The amendment that would strip protections from nearly 45 million acres of national forest cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on June 10. Trout Unlimited’s president stood with Senate Democrats the following day to oppose it.
Trout Unlimited President and CEO Chris Wood joined Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) at a June 11 press conference in Washington opposing the latest Republican effort to repeal the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The amendment was attached the previous day to Senator John Barrasso’s (R-Wyo.) Wildfire Prevention Act and cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on a party-line 11-9 vote, sending the amended bill to the full Senate floor. The repeal would lift protections from nearly 45 million acres of national forest, as MidCurrent reported last week.
Wood Pushes Back
Wood, described in the senators’ release as an architect of the Roadless Rule, made the angler stake explicit. “If you hunt and fish, roadless areas are the most valuable landscapes we have in America,” he said. He cited what he called a statistic that “absolutely blew me away” during the rule’s development: inventoried roadless areas account for roughly 2 percent of the American landscape but provide habitat for 25 percent of the country’s threatened and endangered species. Wood also pushed back on the wildfire rationale driving the amendment, saying that “a lack of roads has not stopped fire prevention measures” and that 80 percent of fires are started by people, with 80 percent of those starting within a half mile of a road. He testified against a parallel House repeal effort earlier this year.
A Conservation Tool
Heinrich called the fight “one of the major conservation battles of this Congress” and described the rule as “probably the most flexible conservation tool that we have,” responsive to both wildfire management and habitat protection. Wyden, who according to the Bend Bulletin attempted to strip the repeal language from the underlying bill before it advanced, told reporters that “no one is asking for the repeal of the roadless rule that protects 58 million acres of iconic national forests and outdoor spaces.” His committee effort failed; the amended Wildfire Prevention Act now awaits a floor vote.
The Senate track runs parallel to an administrative effort by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which announced its intent to rescind the rule in June 2025. According to the senators’ release, 99 percent of public comments submitted during that rulemaking favored keeping the protections in place.
