One Voice
Media Partner
The Roadless Rule, the people we trust, and the increasingly expensive work of thinking for ourselves
I like Cameron Hanes—or at least the Cameron Hanes I know through podcasts, books, and social media: the disciplined bowhunter and endurance athlete who has built a career around doing hard things. I have listened to him enough that familiarity probably influences how I hear him when he ventures beyond hunting and endurance. But I don't actually know Cameron Hanes. I know the man when the microphone is on.
That became important while listening to his June appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. Before the conversation reached the Roadless Rule, Cameron said something I immediately agreed with. He opposed “ballot-box biology,” the idea that wildlife decisions should be made through political popularity rather than by people who understand the resource. He broadened that thought to public lands: he didn't want politicians making land-use decisions; he wanted knowledgeable people in the field making them. Rogan agreed. So did I.
I also understood Cameron's anger over Senator Mike Lee's earlier effort to sell millions of acres of federal land through a massive budget bill. I opposed that too. Public land should not be treated like excess warehouse inventory simply because Washington needs money or somebody discovers that “housing” makes a land sale sound more appealing. Processes already exist for disposing of federal parcels when disposal makes sense. A small, isolated BLM parcel at the edge of a growing community such as St. George, Utah, presents a different problem from a remote hunting basin, wildlife corridor, or undeveloped drainage. BLM has, for example, proposed individual sales near St. George where parcels had already been identified for disposal through land-use planning, followed by a public-comment process.
That is not an argument for selling the West. It is an argument against pretending every federal acre presents the same question. If a parcel should be sold or exchanged, identify it, analyze it, involve the public, and make the case. Wholesale disposal is not a substitute for land management.
By the time Cameron and Rogan reached the Roadless Rule, I thought Cameron and I probably agreed on more than we disagreed. Keep public lands public. Don't let politicians casually dispose of them. Let biologists, foresters, and land managers who understand the resource help make decisions. Involve the public. Pay attention to conditions on the ground.
Then somehow we ended up on opposite teams.
The confusion is understandable because several public-land fights have been happening at once, and some of the same politicians appear in all of them. In 2025, Mike Lee pursued a broad proposal to sell millions of acres of federal land. In June 2026, lawmakers added Roadless Rule repeal language to a wildfire bill moving through the Senate. Separately, the Department of Agriculture has been pursuing an administrative rescission of the 2001 Roadless Rule through a federal rulemaking process.
Those are related political stories. They are not the same policy.
The land-sale proposal involved transferring federal land out of federal ownership. The congressional Roadless amendment would nullify the national Roadless Rule legislatively. USDA's proposal would rescind that same national rule administratively and return decision-making over inventoried roadless areas to the land-management planning process at individual national forests. The current proposal applies to about 44.7 million acres because Idaho and Colorado operate under separate state-specific roadless rules. Rescission itself would not sell the land.
On Rogan, however, those stories begin to run together. The discussion moves among Mike Lee's public-land fights, the Roadless amendment, development, public ownership, and the roughly 45 million acres still governed by the national rule. Cameron urges listeners to call senators and keep the Roadless Rule intact, while repeatedly tying the current fight back to the previous “Not One Acre” campaign against public-land sales.
What makes that interesting is that most of the ingredients are real. Lee really did pursue federal land sales. Roadless repeal really was moving through Congress. USDA really is separately proposing rescission. The Roadless Rule really does govern tens of millions of acres. People really are concerned about what could happen without it.
You can assemble a story almost entirely from true pieces and still misunderstand what is happening.
That may be one of the more difficult forms of misinformation to recognize. Sometimes misinformation is not a false fact. It is a collection of substantial facts arranged into the wrong story.
The numbers can work the same way. During the Rogan conversation, Joe reads a statement that “99% of Americans oppose repealing the Roadless Rule,” and Cameron repeats the idea moments later, citing 99 percent of the public as opposing repeal. A real number supports that claim, but it did not come from a national opinion poll. During the Forest Service's 2025 public process on rescission, the agency received more than 600,000 submissions when petition signatures were included, and its subsequent environmental analysis characterized about 99 percent of the comments as generally opposed to rescission. An independent analysis of a large sample of docket comments reached a similar result.
That is significant. It tells us that opposition was overwhelming among the people and organizations who participated in that rulemaking. It does not tell us that a scientific survey found 99 percent of Americans opposed rescission.
Nothing had to be invented for the meaning to change. “Approximately 99 percent of comments opposed rescission” became “99 percent of Americans oppose repeal,” then “99 percent of the public.” The number survived the journey. The denominator did not.
