Roadless Rule Attack in the Senate

[wowzers]

I'm happy to see that example. Thanks. I'm going to do more digging to see where the subsidy data comes from and if it's accurate or not.

I added a few thoughts after you responded.

 

[Marbles]

There's a terminology distinction here. Fire-adapted forests need fire to burn off the duff and brush on top of the soil that starts choking things out, but not burn so hot or so high that it gets into tree branches. That's why conifers drop their lowest branches as they grow, leaving feet of nothing but hard-to-burn bark. Their seeds even are fire-adapted, with a wax coating that literally needs to be melted off by fire.

The "bare mineral earth" I'm referring to is a wildland firefighting rule - when clearing a fireline, you leave nothing but bare mineral earth that cannot burn or carry a smolder further underneath and into what you're protecting.

These fires that rage through unmanaged forests burn everything right down to bare mineral earth - the reason this is bad is because it destroys the topsoil. Especially the organic matter that fertilizes everything, and even more importantly, the fungal/mycological ecosystem that healthy soils require.

It essentially sterilizes everything, instead of refreshing it like normal fires would.

What does come back, at first, is deer food...and then it chokes off the landscape and makes it far harder for a healthy forest to return. The mycological ecosystems can take decades to recover - and that matters immensely for tree health.

It may vary by area. But the Swan Lake fire on the KP in 2019 was a "good" fire because it burned down to bare mineral earth in a large area (or so I have been told), which was needed from a moose perspective (you can find documents discussing the need for this that were published in 2010, so not a post hoc rationalization).

Forest growth cycles. Clear cut logging results in uninhabitable county at about the 40 year mark, worse than a hot burn does to my understanding. This logging and the lack of anyone cleaning up the land once the commercial value is extracted is one reason why POWs deer numbers have fallen off. That and can be logged, but it is not economically viable.

Logging old growth produces trees and forest that are not fire resistant in other areas. Where 600 year old Sitka spruce would be unharmed, younger trees and the small stuff that gets enough light to grow below them provide ladder fuels.

Looking at some research post Swan Lake, it looks like it is debatable if high burn severity is actually better, but an argument can be made that it is (at least in boreal forest environments) due to having frontier plant species reestablish at the start of the cycle, rather than regrowth from roots of the previous trees.

 

[wowzers]

I think it's worth bringing up again that there are 9000 miles of OHV trails within the Roadless Areas.

10 Things You Can Do In Roadless Areas - Trout Unlimited

Here are some things you might not know are possible in Roadless Areas...

www.tu.org

7. Off-highway vehicle (OHV) riding: Roadless areas provide a remote recreation experience for OHV users. 33 percent of mapped motorized trails on National Forest land across 12 western states are located within roadless areas, totaling over 9,000 miles of trails open to OHVs. That’s like riding from New York to LA three times

 

[Mescalito86]

As a former wildland fire fighter of nine seasons with experience on hand crews, hotshot crews and helitack, I can tell you that your statement is far from the truth. 85% of fires in 2025 were human caused fire and you go and open up another 5.5 million acres to motorized vehicles, this is only going to add to the problem. Everything thing from unattended camp fires, no spark arresters, dragging chains down the road, you name it and if it creates a spark, it can cause a fire. And this notion of logging for fire breaks is complete BS. This is nothing more than Mike Lee’s selling point as another way to sell off and privatize public lands. Plus a scorched earth moon landscape left behind by an extremely hot fire doesn’t promote a new healthy forest the next year. It takes decades for the soil to recover if it hasn’t been washed away by flooding and slides the next spring. Sure fire is good for the forest’s ecology, but that is why wilderness fires are typically not suppressed unless they begin to threaten life and property. However human caused fires are nothing more than a waste of tax payer money, lives lost when a fatality occurs on the fire line, habitat reduction, and anything but natural. This is why the Roadless Rule is important.