The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East’s last great forests

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station; and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region. When most people think about national forests, they imagine vast Western landscapes: Alaska, the Rockies, the Pacific Northwest. But millions of acres of federal woodlands dot the eastern half of the country, too. These great swaths of vibrant ecosystems have long been free of roads, protected by a policy called, appropriately enough, the “roadless rule.” That may soon change. Adopted in 2001 during the final days of the Clinton administration, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, as it is formally known, grew out of a realization within the U.S. Forest Service that it had built more roads than it could afford to maintain. Many were crumbling into streams, fragmenting habitat, and degrading drinking water, alarming even agency scientists. The rule barred road construction and logging in nearly 60 million acres of undeveloped national forest in 39 states. In the eastern U.S., these areas provide rare pockets of ecological and natural relief in a densely developed region. As the Trump administration moves to dismantle the policy and open those lands to logging and mining, the future of these forests — and the communities that rely on them — is in question. Read Next The Department of Agriculture, under which the Forest Service sits, argues the roadless rule limits its ability to reduce wildfire risk, maintain access for firefighters, and promote forest health. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has called the policy an “absurd obstruction” and “overly restrictive.” She said its repeal would give the Forest Service greater flexibility to protect woodlands and support rural economies. But conservationists argue the administration’s position is unsupported by science and ignores the importance of these relatively pristine expanses of forest. The woodlands play an outsize role in sheltering wildlife, supporting recreation, and protecting drinking water supplies to millions of people, as well as storing carbon to help fight climate change. “Roadless areas are a finite resource,” said Garrett Rose of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are our last best stretches of national forest land.” Even some former leaders of the Forest Service oppose the repeal. Four former chiefs, drawing on 150 years of collective experience, have urged the administration to preserve the rule. “Removing protection of these precious lands that belong to all citizens, rich and poor, would be an irreparable tragedy,” said Vicki Christiansen, who led the agency from 2018 until 2021. The policy safeguards about one-third of all national forest land. Ninety-five percent of it lies in 10 Western states where vast, contiguous forests remain the norm. East of the Mississippi River, however, the policy shields smaller, more vulnerable parcels. In Shawnee National Forest in Illinois, for example, just 4,000 acres are road-free; across the Southeast, the total is roughly 416,000.  The Trump administration began its repeal effort last fall with an unusually short 21-day public comment period — far shorter than the usual timeframe, which can be as long as 90 days. Still, it drew more than 220,000 responses, nearly all of them opposed, according to an analysis by the advocacy organization Roadless Defense. Most cited concerns about wildlife, tourism, and water quality.  Still, the administration plans to press ahead. The rollback is part of a broader push to expand logging and remake the nation’s second-largest land management agency. Last month, the Trump administration shuttered 57 of the 77 research stations the Forest Service operated nationwide, many of which studied the impacts of climate change, invasive species, and wildfires on woodlands. The shakeup included plans to move the agency headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah from Washington, D.C. and shutter nine regional offices.   Since his return to office last year, President Donald Trump has pushed federal agencies to intensify timber production, an effort that includes making it easier to use legal loopholes to fell trees. With the Department of Agriculture aiming to overturn the roadless rule this year, the debate is shifting from Washington to the woods — and to the communities living alongside some of the last protected forests in the East.  — Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco & Katie Myers The Garden of the Gods observation trail is seen from the Shawnee National Forest near Herod, Illinois, in March 2019. Patrick Gorski / NurPhoto via Getty Images Shawnee National Forest, Illinois A quiet stand in the woods against a warming world In the summer of 1990, John Wallace celebrated his 31st birthday by looping a bike lock around his neck and securing himself to a log skidder deep within Shawnee National Forest. He was among dozens of activists who spent 79 days occupying the woodland to stop the sale of its timber. U.S. Forest Service officers arrested him only after cutting him free with a blowtorch. The campaign, which drew national attention, helped secure an injunction on commercial logging and oil and gas drilling that ended in 2013. Still, the roadless rule continued to protect about 2 percent of the forest from harvest.   Thirty-five years after locking himself to that skidder, Wallace worries about what President Trump’s push to expand logging will mean for the land he loves. “The impact in the Shawnee is not going to be as profound as the impact in the forest out west,” said Wallace, who spent part of his career managing public lands in Carbondale, Illinois. “But make no mistake, the Trump administration is determined to open up our public land to industrial exploitation.” John Wallace walks through the Shawnee National Forest in 2026. He was among a group of activists who spent 79 days occupying the woodland to stop the sale of its timber.Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / WBEZ / Grist Shawnee stretches across the southern tip of Illinois, covering nearly 289,000 acres of steep hills, hardwood forest, and sandstone bluffs. Heavily logged a century ago, the forest has grown back unevenly, hemmed in by farms, power lines, warehouses, and small towns. Only a handful of scattered pockets of the forest, about 10,000 acres in all, are safe from pavement through the rule. The roadless areas in the park are vital to imperiled species like the cerulean warbler, the bird-voiced tree frog, and the Indiana bat. One tree can also absorb approximately 48 pounds of carbon dioxide each year — and many of these woodlands are at a stage when that process is at its peak. “Eastern forests are middle-aged,” typically between 80 and 120 years old, said Richard Birdsey, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and former U.S. Forest Service researcher. “That’s a period when they are optimally removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in biomass and the soil.”  Birdsey has spent decades studying the role forests play as carbon sinks. Woodlands offset more than 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, and a study he co-wrote in 2023 found that Eastern forests had reached only about half of their carbon storage potential. Left intact, they could continue accumulating it for decades, even centuries. Stopping all timber harvesting in these forests could absorb about 117 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2050. Accelerating timber harvest, as Trump wants to do, could increase emissions by a similar amount. Back on the ground in Shawnee, Wallace navigated the winding backroads, passing a patchwork of fields, power lines, and scattered homes that cut across the forest. “I can see national forest in my rearview mirror and there’s national forest up here on our left,” he said. “When we get close to the roadless area, we’ll be surrounded by national forest.” After missing a turn and backtracking onto a country road, he pulled into the modest cabin of his longtime friend Mark Donham. It’s tucked deep inside the Shawnee near Burke Branch, an expansive woodland ecosystem that fell short of the protection criteria of the roadless rule, but that the Forest Service still preserved from timber harvests due to its sensitive plant and water resources. Inside, Donham — who works at a grocery co-op across the river in Kentucky — stoked one of his wood-burning stoves, the home’s only source of heat, and unrolled a large map. “Down here and over, all of this up to here — all the way up to where that transmission line is — that’s the roadless area,” he said. Donham moved to the cabin with his late wife in 1980 and soon joined the fight against logging. “It’s almost 7,000 acres.” Outside, he led the way down a muddy, uneven path into Burke Branch, which is crisscrossed by a dense network of improved and unimproved roads, according to the forest’s 2006 management plan. Donham pointed out towering pines, one rising nearly eight stories. “And these aren’t even the biggest ones,” he said, gesturing farther down the trail toward even taller conifers.  His mood shifted as the path narrowed. Deep ruts from all-terrain vehicles marred the soil. Beer cans lay scattered about. “I’ve lived here 45 years,” Donham said, filling a white plastic bag with trash. “Other than it being abused by vehicles, nothing’s happened in this area. You can take off walking that way, go four or five miles and just be in the wilderness.” To Donham, the damage is a warning. Roads mean access — and access, he said, rarely brings good things. — Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco Water falls into a pool in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia. Tom Wozniak / 500px via Getty Photos Chattahoochee National Forest, Georgia  The fire risk on both sides of the road A narrow, heavily potholed dirt road stretches deep into the Chattahoochee National Forest outside the tiny north Georgia mountain town of Clayton — a moderate hike on foot, or a fun, if bumpy, ride on a mountain bike or all-terrain vehicle. But scramble up the steep slope to one side, through the leaf litter and scattered branches, and you’ll crest a ridge overlooking an expanse of woodland with no roads at all. Pines, oaks, and twisty mountain laurel roll down the mountainside. Off in the distance, another peak rises into the sky. It’s beautiful — and remote.  The Chattahoochee covers roughly 751,000 acres in the Appalachian foothills of northern Georgia. Just 7 percent of the forest, a tapestry of winding streams, steep ridges, and mixed woodland, remains free of roads. It feels vast and untouched — a rarity in the East. But that beauty comes with risk.  “If lightning hit one of those peaks and started burning, starting a fire, it would get a fair way before they could maybe do much about it,” said JP Schmidt, an ecologist with Georgia Forest Watch. That concern — access — lies at the heart of the U.S. Forest Service’s argument for repealing the roadless rule. Agency officials say that without roads, firefighters may struggle to reach blazes quickly, giving them ample opportunity to grow larger and more dangerous. In 2016, the Rough Ridge fire tore through 28,000 acres of the forest, underscoring those fears. “It was a fire that they were unable to keep up with,” said James Sullivan, also with Georgia Forest Watch. The blaze, which burned for about a month, threatened small mountain communities like Tate City and Betty’s Creek. Though firefighters defended those areas, “the rest of it burned on its own.” Allowing a fire to run its course — so long as people and homes are protected — isn’t necessarily a failure of forest management. It clears leaf litter, thins crowded saplings, and reduces the buildup of debris. “You’ve got all these fuels taken care of,” Schmidt said, “and there’s much less threat of a major fire again any time soon.” The untouched portions of Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest are beautiful, but officials say their remoteness comes with risks. Emily Jones / WABE / Grist It wasn’t always that way. The National Forest Service was founded in 1905 with aggressive fire suppression as a key policy. That began to change in the 1960s, and today some blazes burn themselves out under careful supervision. In fact, many public lands are managed with fire, a technique Indigenous peoples used for millennia to promote forest health. “Prescribed fire is one of the most effective tools for reducing hazardous fuels and maintaining