That distinction sounds meticulous until you realize how often numbers acquire authority simply because they are numbers. Data tells us what was measured. The story attached to the data tells us what somebody thinks it means. Trouble starts when we stop noticing the difference.
The Roadless Rule itself practically invites the same mistake because of its name. “Roadless” sounds like a physical description. Most people hear it and picture country without roads, motor vehicles, or development—something approaching wilderness. An Inventoried Roadless Area is actually an administrative classification. The 2001 rule generally prohibits new road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting, with exceptions. It does not turn those lands into congressionally designated Wilderness, and it does not prohibit authorized motorized or nonmotorized trails simply because they fall within an inventoried roadless area. The original rule even acknowledged that some inventoried areas contained existing roads and previously developed portions.
The word on the label is easier to understand than the regulation underneath it, which is precisely why the label usually wins.
The current USDA proposal becomes more interesting when placed beside Cameron's stated philosophy. Cameron says he wants knowledgeable professionals, not politicians, making land-management decisions. USDA says rescinding the national rule will return more of those decisions to individual forest-planning processes, giving responsible officials greater flexibility to respond to local conditions.
That does not mean Cameron should support rescission. He could reasonably read the entire proposal and conclude that he wants professional land managers making decisions inside a national guardrail that still prohibits certain roads and timber activities. That is a coherent position. The more interesting possibility is that Cameron and I may agree on many of the values underneath the argument and still reach different conclusions because we are not always talking about the same thing.
That possibility changes how I want to approach the Roadless Rule. I support reconsidering it because I am skeptical of universal prescriptions applied indefinitely across landscapes that change.
A roadless area in Alaska does not present the same management problem as one in eastern Oregon. A forest next to a growing wildland-urban interface is not the same as a remote drainage far from communities. Fire regimes, wildlife, soils, existing roads, recreational use, forest health, and local economies differ. A national rule can provide certainty, but certainty is not the same thing as suitability.
That argument feels obvious to me until I think about Southeast Arizona.
During the cattle boom of the 1880s, local stock growers in southeastern Arizona recognized that the range was overloaded. They understood the country and depended on it economically, yet insecure grazing rights created a brutal incentive. Somebody else's cattle could consume one rancher's standing grass. Reducing your herd made little sense if your neighbor did not do the same. Then drought arrived. Cattle died in enormous numbers, heavy rains followed, and soil moved off damaged ground.
Tombstone is inconvenient if your slogan is LOCAL CONTROL.
People closest to a resource can possess extraordinary knowledge and still make collectively terrible decisions. They can understand a problem and remain trapped by incentives that prevent them from solving it. Local knowledge matters. It is not magic.
Fortunately, anyone tempted to conclude from Tombstone that distant experts should therefore run everything can continue into Navajo country and discover the opposite problem. During the 1930s, federal officials confronted serious erosion and deteriorating range conditions on Navajo lands. They identified livestock pressure as part of the problem and responded with a reduction program based on carrying capacity. On paper, the logic was clean: determine how many animals the land could support, remove the excess, and improve the range.
The landscape contained people who did not fit cleanly into the equation. Sheep and goats were food, wealth, culture, and security, and many were controlled by Navajo women whose importance federal planners poorly understood. Historian Marsha Weisiger found that federal conservation officials made conditions worse in important respects by ignoring those social realities.
The federal officials did not need to be villains for the policy to fail. They recognized a real problem but still misunderstood the system enough to produce unintended consequences.
Tombstone says local knowledge alone is not enough. Navajo livestock reduction shows that expert knowledge from a distance is not enough. Neither story tells us which team should win. Both suggest that the real challenge is creating systems that combine knowledge, participation, accountability, and the ability to change when reality refuses to cooperate with the original plan.
The forests have taught that lesson for a long time, too. The Big Burn of 1910 helped shape a Forest Service culture built around aggressive fire suppression. Given more than three million acres burned, communities threatened, and firefighters killed, the response made sense. Over time, however, forest science increasingly recognized that many Western ecosystems had evolved with fire and that excluding it could change stand structure and fuels. A policy born from real experience could be useful for decades and still become a poor fit as knowledge and landscapes changed.
That does not prove the Roadless Rule should disappear. It does make reconsideration less threatening. Twenty-five years is enough time for forests, communities, science, and management tools to change. It is also enough time for the values the rule protects to prove important. Both facts deserve to survive the argument.
