This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization, as well as WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station; and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.
On a foggy winter day by the banks of the South Mills River near Brevard, North Carolina, outdoor guide Heath Cartee kicked at a bit of loose dirt and watched it fall into the frigid water.
“They can’t even keep up with what they got,” he said. “See my point? That’s silt. It goes into the river.”
He stood on what had once been a road, long abandoned and leading to a footbridge broken and tangled by Hurricane Helene. The river and surrounding 8,600-acre tract are part of the state’s 172,000 acres of inventoried roadless forests. Over the years, Cartee has seen many decaying Forest Service roads crumble into waterways, filling riffles and rocky creekbeds with sediment where salamanders, trout, and other aquatic life lay their eggs and live out their lives.
“Those interstitial spaces don't exist anymore, and therefore that life doesn't exist anymore, and it begins to sterilize the river,” Cartee said.
At first glance, South Mills looks a lot like other forests in Western North Carolina — rhododendron, mountain laurel, a gentle trail on a former logging road. But Cartee would rather spend time there than in nearby Pisgah National Forest, which he says has been degraded by too much access and development. Without places like South Mills, Cartee says, people would lose the chance to understand what a real wilderness is.
“How do you explain what chocolate cake tasted like if they’ve never tasted it and it doesn’t exist?” he asked.
South Mills is one of 32 roadless areas within the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests of Western North Carolina. This stretch runs for nearly 12 miles along the river adjoining Pisgah. Reaching the best fishing holes means strenuous hikes and multiple stream crossings — work that, for Cartee’s clients, is part of what makes the trip worthwhile.
This area, along with 416,000 roadless acres across the Southeast and around 2 million across the country, is protected by a unique federal law — one that may soon be repealed.
A contested rule
Adopted in 2001 during the final days of the Clinton administration, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, as it is formally known, grew out of a realization within the U.S. Forest Service that it had built more roads than it could afford to maintain. Many were crumbling into streams, fragmenting habitat, and degrading drinking water at a rate that alarmed agency scientists. The rule barred road construction and logging in nearly 60 million acres of undeveloped national forests in 39 states. In the Eastern U.S., these areas provide rare pockets of ecological and natural relief in a densely developed region.
The Trump administration began its repeal effort last fall with an unusually short 21-day public comment period — normally, public comment periods can be as long as 90 days. Still, it drew more than 220,000 responses, nearly all of them opposed to rescinding the rule, according to an analysis by the advocacy organization Roadless Defense. Most cited concerns about wildlife, tourism, and water quality.
Still, the administration plans to press ahead. The rollback is part of a broader push to expand logging and remake the nation’s second-largest land management agency. Last month, the Trump administration shuttered 57 of the 77 research stations the Forest Service operated nationwide, many of which studied the impacts of climate change, invasive species, and wildfires on woodlands. The shakeup included plans to move the agency’s headquarters to Salt Lake City from Washington, D.C., and shutter nine regional offices.
Since his return to office last year, Trump has pushed federal agencies to intensify timber production, an effort that includes making it easier to use legal loopholes to fell trees. With the Department of Agriculture aiming to overturn the roadless rule this year, the debate is shifting from Washington to the woods — and to the communities living alongside some of the last protected forests in the East.
The Department of Agriculture, under which the Forest Service sits, said the Roadless Rule limits its ability to reduce wildfire risk, maintain access for firefighters, and promote forest health. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has called the policy an “absurd obstruction” and “overly restrictive.” She said its repeal would give the Forest Service greater flexibility to protect woodlands and support rural economies.
However, even some who once led the Forest Service oppose the repeal. Four former chiefs, drawing on 150 years of collective experience, have urged the administration to preserve the rule. “Removing protection of these precious lands that belong to all citizens, rich and poor, would be an irreparable tragedy,” said Vicki Christiansen, who led the agency from 2018 until 2021.
Cartee was born and raised in the Carolina mountains, and his concern for the woods that blanket them goes beyond his personal love of wildlife. It speaks to his livelihood. He runs Pisgah Outdoors, leading people on multi-day fishing trips in the South Mills River wilderness, far beyond the lights and noise. Many clients return year after year, catching trout, bass, and other species that rely on these remote watersheds.
Outdoor recreation is an essential to the economy of Western North Carolina, contributing as much as $4.9 billion annually. The hunters and anglers paying a lot of that money, at least half of it through licenses and taxes, tend to lean conservative. But the Trump administration’s call to repeal the roadless rule has spurred many of them to action.
“People want to have that challenge of, “Hey, I hiked eight to 10 miles, camped out, and came out with these birds, this trout, and one of the most amazing deer I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Jordan Linger, a bowhunter and representative of the nonpartisan advocacy organization Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. The group has made their displeasure with the proposal known — Linger said that as many as 600 people have called the organization and said, essentially, “Hey, this isn't going to fly with us.”