healthy, fire-adapted forests in the Southeast,” said Laura Fitzmorris, a Forest Service spokesperson. Roadless areas make up only about a sliver of the Chattahoochee and are “generally small and interspersed with nearby communities, roads, and recreation sites.” Access, she said, is “one of many operational factors considered” in wildfire response. But access cuts both ways — because roads allow more than fire trucks in. “If there were more roads, there would be more access,” Schmidt said. “So people might start fires, purposely or accidentally.” Human activity is by far the leading cause of wildfires. From Virginia to Texas, people sparked 23,980 fires in 2024, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Lightning strikes caused just 809. Many of those fires start near roads, the result of cigarettes tossed from passing cars. Hot exhaust pipes or dragging tailpipes throwing sparks also are common causes. Hikers and campers can start them when they fail to extinguish campfires. And then there are those who intentionally start a blaze, using roads to easily get in and out. In all of these cases, said Sam Evans, the National Forests and Parks program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, “roads are the common denominator.” The roadless rule already makes an exemption for firefighting, and he called the administration’s argument that repealing it will make that job easier “malarkey.” “They’re trying to trick the American people into thinking that timber production is somehow making us safer from wildfire,” he said. “It’s not.”  — Emily Jones A Vermont hiking path includes views of the Green Mountain National Forest on a snowy winter day in February 2023. Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images Green Mountain National Forest, Vermont A denuded swath of woodland hints at the future The snow crunched under Zack Porter’s boots as he wove his way to the crest of a small ridge in the thick of Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest. When he reached the knoll, he looked out at acres of denuded land and wondered aloud: “Why?”  It’s unclear exactly when it happened, but sometime between 2020 and 2025, loggers legally stripped away the maple, beech, birch, and ash trees that had stood here for more than a century. In their place grew prickly brambles that caught on Porter’s pants and left thorns in his socks. “I am blown away,” he said. Porter, who co-founded Standing Trees, a nonprofit that advocates for forests in New England, hadn’t visited the site since it was logged. “They turned this into a moonscape,” he said. He worries that more clearcutting may be coming. The U.S. Forest Service manages about 376,000 acres of Green Mountain National Forest, and this stretch — called Homer Stone — lies in the southern portion of that range. The government has labeled the 11,619-acre parcel as a roadless area, but because it wasn’t designated as such until after the 2001 rule took effect, it has remained ripe for what the Forest Service calls “early successional habitat creation.” “You have to get used to that with the Forest Service. There’s a lot of gobbledygook, a lot of names that kind of throw you off,” said Porter. “That’s shorthand for logging.”  The Forest Service has deemed roughly 81,000 acres of Vermont part of a “roadless area,” but only about 25,000 acres of that are projected by the Clinton-era rule. The other 56,000 aren’t covered, and the Forest Service has approved about 6,000 acres for logging. This is a preview, Porter said, of what would happen to protected trees across the country if the Trump administration scraps the Clinton-era protections. “The roadless rule is really one of the best tools we have to keep these public lands on a path to ecological restoration,” he said, staring at land covered in stumps, some of them 3 feet or more in diameter. The Forest Service maintains that cutting mature trees can help revitalize the forest by creating swaths of young, fast-growing vegetation that provide food and cover for songbirds, small mammals, and insects. Some ecologists, ornithologists, and conservationists support this approach, arguing that decades of fire suppression and development have reduced the amount of this habitat on the landscape. The trees in this patch of Homer Stone are, for the most part, now gone. With them, Porter argues, went irreplaceable ecological benefits. Less old growth forest means a smaller potential habitat for the American Marten, which is endangered in Vermont. It also means fewer shaggy bark trees, and the inevitable fallen deadwood, that make great homes for northern long-eared bats. A dearth of cover can also increase runoff, exacerbating Vermont’s growing problems with flooding.  Porter is also troubled by how these trees came to be cut. The Forest Service announced its plans to log during the first Trump administration, but didn’t provide exact locations. The public comment before cutting began was brief, Porter said, and led only to superficial changes. For example, some of the proposed roads were re-labeled “temporary,” though Porter said it is unclear what, in practice, distinguishes them from permanent roads.  Tracey Forest runs the Spirit Hollow silent retreat in southern Vermont and told the local news outlet VTDigger that she wasn’t aware of the public comment periods. Foresters appeared in the forest surrounding her land in 2024, and trees began to fall last year. She has since had to relocate parts of her business. “To place such a giant, loud, factory operation right at our border — it seems unconscionable to us,” Forest said.  Driving deeper into the Homer Stone forest, the evidence of logging is easy to find: stumps where trunks have been hauled away, a hilltop where light pours through thinned trees. Then, abruptly, the forest resumes, largely undisturbed. On either side of this invisible line, the trees are ecologically identical — but those beyond it were inventoried before 2001, and so are shielded from logging. “There’s little to stop the logging of this place, except for the roadless rule,” said Porter, crossing into protected land, onto a path lined with sturdy Vermont hardwoods. “Look how easy it would be for someone to drive a logging truck in here.” — Tik Root

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