A three-week comment period for the Trump administration’s plan to scrap the “roadless rule” on National Forest lands opened Friday.

The rule, established in 2001, allows the federal government to designate “inventoried roadless areas” within the National Forest System.

Those lands typically have little to no history of human development and amount to 30% of all national forests and grasslands. In Montana, that figure is about 38%, or 5.5 million acres. The designation affords protections against most types of harvest and road construction, although exceptions exist.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture under President Donald Trump touted the plan to rescind the roadless rule as a way to open up more federal lands to logging and fuels reduction when it announced the plan in June. Montana’

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