THRESHOLD CONVERSATIONS
Ben Goldfarb
[00:00] INTRO
AMY: Last June, the U.S. the Secretary of Agriculture announced that the Trump administration intends to repeal something called the “Roadless Rule” — a policy implemented in 2001, which protected some of the Forest Service’s wildest lands from logging, mining, and road-building. The Roadless Rule has been instrumental in preserving millions of acres of public lands, and if it’s repealed, it will have a big impact on the people and the animals that live in and around these places.
Author Ben Goldfarb examined the impacts of road and roadless areas in his 2023 book, Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. In it, he wrote, “Roadless areas are kingdoms through which grizzlies can wander without fear of bumping into hostile humans, where salmon can spawn without their eggs being choked by mud.” Now, with those roadless areas under threat of losing protections, I wanted to talk with Ben about why our Forest Service lands already have so many roads, and what building more would actually mean for wildlife and for people.
And Ben is just one of those ecological thinkers I want to talk to in general for Threshold Conversations. In addition to roads, Ben has written a book about beavers, and now he’s working on one about fish. Running through all of his work is a deep curiosity about how both people and animals change the landscapes around us, and what happens when our respective engineering projects collide.
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AMY: Ben Goldfarb, welcome to Threshold Conversations.
BEN: Thank you Amy.
AMY: Ben, I’d like to to start with a few lines from your book that really struck me: “on a zoomed out map of America, forests appear as green blocks, mostly unmarred by interstates, creating the illusion of roadlessness. No impression could be more wrong. You could make it to the moon on Forest Service roads and most of the way back.” I think people who don't necessarily go into our national forests on a regular basis would find this really surprising, because I think we do have this idea that, you know, it's all just like green stuff that's kind of roughly the same. And it's all kind of untrammeled, wild spaces. But it's definitely not the case when it comes to the Forest Service lands. How did it get this way? Why do we have so many roads in the national forests?
BEN: I think that the history of Forest Service road building really begins with good intentions in a lot of ways, right. The Forest Service was established in the early 1900s. And, you know, there were these huge tracts of land that this brand new agency is responsible for managing. And pretty soon all of these early rangers, people like Aldo Leopold and Elers Koch get out there. And so building roads was part of comprehending that landscape. You know, there are some great memoirs by early rangers who talk about building roads so that we can care for the elk and the trout fisheries and fight fires and remove beetle infested trees, that sort of thing. So, you know, roads were first this form of stewardship, I think, in the minds of many early Forest Service professionals.
And they were also a form of recreation as well. In the early 1900s, of course, you have this explosion of automobiles, this brand new technology that's taking over the American landscape. And, you know, people need places to drive, right? One of the very early backers of the National Park Service was the American Automobile Association. Because building roads into the forests is a way of catering to this new recreation class of motorized tourists. Western National Parks were a form of that. And so were National Forests. So that's, I think, where a lot of the early roads come from, is this kind of joint purpose of forest stewardship and forest recreation.
And then over time, logging becomes the dominant form of road building in National Forests, especially after World War Two. There's this explosion of construction in the United States. All of these, you know, returning soldiers, the suburbs are being built, a lot of the private timberlands in the US have been picked pretty clean. And so National Forests become this critical timber supply for this burgeoning wave of construction. And so, you know, lots of timber companies basically build thousands and thousands of miles of roads of their own, from the 1950s really through the 1970s was kind of the peak, and in many cases, the Forest Service was actually paying those private timber companies, effectively, to build roads. So they were private companies building roads on public land to access a public resource. So when you go to a place, you know, like the Bitterroot and see tracts of forest where it looks like, you know, those timber companies must have driven to every tree, that's a legacy of that mid 20th century logging road construction boom.
AMY: One of the things that I found really provocative, in a good way, about your book Crossings, was the way that it really inspires us to think about roads from all these different angles. It's heart wrenching and fascinating to read about what a road is if you’re a pronghorn or a mule deer. What does a road mean to an animal that lives in the forest? And what does it mean to have space where there isn't a road?
BEN: Every species experiences a road a little bit differently, right? Of course, animals have very different sensory capacities and different levels of comprehension of what a road is. Sometimes scientists will lump animals into different categories based on how they experience roads. You've got animals that you might consider avoiders like grizzly bears or the classic avoider, right? Grizzly bears are really intelligent. They know that humans and human infrastructure means trouble, and they'll just steer clear of roads. Generally even really rural roads with very little traffic. Which is why roads are so fragmenting of grizzly bear habitat.
