Save 400 Imperiled Species From Losing Their Last Wild Home

Final signature count: 10,637

10,637 signatures toward our 30,000 goal

For a quarter century, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has shielded more than 44 million acres of national forest from roads, logging, and large-scale development.⁴ These are the wildest, least disturbed federal lands in the country — places where rivers run clean, old-growth canopy stands unbroken, and species on the edge of survival still have somewhere to go. In August 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture filed a formal proposal to rescind that rule entirely.^3,7 If it goes through, the damage will be permanent.

400 Species at Stake

A peer-reviewed study released in late August put hard numbers behind the threat. Roadless national forest areas provide habitat for roughly 400 species currently listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.^1,2 Researchers identified these intact landscapes as critical refugia — places where at-risk wildlife persist precisely because human disturbance has been kept out.

The species span every part of the food web: fish that cannot tolerate the silt and runoff road construction sends into streams, wide-ranging mammals whose territories cannot shrink further without population collapse, birds, amphibians, and invertebrates that depend on undisturbed soil and old-growth cover that takes centuries to return once it's gone. Researchers described the rule's repeal as placing these animals on an extinction fast track.^1,2

Roads Change Everything

Roads are how industrial activity penetrates wild landscapes. Once they go in, logging, mining, and fragmentation follow. They introduce erosion into streams, fragment habitat that wide-ranging species need to survive, and open remote areas to poaching and invasive species. The 44 million acres covered by this rule represent a landscape larger than the state of Washington.⁷ Open it to roads and it will not come back.

The Rationale Doesn't Hold Up

The USDA frames the rescission as a wildfire management necessity, arguing that road restrictions limit fuel treatments and emergency response.³ Retired Forest Service officials dispute that framing, saying the agency's own research does not support it.⁵ Meanwhile, the economic pressure from timber and extraction industries seeking access to lands that have been protected for a generation is well documented.⁶ The wildfire argument offers political cover; the beneficiaries are industries that have been locked out for 25 years.

The Comment Window Is Closing

Federal rulemaking requires a public comment period before any proposal is finalized. That window is the last meaningful opportunity for public input before the rule — and the habitat it has protected — is gone. The Secretary of Agriculture and the Chief of the Forest Service have the authority to withdraw this proposal. Public pressure is how they hear from the people these lands belong to.

Four hundred imperiled species have no voice in this process. You do.

Sign the petition now to urge the USDA and the U.S. Forest Service to withdraw the proposal and preserve the Roadless Area Conservation Rule before it's too late.