Despite what appears to be an intentional statewide media coverup, Colorado is on the front lines of a battle with the Trump administration over the U.S. Forest Service’s looming rollback of the “Roadless Rule,” which currently limits industrial extraction (logging, grazing, mining, and drilling) across almost sixty million acres of America’s wildest lands.

In late August, over 155 conservation groups across the U.S. joined a sign-on letter urging Congress to both reinstate the Roadless Rule as well as close the loopholes that allow logging and other forms of extraction, co-written by Colorado-based Eco-Integrity Alliance and Western Watersheds Project, John Muir Project, and Eco Advocates NW. Signers include: Greenpeace USA, WildEarth Guardians, Rainforest Action Network, Western Environmental Law Center, Rocky Mountain Wild, Green Latinos, and the Rachel Carson Council.

Right now, what may be the largest logging project in Colorado history—the “Lower North South Vegetation Management Project” in the Pike-San Isabel National Forest 30 miles southwest of Denver—plans to cut 116,000 acres of public forests, including in endangered species habitat and old-growth forest, with 18,500 acres of logging in Colorado Roadless Areas.

This massive project is being pushed through under an obscure “emergency authorization” which now targets 112 million acres—59% of National Forests—on the heels of Trump’s executive order to expand timber production, yet has not been covered by any Colorado media outlets.

A recent opinion piece by former USDA head Robert Bonnie (which oversees Forest Service) reveals the desire to use Colorado’s lack of protections for Roadless Areas as a national model.

The current unprecedented threat to Roadless Areas has revealed the need for conservationists to not only reinstate the Roadless Rule but expand protections. “Wildfire” is currently the Trojan Horse being used by the Trump administration—and sadly, many elected officials on both sides of the aisle—to degrade our public lands, including clearcutting and removal of mature and old-growth trees.

Contrary to popular belief, there is little to no credible science proving logging forests protects communities from the spread of wildfire. Instead, the scientific consensus is that home hardening and defensible space pruning up to 100 feet around homes are the only effective actions that save structures.

If you read the science closely, even U.S. Forest Service studies promoting “fuel reduction” quietly admit logging has nothing to do with protecting communities: “[Fuel] treatments generally are designed to mitigate wildfire intensity and effects but they are not necessarily intended to impede fire spread or reduce fire size.”

The best argument in favor of “thinning” is that minimal tree removal can sometimes—not always—reduce burn severity in forests from low- or moderate-intensity fires, which rarely threaten communities and are typically easily contained by firefighters. The vast majority of studies show that “thinning” does not reduce burn severity from high-intensity fires—driven by hot temperatures, low humidity and drought, and wind—which are the primary threats to communities. What’s more, all burn severities, including high-severity, are crucial to fire-adapted forest ecosystems, and, as this 2025 study reveals, “thinning conducted ostensibly to reduce tree mortality from fire or bark beetles can kill significantly more trees than it prevents from being killed.”

Ironically, “fuel reduction” has been shown to increase the risk of fires ignited and spreading to communities by opening up the canopy, which heats and dries the microclimate and opens the forest to wind spread as well as crown fires. As a 2020 study explains: “The opening of the canopy can entrain more wind and solar radiation which might result in the reduction of fine fuel and canopy fuel moisture…All of these effects could result in enhanced surface fire behavior and increase in crowning potential.”

The recent report, Forest Fire Malfeasance (ForestFireMalfeasance.org), features emails exposing a Colorado government coverup of peer-reviewed science and deliberate deception of media and the public to force through taxpayer-funded logging of public lands in the name of “wildfire fuel reduction.”