Dear NRDC Activist,

The Trump administration wants to open tens of millions of acres of national forests — including iconic lands like California’s Tahoe National Forest, Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, and important segments of the Appalachian Trail — to logging and other destruction. We need your help to mobilize massive opposition before it’s too late.

WHAT’S HAPPENING
Last year, we warned you that the Trump administration's U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was planning to gut the Roadless Area Conservation Rule that has effectively protected nearly 60 million acres of public forests for the last 25 years. Now, they are poised to advance this dangerous rollback. We must make our opposition heard.

Don’t wait: Send your message defending our forests from reckless logging.

WHY IT MATTERS
If the rollback is finalized, iconic public lands nationwide will be opened up to destructive logging and other extractive industries. Logging and roadbuilding would damage these breathtaking forests, their wildlife, and communities who rely on them for generations to come.

This is just one of the threats from the Trump administration to give away our public lands and waters — all to make corporations richer. The administration already rescinded the Public Lands Rule; over 200 million acres of America’s public lands are being put at risk of exploitation by coal, oil and gas, and other polluting industries. And the Trump administration is advancing its scheme to lease lands for oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Western Arctic and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s Coastal Plain, sacred to the Gwich’in people and vital habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds, and more. We cannot allow our public forests to be next on the chopping block.

WHAT WE ARE DOING
NRDC is considering all of our options to fight threats to forests, including going to court if necessary. We have been defending the Roadless Rule and the unrivaled forestland it safeguards for decades.

We will keep fighting, but we need your help. Thanks to supporters like you, we sent the Trump administration over 40,000 public comments last year opposing the rollback. But the administration is still pushing to open U.S. forests to reckless logging and road building.

We need to keep up the massive public outcry for our forests: Make your voice heard now.

WHAT’S AT STAKE
Rolling back the Roadless Rule and opening more of our forests to logging and roadbuilding would:

• Endanger wildlife: Forests are home to imperiled animals like endangered grizzly bears, wolves, jaguars, and salmon that NRDC has spent decades protecting. Roads and logging fragment wildlife habitat and cause dramatic declines in wildlife populations.
• Threaten clean water resources: Roadless areas provide clean drinking water for over 60 million Americans. Once roads are built, though, they fracture ecosystems and divert rainwater from its natural flow, increasing flood risks, causing more landslides, and polluting drinking water.
• Imperil recreation areas: Every year, millions of Americans explore awe-inspiring forests protected by the Roadless Rule to hike, hunt, camp, fish, climb, and paddle.
• Jeopardize mature and old-growth trees: The rule provides essential protections for old-growth forests across the U.S., like in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest — the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest and the nation’s largest old-growth forest.
• Worsen climate change: It takes decades to regrow large, mature trees that capture and store the most carbon. Yet these trees are often the most targeted for logging; if we lose them, we lose a crucial tool in fighting the climate crisis.

We cannot let our forests go without a fight. Send your urgent message opposing the Trump administration’s scheme.

Sincerely,

Garett Rose
Senior Attorney, Nature, NRDC