The Trump administration has opened a comment period starting this Friday, August 29th, in order to rescind the 2001 National Roadless Rule. That regulation largely limits road construction and logging on national forest wildlands in most of the United States. The US Department of Agriculture opened up a comment period today. Comments are accepted until September 19th.
This is essentially another version of a public lands selloff. This administration wants to sell out the public’s forests by opening remote, protected areas to logging, roadbuilding and other development that will forever change the character of these forest that belong to all of us.
With more than 9 million acres of roadless national forests, Idaho is the wildest state in the Lower 48. Our mission area boasts roughly 1.5 million acres of roadless forest, including iconic wild landscapes like the Great Burn, Meadow Creek, Mallard-Larkins, and Weitas Creek roadless areas.
As of today, the 2008 Idaho Roadless Rule, a (much weaker) regulation that governs those roadless areas in Idaho, has not been targeted by the Trump administration. However, we strongly encourage commenting on this important change in federal policy. The roadless rule is our best (and perhaps only) chance to protect wild national forests during this administration.
We need you to stand up for these irreplaceable wild places. Here are three basic talking points to inform your comment:
The 2001 Roadless Rule has limited development of wild public lands in most of the wild forests of the US. These are invaluable places for wildlife and backcountry recreation.
Roadless areas should have greater protections under federal regulations, not less. Existing loopholes in the Idaho, Colorado, and National rules can and should be closed.
The roadless rule should be re-written to include Idaho and Colorado, which are currently governed by much weaker regulations.
As always, Friends of the Clearwater recommends writing an individualized comment, not copying and pasting from organizations (including us!). Telling your personal story helps make your case. Have you hiked the Great Burn in Montana? Have you fished Weitas Creek in Idaho? Have you hunted in Nevada’s Ruby mountains?
Whatever is most important to you, whether it’s abundant wildlife, carbon-sequestering forests, or revitalizing solitude, is what is most important to say.
Where to comment: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2025-16581
What are roadless areas?
Roadless areas are undeveloped national forest lands. They are essentially wilderness areas without congressional protection. Roadless and unroaded wild places have been in massive decline for the last century, caused by insatiable expansion of human infrastructure and exploitation. Today, roadless areas make up roughly 60 million acres of the national forests of the United States, or 2.5% of the entire country. The majority of those areas are located in Alaska and the Western half of the lower 48. Idaho has 9 million acres of roadless public lands, the most of any in the lower 48.
Wild, undeveloped areas on other public lands (managed by the BLM, USFWS, or NPS) are administered differently.
How do roadless areas protect wildlife?
Roadless areas are crucial for many kinds of wildlife. Elk herds benefit from the habitat security of places far from easy access by automobile or OHV. Several wild carnivores are essentially roadless-dependent, like grizzly bears and wolverines. Roadless watersheds are some of the most productive for cold-water fish in the region, like the salmon-bearing Meadow Creek, which is nearly entirely roadless.
How do roadless areas affect climate change?
Roadless areas are critical to reduce climate change impacts. American forests absorb roughly 1/3rd of the annual fossil emissions of the country. Many old-growth forests, which keep millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries or millennia, are found in roadless areas. Unlogged forests consistently store more carbon than logged forests.
Why are Idaho and Colorado not included in the 2001 Rule?
Roadless areas in Idaho and Colorado are currently governed by two state-specific federal rules. These rules are much more lenient for road-building and timber production than the national rule. Both states should be included on a stronger version of the national (2001) roadless rule.
Why is the Trump administration targeting wild public lands?
The Trump administration’s view of public lands is that they are only a source of raw materials for corporations. In order to hit the ludicrously high timber targets on the national forests, roadless areas would have to be opened up to much greater logging, roadbuilding, and development.
Are roadless areas wilderness?
Roadless areas are "wild" but not congressionally-designated wilderness areas. They are essentially unprotected wildernesses. Most congressionally-protected wildernesses were once inventoried roadless areas (IRAs). A small number of roadless areas are recommended for protection as wilderness by the US Forest Service, most are not.
How would NREPA change roadless protections?
