The Trump administration is trying to kill a rule that protects millions of acres of national forests | Charles F Sams III

The bipartisan Roadless Rule is under fire. It’s just one way Trump could make our public lands unrecognizable

Modern roads in the United States will last for decades. And yet the damage they cause in our national forests is immediate.

Since 2001, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected more than 58m acres of national forests from development, barring road construction and timber harvests. The policy came to be with huge bipartisan support; almost 2 million people submitted comments on it, the majority of whom championed the protections.

Now the US secretary of agriculture, Brooke L Rollins, is working to rescind the “Roadless Rule”, opening up public lands – our lands – for logging and other development to the highest bidder.

This is just one prong in the Trump administration’s campaign to remake public lands in ways that most Americans would find unrecognizable.

I know these places well. I served proudly as the director of the National Park Service for four years, beginning in 2021. In the short time since I stepped down, the administration has fired hundreds of park superintendents, rangers, tour guides, biologists, archaeologists and other staff from one of the most popular agencies this country has ever known. In 2025, more than 320 million people visited national parks systems alone, and millions more spent time in national forests.

The broad aim of this travesty is to disconnect everyday citizens and visitors from their relationship to these lands, from our history, and from our collective ownership.

That runs counter to everything I value, not only as a NPS director, but as a youth growing up on the Umatilla Indian reservation in north-eastern Oregon.