Enacted in 2001 with broad bipartisan support, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule protects 45 million acres of national forest lands across the US. Now the Trump admistration proposes to rescind this rule and open these wildlands to road building, logging, mining, and other commercial uses. Until September 21, the public can comment on this proposed action to deep six a bedrock conservation measure before a final decision is made. In my April 2 blog post this year, I

Wood stork parent and young My wife, Diana, came across this amazing conservation story in a most unusual place, The Times of India. Yes, India, the country. This is a story of how a couple purchased a 45-acre property -- a cypress swamp -- adjacent to their Florida home to keep it from being developed. Their dedication to nature illustrates that conservation does not always begin with a national park or a huge organization. Sometimes it starts when two people

One of the excuses the Trump administration offered for moving to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule that protects over 60 million acres of US Forest Service lands -- our lands -- was to provide more road access to fight wildfires. But a new study published in the journal Fire Ecology , and summarized in Inside Climate News , reviewed the history of wildfire ignitions from 1992 to 2024 and found that wildfires were four times more likely to ignite within 50 meters of a road tha

Congress has begun nullifying resource management plans that were developed and implemented to guide long-term stewardship of federal lands. Plans cooperatively developed by the federal Bureau of Land Management in Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska -- in consultation with scientists, conservation groups, indigenous peoples, industry, and other users of these tracts of federal lands -- are the first on the chopping block. These Resource Management Plans (RMPs) provide stabil

The Trump administration seeks to weaken conservation by rescinding a rule that governs public land use. The Conservation and Landscape...

Newly published research in Science predicts that by 2070 almost half of Earth's land surface will experience increases in spatial...