-Right now, in particular, is probably unlike any time in recent history.

We're facing a bombardment of attacks on public land protections in general.

It's a part of this administration's deregulatory agenda explicitly to open up public lands for things like more mining and more logging.

That is the agenda of this administration.

There are a whole host of things that are happening on a week-to-week, if not a day-to-day basis, to accomplish that.

-We're freeing up our forest.

We're going to be able to take down trees.

Right now, we're so restricted environmentally.

We're going to be freeing it up with an emergency order.

We have an emergency order.

-We've been part of the public land debates for over 40 years, so we've seen the priorities shift time and time again, that shift with different political administrations.

Of course, that's happened with this one.

The things that we see that are happening with the current administration that we like is that they are actually wanting to actively manage our public lands.

We generally like more management.

You usually get a better recreation experience out of actively managed public lands than you do out of the burn scar from the high-severity catastrophic wildfire.

-This is the Los Padres National Forest.

The Los Padres National Forest is one of California's biggest national forests.

It's huge.

It extends all the way from Big Sur and Monterey County through San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and even out to Kern County.

It's massive.

[music] Forest Watch is a nonprofit environmental organization.

We work to protect wildlife, wilderness, water, and sustainable access in the Los Padres National Forest and surrounding public lands.

We use education, outreach, and when necessary, we use legal tools that are available to do that work.

There have been things like eliminating the Roadless Rule, obviously.

The Roadless Rule is basically a policy.

It was adopted in 2001 with enormous bipartisan support.

It prevents the construction of new permanent roads in national forests, and it prevents the most extreme forms of commercial logging.

That's it.

-It's enforced here, or has been in Los Padres.

-There's over 600,000 acres of designated roadless area in the Los Padres National Forest.

This is the key point, is that these lands that the Roadless Rule protects are literally the gateway to America's backcountry.

There's not a lack of access in these lands.

Rather, the Roadless Rule is what keeps these areas still relatively intact.

What we don't want to see is these places become further carved up by roads and commercial logging operations.

That's what this is about.

It's not about lack of access.

It's not about anything else.

This is about removing protections to allow industrial commercial logging in America's national forests and some of the last remaining protected, relatively intact places.

[music] -The Blue Ribbon Coalition has been around since 1987.

We've been fighting for all those years to keep public lands open for the public to come and enjoy them, to keep public lands open for all forms of outdoor recreation.

The things that we see that are happening with the current administration that we like is that they are actually wanting to actively manage our public lands.

That's where you're seeing the conflict is how much should these agencies be doing work to manage these public lands.

We generally like more management.

Traveling through the Los Padres Forest, there's definitely excessive fuel loads.

We have seen in the Palisades and the Thomas Fire and the Dolan Fire, which happened further up the coast in the Los Padres National Forest, that this exact ecosystem will burn.

It will burn catastrophically.

-To you, repealing the Roadless Rule is a way to grapple with that problem.

-Yes, because roads enable that active management.

When people hear roads, they sometimes think we're building big paved highways through the forest.

That's, in most cases, not the case.

We're talking about very primitive dirt roads that still give access to firefighters.

Roads are management tools.

Once they're done with the treatments, then the roads can be used for recreation, which is why we, as a recreation group, has always supported these.

-Getting rid of the Roadless Rule isn't so the average American can get out and go hunt, or fish, or hike.

It's to create permanent roads so logging companies can access the last few remaining old-growth forests.

That's what this is about.

I'll tell you exactly why.

You can already do fuel reduction projects in roadless areas.

Roadless protections don't prevent fuel reduction.

It doesn't even prevent certain forms of commercial logging.

For proof of that, again, you can just look to the Los Padres National Forest.

We have three, four, five different fuel reduction fire mitigation projects currently in various stages of proposal or being actively implemented in the Los Padres.

That includes projects where they're removing merchantable timber.

Now, what the Roadless Rule does do is it prevents those projects from turning into the most intensive forms of commercial logging.

It's basically keeping these areas from turning into the equivalent of private tree plantations.

That's what it does.

It doesn't prevent fuel mitigation.

That's a myth.

That's a lie.

-I know it's easy to demonize commercial interest in public land, but land is always the basis of all commercial activity and economic activity.

It's why America is such a hugely successful country is because we've been finding innovative ways to use our natural resource base for hundreds of years now, and we'll keep doing that.

If you're going to keep portions of public land public, you then have to make sure the communities have ways to thrive and also be strong economic communities around the public lands, and that's a balance you have to strike.

Should that even be a conflict?

I don't think it should.

I want people to come have valuable experiences that make them better humans and make them better members of the ecological community.

If all I do is sit and look at this as a picture on my phone in my apartment, I'm not getting the same experience.

In my mind, more access means more people getting these benefits, meaning more people are better people.

-We hear very regularly from people who are frustrated that they can't get to certain places in the forest, but it's not for a lack of roads.

It's because the roads that we already have in place are in disrepair, and they're closed because the US Forest Service doesn't have a budget to adequately maintain the roads that we already have.

-What's the nightmare scenario for you?

-The worst case is we lose some of the very things that are most precious to us as a country.

This is where people come to connect with the land.

It's part of our natural heritage.

This is the land that we're going to pass on to future generations.

It took decades and decades to secure many of the protections that we have in place.

Once you whittle away at those things, it's really hard to get those things back.

The places themselves, once we impact them, a lot of these resources are gone forever.

They're not recoverable.