The DU Lounge

In June, the Trump administration announced that it intended to rescind the roadless rule, and this month it instituted an accelerated three-week public comment period, set to end on Sept. 19. What had taken two years to put together would now be put asunder in three weeks.

The most important thing to understand about President Donald Trump’s endeavor is that every new road blazed into a previously unroaded landscape is a disaster for wild landscapes and the creatures who live in them. In two decades reporting on the exploitation of American public lands, I’ve found that the most important first effort in destruction of habitat and the fouling of clean air and water is the building of a road.

A road cut through wilderness is a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It doesn’t matter if it’s paved or unpaved, though a paved road always brings more traffic. Then again, it doesn’t matter whether a road is heavily trafficked or lightly used. The very presence of a road alters the environment around it. This is especially true in high-altitude forested landscapes, such as the La Sals, as roads divert the natural downstream flow of precipitation, producing heavier runoff and more erosion that disrupts the hydrology and sedimentation of nearby waterways. Road runoff carries the poisons that automobiles drip from their chassis. The grinding engines and the sound of rattling metal terrify wildlife. From the tailpipes comes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, heavy metals. You get more roadkill. You get more hunting and poaching. Roads scare off the cougars and wolves and bears, who learn that death awaits on roads.

Reed Noss, one of the premier conservation biologists in the United States, writes that the cumulative effect of roads blazed into previously unroaded ecosystems is “nothing short of catastrophic.” For the sake of wild things, Noss recommended that most existing roads on public lands “should be closed and obliterated.” He especially liked the idea of keeping out road-attracted humans who “bring along their chainsaws, ATVs, guns, [and] dogs,” who “harass virtually every creature they meet, and leave their mark on every place they visit. The more inaccessible we can keep our remaining wild areas to these cretins, the safer and healthier these areas will be.”