By David Jenkins, President of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship

There’s nothing remotely conservative about Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’s plan to do away with the 25-year-old Roadless Rule that protects America’s most ancient stands of forest. Not only will the proposed rollback undermine our natural wealth and betray common sense conservation, it would be a fiscal nightmare.

Opening up new remote areas to expensive road building is the last thing the U.S. Forest Service needs.

The harsh reality is that the agency doesn’t have the budget to take care of the 368,000 miles of roads already on our national forests. It’s in a deep road maintenance backlog hole. Just to fix all of the Forest Service’s existing roads will cost taxpayers an additional $10.8 billion.

Read the rest of the op-ed at Richard Viguerie’s Conservative HQ.