How to Permanently Rescind the Roadless Rule

The Trump administration is about to get rid of the Clinton administration’s Roadless Rule, a regulation categorically banning the construction of roads across whole swaths of federal land. The recision’s public comment period ended last week. It doesn’t look like any comments in opposition were persuasive. (Are they ever?)

When it became clear that Al Gore would not be certified as the next President, the Clinton administration put the implementation of this rule into high gear and got it across the finish line in January 2001. Any future Democratic president can reinstate it.

Here’s a modest proposal on how to make that impossible: the Trump administration should give away as much federal land as possible to Native Americans. Does that sound crazy? No, I’ll tell you what’s crazy: the federal government owning land for the purpose of preventing its productive use.

I got this idea when watching Governor Brown oppose the sale of Oregon’s Elliott State Forest to a consortium of Oregon tribes. Why would she and other folks given to ritual land acknowledgements oppose such a sale? The tribes might log their property to support their people.

This made me realize that even giving the land to those tribes for free would have been a net benefit to the entire state when the consequence of government ownership is to deny development. The same holds true at the federal level, but on a bigger scale.

Sure, the federal government should own some land for military bases and other specific uses, but we’d all be better off if, say, the Warm Springs Tribe owned Mt. Hood National Forest. They wouldn’t erect sweeping rules preventing roads from being built. They would generate greater value out of that land for this country than the bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of the Interior is allowed to allow.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.