09/21/2025
Overturn and Rescind the Roadless Rule
I worked with my ad agency, Advantage Advertising in Lewiston, Idaho, help try to defeat the first round of the Roadless Rule by placing this ad as a full page color statement to Americans to reject the myopic, self-serving, fatally flawed, political effort led by Al Gore and enabled by Jim Lyons and Mike Dombeck. The Roadless Rule was wrong on so many levels.
We’d invested 20 years in a good faith effort to systematically build informed consent among Americans for multiple use management of our public forests. Frustrated and angry because everything didn’t go their way, key environmental groups backed by endless money from Patagonia, the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society, the Center for Biological Diversity and many others, found a useful tool in Al Gore to upend the rational planning process and silence any further conversation about our common and varied uses of our public lands.
Inside the Forest Service and the many groups who had expended time and effort to negotiate comprehensive agreements, forest by forest, about how to go forward meeting the needs of the greatest number of people in the long run. That moment when the Rule, forced down our throats in the most dishonest, egregious, cynical, ignorant, political, ham handed manner in our lifetime, I knew it would not, and should not, stand. We had only to wait for a friendly administration to do unto others what they had done unto us.
The pro forma comment period on rescinding the Roadless Rule ended at 11:59 PM on September 19. The environmentalists responded in the same old tired, fake, hail storm of manufactured comments and Ai emails. Only this time their hollow insincere efforts are not aimed at giving cynical politicians the political cover for a decision made before that process even started. Gore made the decision before he ever started the process, then ordered his willing agency heads to go through a sham process and make it look good.
In one stroke of his pen, Al locked up 58 million acres of our public lands without local conversations, without informed consent, and with no understanding of the chaos that would result from turning public land management into a voting frenzy, winner take all, where the most well-funded voices win. Yet, here we are. Now, the gavel has passed to a new administration with a long memory, an administration determined to right the excesses and wrongs of misinformed, disinformed, cheaters who thought only their voices mattered.
The comment period is over. Those 200,000 or so comments will be perused and filed away, and the Rosdless Rule will be thankfully and rightly rescinded. By launching land management planning in 1980 on America’s National Forests, we hoped to robustly engage all interested parties, haggle awhile, win some and lose some, and move forward. The process was almost immediately hijacked by smart cynical people who wanted only wilderness everywhere and no other uses. They were aided by an innocent law enacted to help veterans with lawsuits against the government. They stole it, not for a righteous cause or to help anyone, but to impose a strategic advantage over other people and groups. Even as others were negotiating in good faith, the environmental groups were lawyering up, fighting every action that did not conform to their destructive catechism of “preservation, period.” While others met to talk together and work out differences and compromises, the environmental cabals were there to stall and drag their anchor until their lawyers could stop a timber sale by some legally arcane means aided by their ideologically sympathetic judges chosen in specific circuits for a win, and its application to the whole country. They did it all with taxpayer dollars and billionaire dollars, and considered that the ends justify the means.
The tables have now turned. The means have risen against them.
There is yet much to do to disarm the cynical cheaters we inadvertently created trying to help veterans. Every interest should be able to sue to stop outcomes they don’t like, and they should spend their own money to do it.
In the meantime, the illegitimate Roadless Rule will be rescinded and we will return to local conversations about local needs for our National Forests, as it should be.
