Utah Governor Gary Herbert has petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a “Utah-specific Roadless Rule” to replace the 2001 Roadless Rule that prevents building new roads in wild areas of national forests.
The petition claims that new roads are necessary to reduce wildfire risk but it seems related to a conservative agenda pushing so-called “salvage logging” in order to avoid environmental reviews. The Sierra Club calls Utah’s request “a thinly veiled effort to increase development of these areas, under the guise of wildfire mitigation, with wholly unfounded scientific claims and virtually no public transparency.”
Save Our Canyons says in the past 15 years fewer than 10% of Utah wildfires were in roadless areas.