Here’s some pretty good commentary by Sarah Gilman of the High Country News concerning last Friday’s resurrection of the “roadless rule” . . .
One of the last decades’ most scintillating (that is, in the headachey confusing sense…) enviro-legal ping-pong matches may finally be drawing to a close. On Friday, a three-judge panel at the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver effectively reinstated the Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which banned new road building and most logging on more than 50 million acres of National Forest. The rule was meant to prevent further fragmentation of wildlife habitat, sedimentation of streams, and other negative effects of roads on lands that had been previously inventoried as “roadless.”