Commentary: More forest roads won’t mean fewer forest fires

Contrary to what Utah Gov. Gary Herbert claims, there is no direct cause-and-effect relationship between road access and fewer wildland fires.That was the conclusion in 2001 when a team of U.S. Forest Service employees were charged with analyzing whether a proposal called “the Roadless Rule” – which would ban new road building in remote national forest roadless areas — would make wildfires worse. As a 37-year veteran of the Forest Service, a fire management and fire ecolo