Andy, can you take us back to the legal history of the roadless rule and how it came into being during the Clinton administration?

Yeah, I'm going to start maybe even a little bit earlier because Ben's book, which everyone should rush to their bookstore and library and get right away.

And I especially love chapter five, which is really about the roadless rule.

And he makes a really important point in terms of, as we talk about the rescission a little bit later in the podcast, that in a lot of ways, the idea for a roadless rule was organic to the service, right? It was the experience of foresters, right? And maybe just a word about that.

Ben does a great job of talking to folks who came to regret this giant network of roads and see how it fragmented and harmed the resources.

And early in the Forest Service history, right, there were these great people like Aldo Leopold, a Yale graduate and a professor at the University of Wisconsin for many years, which I'm a proud graduate of, so I'll get that in here.

Of course, he wrote Sand County Almanac in Wisconsin.

Andy, can you talk a little bit about how the Forest Service tries to justify this change in position in this proposed rescission?

What's ENRD's role in any of that or other ways that it can set or sway policy?

Yeah.

So the policy role is an important one.

First, I guess I just sort of start again going back to the multitude of agencies that the Department of Justice, I almost said we, even though it's been a long time, that the Department of Justice represents.

And some of those agencies have conflicting responsibilities and some administer statutes together.

For instance, The Endangered Species Act is administered both by the Fish and Wildlife Service for terrestrial species primarily and by NOAA for ocean-going species.

And so, you know, we say NRD doesn't set policy, but it has to work through those conflicts.

And that's absolutely true at DOJ as well.