Whereas you know, an animal like a frog or a salamander that's migrating from its upland forest habitat to its wetland breeding habitat, you know, they don't necessarily know that a road and traffic means trouble. And so they're just going to blithely hop across any bit of pavement they see and get crushed in the process. So, you know, grizzly bears are pretty fragmented by their own behavior and their avoidance strategies. Frogs and salamanders and toads and turtles are fragmented by the fact that they're really susceptible to becoming roadkill.
And for example, roads are really inimical to bull trout, These fish that require really pristine, cold, clear flows. And when you have roads dumping sediment into bull trout streams, that's not a place that bull trout can thrive, right? One of the really remarkable findings that comes out of many years of road ecology literature is that for so many species across so many taxonomic groups, the most important variable determining whether they can thrive in a given piece of habitat is the road density. And that's different reasons for different critters. But roads mean trouble for all of them.
AMY: Just speaking for myself, when I'm getting out on a hike, as soon as I can't hear a road anymore, I start to feel like, okay, now I'm actually out there. Now I'm in something a little wilder. And I've really been thinking about this lately because I just spent the last two years researching and reporting about sound and listening and the impact of noise for our most recent season of Threshold. So can you talk a little bit about how The Sound of Roads influences wild animals?
BEN: When you think about the impacts that roads have on nature, the introduction of noise pollution is one of the most profound ones. Right? There's this really famous experiment that was conducted in Idaho, the Phantom Road Experiment. And basically what those researchers did is they recorded traffic noise in Glacier National Park. So not I-90, right? Not some hugely trafficked Interstate highway, but Going-to-the-Sun Road, a road through a national park. And then they played those traffic recordings in an unrelated area of a forest in Idaho. And what they found was that migrating songbirds avoided that area. And the ones who did stick around were actually in worse body condition. Right. Because if you're a songbird who has to listen constantly for the sound of hawks’ wings or a bobcat creeping through the underbrush, right? But all of a sudden, you can't hear those signals because they're drowned out by traffic noise. You have to look around instead. And every second you're looking around for predators is one that you're not foraging on insects or berries. Right. So roads have all of these really subtle non-lethal effects that nevertheless impair animals lives.
AMY: Yeah. In our lives too, we're finding out exposure to road noise is actually really bad for our health.
BEN: I've come to think, because I, you know, read the literature around road noise pollution, that it's really one of the great unsung public health crises of our time, right? And I know you guys touch upon this in the show, but road noise elevates our blood pressures and cortisol levels and risks of stroke and cardiac disease. I mean, there's an amazing study in Paris that basically found that, controlling for all other variables, people who live in the quietest places live three years longer than people who live in the noisiest neighborhoods in the city.
So road noise is taking millions of years off of our collective lives, you know. Silence and quiet generally is this incredibly rare, precious commodity in our modern society. And I think that gets to a lot of the value of these roadless places that they're some of the last reserves of quiet and of silence. And I think that's a big part of why people love experiencing them and care about protecting them.
AMY: Yeah, I thought it was a really moving part of your book when some of those early proponents of building roads in the Forest Service, you know, a decade or two after, were like, ooh, I wish we hadn't done that. And that sense of once you put the road in and the noise comes and the impacts come, it's not impossible to undo, but it's so much harder than just just leaving it untouched.
BEN: There's a really beautiful book, 40 Years A Forester by Elers Koch, who's an early Forest Service ranger in Montana. And he's one of those regret-stricken guys you talk about who, in his memoirs, looking back on this long, illustrious, decorated career in public land management and saying, you know, it was all kind of a huge mistake, or at least the road building component was a huge mistake. And he's got this beautiful line, which is basically that, you know, a road is an irretrievable fact. You've got the impact from the road itself, right? This little strip of infrastructure, but then you've got all of the land use changes that come with the road. I mean, what's going to follow new roads? It's clear cuts, right? Which have their own immense ecological impact, obviously. So, you know, the road itself is this form of change and degradation, but it also facilitates all of these other forms of change and degradation.
AMY: We’ll have more of my conversation with Ben Goldfarb right after this.
