While the proposal undergoes review, Mississippi's six national forests will still operate under the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, per the the U.S. Forest Service.
"The National Forests in Mississippi span 1.2 million acres, including 2,558 acres of inventoried roadless areas," the National Press Team for the Forest Service wrote in an email to MPB News, responding to an interview request. "All of those acres are located within the Sandy Creek area of the Homochitto National Forest."
That rule was developed after hundreds of public hearings as a way to manage, at the national level, around 58 million acres of undeveloped land within national forests. It prohibited timber harvesting and road construction, among other activities.
Repealing that rule could affect Mississippi's roadless areas, impacting things like recreation, clean drinking water and wildlife habitat.
"To take advantage of these rare public lands that we have, that's not to be understated, because that's certainly important for the economy and the state of Mississippi," said Louie Miller, state director of the Mississippi Sierra Club. "Everyone knows we're a state that has deer populations, turkey populations, that are harvested on an annual basis."
"That generates revenue for small counties, particularly in the Homochitto area; so these are things that should not be overlooked or marginalized simply to produce more timber."
Kristin Gendzier, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, says that repealing the rule could, more broadly, have a huge effect on the region.
"Southern roadless areas: they're 2% of all we have in the country, but we've got over 120 million people living in the South," she said. "It almost makes the stakes higher for us. It's a scarce resource and there are a lot of people relying on it, both for things like drinking water, and also for outdoor recreation and economies built on them."
The USDA says tossing the rule will give local forest managers more discretion with building roads in national forests, particularly focusing on how that could help fight wildfires.
"For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities," Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in a statement.
The 2001 rule already includes some exceptions to its regulations. And, Gendzier says that more roads could increase the risk of fires.
"The Forest Service knows this," Gendzier said. "There's new research that came out recently confirming that wildfires are four times more likely to start near roads than they are in roadless forests."
Miller said other measures by the USDA put a damper on fighting wildfires, too.
"It rings hollow: if they were serious about addressing wildfire crisis then they would not have dismantled the U.S. Forest Service in a way that has decimated the personnel by reducing...the workforce by fifteen percent," Miller said.
The proposal highlights the need to prevent wildfires in Western U.S. states in particular. Miller said while there are more roadless areas out West (something the USDA notes as well), much of that region may not be dependent on forestland for drinking water the same way the Southeast is.
"These lands are very important to be protected because of what they provide for watersheds, for drinking water," Miller said, with forests helping naturally filter that drinking water and providing over half of available drinking water for around 14 million people in the South.
"Obviously, the West part of the country is more impacted given the acreage that they have and cities like Denver and others have drinking water that comes from these mountain areas."
In its proposal, the USDA argues that previous acts — like the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974 and National Forest Management Act of 1976 — are sufficient for managing resources within affected areas.
"The reason that the Forest Service in the late 90s, early 2000s, decided to create and adopt the Roadless Rule is that they saw how necessary it was," Gendzier said. "They needed, as an agency, to take a big picture look."
"We were losing track of some of our remaining wild areas, and the Forest Service already had a road system it couldn't maintain: so the Forest service decided, 'let's create this rule.'"
Last week's official filing with the Federal Register has already garnered over 13,000 comments. Public comment on the proposal is open until midnight on September 21.
