Loggers say Roadless Rule repeal won't solve their biggest challenges
"The claim that they're going to do all this new road building and logging in roadless areas on behalf of wildland firefighters, and make it more efficient for them, is just a big lie," Ingalsbee says. "Not in our name you don't."
Ingalsbee fears that punching even more roads into these forests will lead to more human-caused wildfires, which have been rising steadily for decades. But he doesn't think any of this is really about wildfire prevention or creating more logging jobs.
"What's driving a lot of Trump's executive orders for public lands management is not real economic drivers. I don't hear industry clambering for this," he says. "It's more ideology."
For Ingalsbee, the U.S. government is just racing to open up as much of the West as possible so industry can squeeze out maximum profits on timber, oil and coal.
Firefighters doubt repeal of Roadless Rule will help with wildfires
Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, believes the Trump administration’s real focus is timber, and the agriculture department’s messaging about wildfire reduction and firefighter access is deceptive.
“Not in our name,” Ingalsbee told Lookout Eugene-Springfield during the event.
“From the perspective of wildland firefighters, this (repeal of the roadless rule) is not going to make it safer, more efficient to go suppress wildfires. It’s going to be just the opposite. It’s going to increase their burdens, risk, and hazards. “
Learn from the Burn
“That was kind of the take-home message from the Forest Service: Be afraid, be very afraid,” Ingalsbee says. “That’s when they first divulged that, in their minds, a burned forest is no longer good for spotted owls.” He says that since the Forest Service no longer viewed the roadless area as a habitat for the endangered spotted owl, it set its eyes on timber sales. “It’s literally at that moment the lights went on in my brain and I said, ‘No way.’”
Is a Perfect (Fire) Storm Brewing for 2026?
“There is a lack of will at the very top, especially in this administration,” says Ingalsbee. “It’s part of an ideology to make prescribed burning impossible so it makes commercial logging inevitable.”
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As thousands of Oregon homes burned to rubble last month, the state’s politicians joined the timber industry in blaming worsening wildfires on the lack of logging.
The Forest Service Not Only Loses Money Logging, It Makes Fires Worse
In the middle of yet another big wildfire seasons, some reporters finally listened to fire scientists when they quoted people like Dr. Higuera, an associate professor of fire ecology at the University of Montana, stating that climate change is resulting in making big wildfire seasons the new normal.