The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) would permanently protect 20 million acres of roadless country as wilderness in six states. It has been introduced as recently as this year: https://allianceforthewildrockies.org/nrepa/
Is the 2001 Roadless Rule a law?
No. The Roadless Rule is a federal regulation that was created at the end of the Clinton administration. It is not a law, but is subject to the same standards of public process that other federal actions are. The Trump administration, more than any other, has a general disdain for the public process and legal accountability for the government and corporations.
Why is logging in roadless areas an issue?
Roadless areas tend to be in very steep, high elevation areas, like the more remote parts of the Rocky Mountains. These areas are very expensive to log, and timber projects on public lands almost always come at a loss to the tax-payer. The costs of fixing roads is immense (the Forest Service is the largest road manager on the planet, managing some 380,000 miles of active roads, roughly five times more mileage than the US interstate system), and the damages to wildlife are diverse and chronic.
Read the full documents and comment online here:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FWS-R6-ES-2024-0186/document
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is changing direction on grizzly bear management in the Northern Rockies. This proposed rule would guide management and set rules on human activities throughout the region.
Biologists and wildlife activists have long advocated for grizzly bears to be managed as one large population instead of isolated islands in the national parks. One connected population of a minimum of 3,000 to 5,000 grizzly bears is necessary to prevent extinction long term, especially with the onset of dramatic climate change.
We do need a large, connected population of bears in the Northern Rockies, which this rule claims to do.
Unfortunately, this rule aims to create a distinct population segment (DPS) for only the Northern Rockies, meaning that restoration of grizzly bears in the Wasatch Front, Southern Rockies, Sierra Nevada, and elsewhere is off the table. Any grizzlies outside the Northern Rockies would lose ESA protections. Even this DPS boundary is political and arbitrary—Oregon's Blue Mountains and Utah's Uinta Mountains are left off.
It doesn't. The proposed rule uses the same five "recovery areas" that are in place today, which do not connect. The proposed rule acknowledges the need for connective habitat, but such places should be explicitly included in recovery area boundaries. Additionally, because of the 4(d) change, grizzly bears outside of recovery zones would have less protection.
The recovery areas in Idaho in this proposed rule are the same as they currently are. This includes part of the Selkirk, a portion of the Cabinet-Yaak, a portion of the Greater Yellowstone, and the so-called Bitterroot Ecosystem, which is the combination of the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return Wildernesses.
No! They are political boundaries that would allow grizzlies in some wilderness and little else. There are better alternatives to these that are based on habitat quality, while still remaining on public land.
The map below, created by Mike Bader and Paul Sieracki, shows what a larger Bitterroot Recovery Area would look like. This map includes important habitat outside of wilderness like in the Nez Perce-Clearwater, Payette, Boise, and Custer-Gallatin National Forests.
Section 4(d) of the Endangered Species Act details regulations on harming threatened and endangered species. It also, controversially, allows for limited "take" or harm of a species under certain conditions.
In this version of the rule, state agencies and livestock producers would be granted broad authority to kill grizzlies they deem a threat—even when non-lethal deterrents haven’t been exhausted.
The rule could lead to:
No! Grizzly bears have no fear when food is near. The primary conflict between humans and bears is because of unsecured (human) food, trash, and livestock. This usually results in humans shooting the bear. Even as a protected species, 85% of grizzly bear mortality is human caused.
Creating serious standards for food and livestock in bear country is critical to reducing conflict, something that this proposed rule does not seriously address.
This version of the rule has problems. Public opinion swayed the USFWS before, and we can do it again. It's important to urge for strong protections for wildlife that are based in science and can make coexistence possible.
Friends of the Clearwater and our allies have created an outline for what better grizzly bear management in the Northern Rockies might look like.
You can read that PDF below!
New-vision-for-grizzly-bear-recovery-in-the-northern-rocky-mountains-FINAL
The US Fish and Wildlife Service is seeking comments on how the agency should direct grizzly bear recovery in the Lower 48. Read the PDF at the bottom of this page to inform your comments!
Make your comment here. The comment period closes Monday, March 17th.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Demographic information like population and inhabited range in this article refer to grizzly bears in the Lower 48 States unless otherwise stated.
Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) are one of the great symbols of the American West, synonymous with wildness and might—and they are still threatened.
Since the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) first listed them in 1975, they have also been synonymous with Western politics, and their legal status continues to fuel debate.
In early 2025, thanks to many of your comments, the USFWS decided to keep grizzly bears listed as threatened in the Lower 48. They also announced a process to redefine how they manage the species in the Northern Rockies.
That announcement (and the accompanying rule-making process) has good and bad elements. Ultimately, their primary aim is to prevent grizzly extinction. So how do you do that?
When a species is listed as threatened or endangered, federal agencies often create rules and regulations to protect them. The Endangered Species Act is explicit about the scope of these protections and clear about the imperative to prevent extinction for every species.
However, removing protections, or "de-listing" has been less obvious. This ambiguity has plagued wildlife policy for decades, including for grizzly bears.
Some argue that grizzlies are already recovered, and so should be removed from protections. If you compare grizzly bear populations and occupied range between 1960 and present day, they argue, there are some reasons to be optimistic; populations in the Lower 48 have increased by 50% and grizzlies have expanded their range.
This is misleading. Presenting the information this way sets the baseline at 1960, when grizzly bears were nearly extinct. Prior to Euro-American settlement, there were an estimated 30,000 grizzly bears in the Lower 48.
Instead of comparing today to when grizzlies were almost extinct in 1960, let's compare today to when they were abundant in 1750. Using the same numbers, grizzly bears have increased from 2% of their 1750 population... to 3%.
Is a 1% increase "recovery"? Is that "restoration"? Is that reason enough to open up trophy hunting?
This context is vital to any discussion about grizzly bear recovery. For the last several decades, Western bureaucrats and their corporate constituents have argued that grizzly bears are fully recovered and must be removed from the Endangered Species List. Their reasoning relies on the baseline of 1960, when grizzlies were nearly limited to only Glacier and Yellowstone National Park.
It also ignores that humans are still responsible for 85% of grizzly bear fatalities while they are currently protected.
The best available research suggests that grizzly bears need a connected population of 3,000 to 5,000 in the Northern Rockies to ensure their survival for centuries to come.
Isolated populations of grizzly bears pose long-term risks. In Yellowstone National Park, whitebark pine trees, an important food source for grizzly bears, have all but died out. In Glacier National Park, berry production has become erratic with climate change. In the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak ecosystems, roads, recreation, and black bear hunting have kept those populations extremely small and genetically at risk of in-breeding.
Because of these pressures, as well as lethal "management" by wildlife agencies, it is very unlikely that the current population and distribution of bears is sustainable in the long run.
The vast wildlands of Central Idaho could provide a massive benefit to grizzly bears. One Montana grizzly bear researcher calls it the "grizzly bear promised land". This vast wild country could support hundreds of bears, and act as a genetic link between grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (near Glacier Nat'l Park) and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Simply put, there is no "recovery" of grizzly bears in the Lower 48 until Idaho gets its bears back.
Claiming that a few hundred grizzly bears living outside national parks constitutes full recovery is bogus. Likewise, aiming for 30,000 grizzly bears in the American West is impossible (at least without a lot of zoos).
So what is a meaningful goal for grizzly recovery in the Northern Rockies?
Friends of the Clearwater, along with a diverse coalition of public lands and wildlife advocates, has outlined what that might look like. We've condensed a lot of science and policy into a vision for the sustainable management of grizzly bears.
This vision aims for meaningful policy in the Northern Rockies to ensure grizzly survival. Some of the more tangible points include:
And more. It's time to stop advocating for below the "bear minimum". We need to think big, act fast, and make sure that real protection can become law of the land.
You can read our vision in the embedded PDF below, open it in a new tab, or download it at the bottom of this page.
New-vision-for-grizzly-bear-recovery-in-the-northern-rocky-mountains-FINALThe Nez Perce and Clearwater National Forests have been under the same management plans since 1987. Very soon, they may be managed under a combined new plan that would strip or weaken many protections for wildlife and habitat.
Friends of the Clearwater
PO Box 9241
Moscow, ID 83843
(208) 882-9755