The Roadless Rule itself illustrates the problem. Saying it prevents forest management is too broad. The rule includes exceptions that allow some timber cutting for ecosystem restoration and to reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire effects. Saying the rule therefore has no meaningful effect on management is too easy to say the opposite. Roads can determine whether a treatment is physically or economically practical. The result depends on the place, the proposed activity, existing access, and the other rules governing that forest.
“It depends” is not much of a rallying cry, but nature seems comfortable with it.
Elinor Ostrom spent much of her career studying similarly inconvenient problems. In Governing the Commons, she examined forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, and grazing lands where people had built institutions to manage shared resources. Her work is sometimes reduced to an argument for local control, but she explicitly warned against that interpretation. Local communities could govern resources successfully, but they did not always do so. The useful question was which conditions allowed people to organize effectively and which institutions matched the resource being governed.
That lesson is harder than “local good, federal bad.” It is also more useful.
A national prohibition can protect values that local decision-makers might undervalue. One road can make sense. So can the next one. Over decades, a series of individually defensible projects can fragment a landscape whose larger value becomes obvious only after it is gone. That cumulative risk was part of the logic behind the Roadless Rule, and people committed to keeping it are not foolish to worry about it.
If I want them to reconsider the mechanism, I should be able to explain that concern without reducing them to elitists who want to lock everyone out.
The same obligation works in reverse. Someone who supports the Roadless Rule should be able to imagine a forest manager looking at fuels, insects, disease, recreation, infrastructure, or an expanding wildland-urban interface and reasonably asking whether a national rule created in 2001 leaves enough flexibility for a particular place. Asking that question does not automatically make the person a timber-industry stooge.
Once both people can describe the other's concern fairly, the argument gets harder.
Social media tends to reward the opposite. Complicated land policy has the aerodynamic qualities of a refrigerator, while certainty travels beautifully. A major MIT study examining roughly 126,000 news cascades shared by about three million people found that false information traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truthful information. The researchers also found that humans, not bots alone, drove the difference and that novelty seemed to help false stories spread.
The platforms did not invent our appetite for simple stories. They learned how to feed it.
The Roadless fight supplies wonderful material. “They're selling your public lands” travels better than an explanation of administrative rescission. “The Roadless Rule prevents forest management” beats a discussion of regulatory exceptions and project economics. “Ninety-nine percent of Americans oppose repeal” carries more emotional authority than “approximately 99 percent of submissions in this particular administrative process opposed rescission.”
The easy story asks almost nothing of us except allegiance.
Pick a side. The side becomes a team. The team supplies people to trust, experts to doubt, motives to assign, and facts worth repeating. Eventually the relationship can become more demanding. Questions start sounding like disloyalty. Changing your mind feels less like learning and more like betrayal. We stop asking whether a claim is true and begin asking who said it.
That is the point where a team can start behaving more like a cult.
Not because everyone inside it is irrational, and not because a charismatic leader necessarily asked for that authority. Followers can create the authority themselves. A healthy group can tolerate a member asking, “Are we sure?” A more dangerous group hears the same question and responds, “Whose side are you on?”
I think about that when I listen to influencers. Cameron did not ask me to make him an expert on federal administrative law. Joe Rogan did not ask me to treat a conversation as an environmental impact statement. A conservation organization does not become infallible because I agree with its mission, and a Forest Service scientist does not become an authority on every policy question simply because he understands a particular ecological problem.
Credibility has boundaries even when social media does not draw them for us. The audience has responsibility too.
If Cameron says something about the Roadless Rule, the important question is not whether I trust Cameron. It is whether the claim survives without Cameron attached. Would I believe the same statistic if it came from somebody whose politics I dislike? Would I demand a source then? If the standard changes with the speaker, I am not evaluating information anymore. I am checking uniforms.
I am not safely outside that problem.
I want the Roadless Rule reconsidered, so I am naturally receptive to claims that support that argument. Tell me the rule prevents forest management and I want to nod before asking what activity, in which forest, and under which provision. Tell me local managers understand conditions better than Washington, and I instinctively agree until Tombstone reminds me what local incentives can do. Tell me one national rule is too blunt a tool, and I have Ostrom ready to testify until somebody asks what prevents a series of locally rational decisions from slowly consuming a national resource.
Truth is easy to defend when it costs the other team something. The real test comes when it takes ammunition away from yours.
If I object when a Roadless supporter turns “99 percent of submitted comments” into “99 percent of Americans,” then I cannot turn “the rule constrains some management options” into “the rule prevents forest management.” If I insist that rescission is not a sale of public land, I also have to acknowledge that removing a prohibition creates management possibilities that did not previously exist. If I want local flexibility, I must take the risks of local political pressure and cumulative loss.