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[11:56] BREAK
THEME MUSIC
AMY: So Ben, can you just give us a thumbnail history of what the road this rule is and how it came about?
BEN: Yeah. So the roadless rule is the Forest Service rule that basically prevents new permanent road construction in about 60 million acres of Forest Service land, about 58.5 million acres, ultimately. And you know, the history of that rule really dates back to the 1990s, during the Clinton administration. Mike Dombeck, the head of the Forest Service at the time, you know, this sort of lifelong Forest Service biologist, he also worked as a fishing guide in his youth and had seen how road building really harmed the trout streams that he loved. So he was very cognizant of the impacts of roads. And when he ascended to the role of Forest Service chief, you know, he looked at the agency's ledgers and said, wait a second, you know, we've got close to 400,000 miles of road. We have something like an $8 billion maintenance backlog. We can't afford to manage the roads that we already have, you know, why would we go around building more? So he basically put a moratorium on new road construction.
The relatively new field of conservation biology was ascendant in the 1990s. And, you know, all of these biologists were beginning to recognize that, hey, large impact parcels of land that weren't fragmented by roads were tremendously important for grizzly bears and elk and wolverines and any species you might care about. And you know, these roadless areas were also really important for the protection of drinking water. So that was really where the roadless rule came from, was this recognition that, you know, these large, intact parcels of land are both endangered and ecologically crucial. And so, you know, in kind of the waning days of the Clinton administration in January of 2001, they implemented the Roadless Rule.
AMY: And what was the response at the time to the Roadless Rule getting enacted?
BEN: The response was overwhelmingly positive from the public. I think the proposal generated 1.6 million public comments, which was at the time, I believe, the most comments that any federal action had ever generated, certainly any federal conservation action. It was one of the first truly digital environmental campaigns in history, where all of these environmental groups, you know, basically put the word out, to their, their, their members. One weekend, there were so many comments submitted that they actually crashed the white House servers. So, you know, it's this hugely popular initiative, at least among the public. Certainly not every state was a fan. You know, Idaho, Wyoming bristled against it. You know, the Bush administration, once George W Bush took office, shortly after the road this rule was passed, basically tried to undo the rule over the course of many years. But, you know, it did survive all of these court challenges and remains in place, at least for now, today.
AMY: Yeah. So what is happening now? What is the Trump administration, or the Forest Service under the Trump administration, currently proposing
BEN: In June, the US Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, announced its intent to rescind the Roadless Rule. And, you know, there's a couple of reasons that they gave. The first is that it's necessary for fighting fires. The Trump administration claims that the inability to access some of these places prevents tree thinning and selective logging that would reduce potential wildfire fuel burdens.
It’s also part of this broader Trump administration push to dramatically increase logging on public lands. You know, Trump has called for a 25% increase in logging on Forest Service lands. And to accomplish that, you need lots of roads.
AMY: What do you think of those reasons that the administration has given for repealing the Roadless Rule?
BEN: You know, one of the things that we know from lots of research is that where there are roads, there are wildfires, right? Roads allow humans into the backcountry. And humans create fires, right? With our untended campfires and our hot mufflers and dry grass and, you know, when we go shoot our explosives and guns in the backcountry for the heck of it. You know, those are all potential ignition points, right? There's lots of research basically showing that more roads means more fire starts. And so I think the stated rationale of building roads to prevent fires is, potentially backwards. I mean, I've been reporting on this this summer and fall. And it's an interesting question like who, who wants this, exactly? Who are the, you know, the stakeholders who are really going to benefit? I've heard people, including former Forest Service administrators basically say, you know, look, there's not a lot of really valuable timber left out there. You know, we've taken a lot of it. And the idea of building new roads so we can dramatically increase logging. I mean, the timber just isn't there for that to make a whole lot of sense. I've heard other folks, especially, you know, environmental advocates, basically saying, no, you know, there actually are these big pockets of old growth still out there in places like the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington state. And the northwest still has plenty of old growth left. And building new roads, really is going to let the timber industry take out a lot of those big, super valuable, ecologically and financially, older trees. You know, you kind of hear conflicting answers.
AMY: Some analysis of the public comments that were submitted indicates that there is strong opposition to repealing the Roadless Rule. Do you have any sense of which way this is going to go, or if those comments are going to have any influence on this decision?
