Georgia has 63,000 acres of roadless forest left. USDA wants to change that.
When the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in August that it’s rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule across 44 million acres of national forest, its press release listed the 10 states holding more than 95% of the affected land: Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Georgia isn’t on that list, which is precisely why Georgians ought to be paying attention. What’s left here is small enough to take while everyone is looking west.
The Chattahoochee National Forest covers about 751,000 acres across 18 North Georgia counties, and roughly 63,000 of them are what the government calls inventoried roadless areas.
Georgia ForestWatch’s road analysis found that across 70% of the Chattahoochee, you can’t walk half a mile from a road without coming within half a mile of another one.
The 63,000 acres without roads include Kelly Ridge, where white and red oaks on the ridgetops have been standing for more than two centuries, where boulderfields stay green under moss into winter, and where the Appalachian Trail runs 5 miles on its way north out of Springer Mountain.
They include Mountaintown, 12,000 acres at the head of Fightingtown Creek outside Ellijay, the largest unroaded block left in the forest. These are the headwaters this forest was bought to protect, the refuge our wildlife has left, and a glimpse at what our mountains used to look like before we got through with them.
Roads are how fires start
We know what happened to the rest, because the Forest Service documented it. Clear-cutting on the Chattahoochee climbed from 13,000 acres in the 1960s to 36,500 in the 1980s, eventually consuming close to 100,000 acres, and the agency built hundreds of miles of road to reach it. By 1991 the acting forest supervisor reported that 4 acres of old growth remained standing in the entire Chattahoochee National Forest. Four.
The justification offered in the administration’s August press release is wildfire. Anyone in North Georgia who remembers the Rough Ridge fire burning 28,000 acres in 2016 will hear that argument and take it seriously, and they should know two things about it.
First, the Roadless Rule has never prohibited fire work. The agency’s own rulemaking documents spell out that timber cutting is permitted inside roadless areas to reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire, along with road construction to protect public health and safety during an imminent threat. Nothing about the rule has stopped the Forest Service from thinning a single acre in Georgia.
Second, roads are how fires start. About 90% of wildfires in this country begin within half a mile of a road, because roads deliver the people and equipment that ignite them. The Forest Service reached that conclusion itself.
In the 2001 environmental impact statement for this very rule, the agency wrote that building roads into inventoried roadless areas “would likely increase the chance of human-caused fires due to the increased presence of people,” and that keeping roads out “would not cause an increase in the number of acres burned by wildland fires or in the number of large fires.”
Public can submit comments
There’s also the matter of what the agency can afford. The Forest Service files a deferred maintenance report with Congress every quarter, and the most recent one puts the backlog on roads and bridges at roughly $7 billion.
That figure counts only roads a passenger car can still drive on, because the agency says maintenance costs for the rest can’t be estimated with confidence.
In the Southeast, most forest road mileage isn’t passenger-car road. Every washed-out roadbed above a North Georgia trout stream is sediment headed downhill. Meanwhile this administration has driven out nearly a fifth of the already thin Forest Service workforce, and independent analysis found the agency did 38% less wildfire mitigation work in 2025 than it averaged over the four years before. They simply didn’t have the staff or the budget.
Public comments on the rescission close at 11:59 p.m. tonight. Georgians can file one at regulations.gov under docket FS-2025-0001.
Georgians can also ask U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock why neither has signed on to the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which would write these protections into law and put them past the reach of any administration’s press release. We have 63,000 acres left. We spent the last century proving how quickly that number goes to zero.
Jim Pattiz is a conservationist, writer, and filmmaker based in Georgia, and a co-founder of More Than Just Parks.
Send letters to the editor of 250 words or fewer with your name, city or town and contact information to letters@ajc.com.