This week, a Washington, D.C., district court rejected the state of Alaska’s latest attempt to scrap a 16-year-old rule that protects 50 million acres of wild national forests across 37 states.
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted by President Bill Clinton in 2001, protects the integrity of national forest wildlands by prohibiting damaging development, including commercial logging the construction of most roads. The rule was created for good reason—huge areas of our national forests have been logged, many of them clear-cut, and by 2000, the U.S. Forest Service was maintaining close to 400,000 miles of roads, more than the country’s entire interstate highway system.
LINK (via: NRDC)