BEN: I certainly hope so. I mean, look, we've seen this kind of amazing coalition rise up around the protection of public lands before, right? Very recently, when Senator Mike Lee from Utah, tried to shoehorn a provision into the big, beautiful bill that would have, you know, sort of forced the sell off of millions of acres of public land.
There was this incredible coalition, everyone from, you know, traditional far left environmentalists to the hook and bullet crowd all coming together, you know, in support of the protection of public lands. And I think that's what we're seeing, with the Roadless Rule as well, is, you know, groups like Trout Unlimited or Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, you know, speaking up on behalf of this rule because, you know, where's the best trout fishing? Where's the best deer and elk hunting? It's these roadless places that we all love to access and recreate in. Aldo Leopold talks about the value of kind of slow recreation, of getting away from eroded areas and just being on foot or horseback in nature. And I think there is still this deep appeal of that concept in the US.
I also think it's important to remember that here in the West, we're fortunate in that we have access to these giant blocks of public land. But in the Midwest, in the East, there are roadless areas there as well. They're much smaller. They're more scattered. But, you know, if you live in New Hampshire or Vermont or Virginia or North Carolina, you know, your wilderness options are pretty limited. And, you know, inventoried roadless areas provide some of the best chances you have to, you know, get away from the din of traffic. And so, you know, it's not just a Western thing, it really is this truly national concern.
AMY: So I just need to own that I'm a person who likes to hike in our National Forests, and that means I use Forest Service roads quite a bit, and I'm grateful for them so that I can get out into the woods and then get away from the sounds of those roads. So there's a tension there between protecting wild spaces and facilitating access to them. And I'm curious how you balance those things in your own life, and how you think we should be trying to balance them societally?
BEN: Yeah, it's certainly a paradox, right? I mean, I look, I'm probably going to go drive some forest roads this afternoon and check out our changing aspen. Part of the reason that my wife and I live here in rural Colorado is because we love accessing national forests, of course. And how do we do that? On roads.
One important thing to remember about our forest roads is just how redundant they are. There have been studies performed by the Forest Service, basically finding that, you know, you could eliminate half of Forest Service roads in many places, even more potentially without changing access at all. Because we just have so many roads.
Look, you know, we want some roads on the landscape, right? We love our public lands. We love being able to access our public lands, you know, but we can really get rid of a lot of existing roads or close them without dramatically reducing our ability to visit these special places. And then, you know, I think the other important thing to remember is that we need to be honest about what our love of recreation means for nature. I mean, here in our little valley in Colorado, you know, we have places that are seasonally closed to human users for the sake of bighorn sheep migration or mule deer winter range. And I think just keeping the human footprint out of certain places, you know, I think I think that's also part and parcel of being a good steward of nature.
AMY: What's your favorite roadless area?
BEN: Last summer, my wife and I hiked a stretch of the Colorado Trail that went from Cottonwood Pass to Monarch Pass. You know, here in Chaffee County, so that's all through the Pike-San Isabel National Forest, and, you know, in the course of that hike, about 50 miles over 4 or 5 days, we passed through a bunch of different both inventoried roadless areas and congressionally designated wilderness areas. And, that stretch of trail is just, you know, so spectacular. I didn't hear or see a car for five days. And it was pretty glorious. So I'm really grateful for the roadless areas in our own backyard. And as one ecologist recently pointed out to me, you know, if you live in a town and you look up and you see mountains, those mountains are where your drinking water is coming from, and that drinking water is probably protected by a roadless area.
These roadless areas are not these remote, distant places necessarily. You know, lots of them are really close to us. And that's what makes them so special. They give us an opportunity relatively close to home, to have a true wild experience.
AMY: Public comment on the roadless rule is now closed after an unusually short period of only a few weeks. But the rule itself hasn't been finalized yet. The administration's next step will be a draft environmental impact statement, which will come out sometime in the first part of 2026. If you're wondering how repealing the Roadless Rule might impact public land close to you, look for a link to a map in the show notes for this episode. It shows all the areas currently protected by the Roadless Rule.
CREDITS
To learn more about Ben Goldfarb and his ecological writing, go to his website, bengoldfarb.com. Threshold conversations is produced by Sam Moore. Our music is by Todd Sickafoose. I'm executive producer Amy Martin. Thank you for listening and for considering making a donation to support this show at thresholdpodcast.org.