forest by forest. Even the agency's own analysis seems to know this, acknowledging that "there is a great variation in how existing land management plans address inventoried roadless areas and the 2001 Roadless Rule."
There's a second problem, too: most forest plans are already old. By law, they're supposed to be revised roughly every 15 years. In practice, many have limped along for 30 to 40 years, built around science and climate assumptions that may no longer hold. Asking these aging documents to carry the entire weight of roadless-area protection isn't a serious plan. It's wishful thinking.
I don't have to speculate on what this looks like in practice. It’s already unfolding, insidious as cheatgrass.
The newly released Blue Mountains draft management plan, covering the Malheur, Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla National Forests in Oregon and Washington, is the first real test case for what forest management looks like without roadless protections. The results are stark. The draft plan would eliminate roadless-area safeguards outright, open most of these lands to road construction and timber harvest — including old-growth and salvage logging — scrap the road-density limits that keep elk and other wildlife secure and weaken the watershed protections that keep sediment out of salmon and trout streams. This is the unplanning I sensed was coming.
I keep thinking about the people I used to plan for — the ones who will walk into these forests in 2040 or 2050 expecting to find something wild. A forest that surprises you, where you might startle a moose while walking through willows along a stream. A forest where you hear the warbles of birdsong, and not just the invasive drone of heavy equipment.
We already ran the experiment of managing these places plan by plan, forest by forest, without a shared national standard. It failed, which is exactly why the Roadless Rule exists. It came out of one of the most extensive public engagement processes in Forest Service history, built on a broad, hard-won agreement that these lands are a national asset — one that deserves consistent, durable protection, not protection that rises and falls with each administration's priorities.
I left the agency because I didn't want to spend my career unplanning the forests I care so deeply about. But in some ways, I haven't stopped being a forest planner. I still think in decades. And when I think that far ahead, I don't want the future to be a forest that was incrementally degraded until there was nothing wild left to protect.
The public comment period on the Roadless Rule closed on Oct. 6, 2026. Over the past year, more than 1.6 million comments were submitted, with the vast majority opposing the repeal. This is a remarkable demonstration of how much Americans value these lands — support that has held steadfast in the 25 years since the Roadless Rule was first put in place. But the close of the comment period isn't the end: the administration still has to issue a final rule, and forests like the Blue Mountains are already showing what that could look like. Rather than proceed with repealing the Rule, the administration should heed the will of the public and keep roadless conservation protections in place for the decades ahead. These forests are too valuable and too vulnerable to be piecemealed away one plan at a time.
Keats Conley is a senior policy and planning specialist at Defenders of Wildlife. She resides in Idaho.
Author