Anything else is better-tailored propaganda.
Americans like to believe we dislike kings, yet we are remarkably inconsistent about where that suspicion applies. Washington making a decision we oppose feels authoritarian. Washington protecting something we love can feel responsible. Local control sounds like freedom until the locals choose something we dislike. We have also created private kings—the politician, advocacy group, cable network, scientist, podcast host, or influencer who saves us from sorting complicated questions out ourselves.
Kings are convenient because self-government is exhausting.
Thinking for yourself requires reading things that do not fit on a phone screen. It requires listening to people you may not like and occasionally discovering they know something you don't. It requires letting someone you admire be wrong without turning him into an enemy, and letting someone you distrust be right without joining his team. Worst of all, it sometimes requires changing your mind after people have heard you confidently explain why you were right.
Social media offers little reward for that.
Yet managing shared public land requires almost exactly those behaviors. A national forest can be wildlife habitat, a watershed, a hunting area, a grazing allotment, a timber resource, a motorized route network, a cultural landscape, and somebody's favorite quiet place at the same time. The forester, biologist, Tribal community, county commissioner, hunter, rancher, conservationist, and off-road rider can all know something important about the same drainage while wanting different things from it.
Those are not necessarily competing truths. They are different windows into the same reality. The disagreement is not evidence that the process has failed. The disagreement is the process.
That realization changed what success looks like for me. I still want people to reconsider the Roadless Rule, but I no longer think success requires everyone to finish this article agreeing with me. Success might be someone who supports the rule deciding to read the actual rescission before sharing the next alarming graphic. It might be someone on my side retiring the convenient claim that the rule makes forest management impossible. It might be a hunter listening long enough to understand what a conservationist fears losing, or a conservationist asking a forest manager what the rule prevents in a particular drainage before assuming industry bought the answer.
Success would be two people discovering they agree on more of the desired outcome than their teams let them notice.
That may be what interests me most about Cameron Hanes in this story. After listening carefully, I suspect Cameron and I want many of the same things. Keep public lands public. Do not hide major land transfers inside giant legislation. Let knowledgeable professionals inform land-management decisions. Protect wildlife and recreation. Give the public a voice. Think about what remains for the next generation.
Maybe he would read everything I have read and still insist that the Roadless Rule must remain exactly as it is. Fine, at least then we would be disagreeing about the same thing. That sounds like a modest achievement until you spend enough time watching people argue online.
Somewhere in this process I found myself returning to a simple question: do you want to yell, or do you want to be heard? Yelling does not require raising your voice. A polished documentary can yell. A calm podcast can yell. A government press release can yell. I can write an article full of citations and still be yelling if the real purpose is to collect applause from people who already agree with me.
Being heard costs more. It requires understanding the strongest version of the other person's concern before asking him to reconsider it. It requires asking questions whose answers might inconvenience our own argument. It requires throwing away claims that help us when they turn out not to be true.
That is not weakness. It is the minimum price of persuasion.
After Cameron and Rogan, Tombstone and Navajo country, wildfire history, and Ostrom's commons, I still believe the Roadless Rule deserves reconsideration. Land managers need more flexibility to respond to local conditions through transparent forest planning and site-specific review. Nationally important conservation values need safeguards, and local control without monitoring, public participation, and accountability can be just as foolish as distant control without local knowledge.
That position is less convenient than the one I started with.
It requires fewer villains and fewer absolute claims. It even lets Cameron Hanes and me agree about public-land sales, professional management, and keeping public lands public, while disagreeing about whether the Roadless Rule is the best way to achieve those goals.
Another controversy will follow this one. Another rule, election, crisis, or perfectly edited video will appear on our phones explaining what happened, who is responsible, and what good people are supposed to believe. Distrusting it all is not the answer. Cynicism is borrowed certainty with a darker personality.
Listen. Then ask what was measured, what was omitted, and whether the conclusion actually follows from the evidence. Before assigning a motive, ask what the person across from you is trying to protect. Let experts be experts, not kings. Take a position when the decision requires one, but do enough work that the position belongs to you.
Then argue for it.
Fight for public lands. Fight for access. Fight for wildlife, healthy forests, rural communities, or whatever outcome survives the work required to make the conviction your own. Submit the comment. Call the senator. Disagree with Cameron Hanes. Disagree with me. Nothing is wrong with conviction, and nothing is noble about refusing to decide because the world is complicated.
Just make sure you arrived there yourself, because the most revealing question may not be whether you support or oppose the Roadless Rule. It may be the one that comes before it.
Have you already picked a team?
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