Roadless areas and wildfires
Elsewhere in the Southeast, advocates aren’t buying the administration’s firefighting argument.
A narrow, heavily potholed dirt road stretches deep into the Chattahoochee National Forest outside the tiny north Georgia mountain town of Clayton — a moderate hike on foot, or a fun, if bumpy, ride on a mountain bike or all-terrain vehicle. But scramble up the steep slope to one side, through the leaf litter and scattered branches, and you’ll crest a ridge overlooking an expanse of woodland with no roads at all. Pines, oaks, and twisty mountain laurel roll down the mountainside. Off in the distance, another peak rises into the sky.
It’s beautiful — and remote.
The Chattahoochee covers roughly 751,000 acres in the Appalachian foothills of northern Georgia. Just 7% of the forest’s tapestry of winding streams, steep ridges, and mixed woodland remains free of roads. It feels vast and untouched — a rarity in the East. But that beauty comes with risk.
“If lightning hit one of those peaks and started burning, starting a fire, it would get a fair way before they could maybe do much about it,” said JP Schmidt, an ecologist with Georgia Forest Watch.
That concern — access — lies at the heart of the U.S. Forest Service’s argument for repealing the roadless rule. Agency officials say that without roads, firefighters may struggle to reach blazes quickly, giving them ample opportunity to grow larger and more dangerous. In 2016, the Rough Ridge fire tore through 28,000 acres of the forest, underscoring those fears.
“It was a fire that they were unable to keep up with,” said James Sullivan, also with Georgia Forest Watch. The blaze, which burned for about a month, threatened small mountain communities like Tate City and Betty’s Creek. Though firefighters defended those areas, “the rest of it burned on its own.”
Allowing a fire to run its course — so long as people and homes are protected — isn’t necessarily a failure of forest management. It clears leaf litter, thins crowded saplings, and reduces the buildup of debris. “You’ve got all these fuels taken care of,” Schmidt said, “and there’s much less threat of a major fire again any time soon.”
It wasn’t always that way. The National Forest Service was founded in 1905 with aggressive fire suppression as a key policy. That began to change in the 1960s, and today some blazes burn themselves out under careful supervision. In fact, many public lands are managed with fire, a technique Indigenous peoples used for millennia to promote forest health.
“Prescribed fire is one of the most effective tools for reducing hazardous fuels and maintaining healthy, fire-adapted forests in the Southeast,” said Laura Fitzmorris, a Forest Service spokeswoman. Roadless areas make up only a sliver of the Chattahoochee and are “generally small and interspersed with nearby communities, roads, and recreation sites.” Access, she said, is “one of many operational factors considered” in wildfire response.
But access cuts both ways — because roads allow more than fire trucks in.
“If there were more roads, there would be more access,” Schmidt said. “So people might start fires, purposely or accidentally.”
Human activity is by far the leading cause of wildfires. From Virginia to Texas, people sparked 23,980 fires in 2024, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Lightning strikes caused just 809. Many of those fires start near roads, the result of cigarettes tossed from passing cars. Hot exhaust pipes or dragging tailpipes throwing sparks also are common causes. Hikers and campers can start them when they fail to extinguish campfires. And then there are those who intentionally start a blaze, using roads to easily get in and out.
In all of these cases, said Sam Evans, the National Forests and Parks program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, “roads are the common denominator.” The roadless rule already makes an exemption for firefighting, and he called the administration’s argument that repealing it will make that job easier “malarkey.”
“They’re trying to trick the American people into thinking that timber production is somehow making us safer from wildfire,” he said. “It’s not.”
Back in North Carolina, Heath Cartee remembered how much has changed since his youth. Over his lifetime, Cartee has seen dirt roads become gravel roads and gravel roads become paved roads that grow ever wider, fragmenting the forest he grew up in. He feels that loss deeply. With each new byway and highway, it’s more than quiet and habitat that disappears; it’s that elusive sacredness that Cartee feels when he encounters something larger than himself.
“When you go to the wilderness you have to go there for spirituality,” he said. “It doesn't mean that you're going to find ‘God’. It also doesn't mean that you're going to find the devil. You're likely to find both.”
As Cartee drove out of South Mills, and the rhododendrons gave way to fences and highways, he reflected on the deeper meaning of roadless areas. For him, and for many of his clients, a night in the wilderness makes you confront your humanity, your primal connection to the natural world, and your mortality as a being that came from the dirt and will someday return to it.
“Part of engaging with the woods and the forest and the wilderness and getting away from society is engaging with both,” he said. “Because they're both part of you.”
