58.5 million acres are about to lose their protection (From ASP)

[Bogertophis]

Sharing my email from Melissa Amarello with Advocates for Snake Preservation (ASP): Please, everyone...It's EASY to speak up about this to save our roadless forests! > > >
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It was early July, before the monsoon began. The kind of dry, hot weather when snake activity is at one of its lowest points of the whole year. And yet we found a Rock Rattlesnake dead on the road. Not a highway. A rough, dead-end dirt road on private land, the kind with maybe one or two vehicles a day, nowhere for anyone to be going fast. But just one, slow-moving vehicle can be fatal for a snake. This is a road with almost nothing on it, in a season with almost no snake movement, and it still killed him. Now imagine 58.5 million acres, a third of our national forest system, opened up to the roads that industrial logging and oil-and-gas drilling require. Not dead-end dirt tracks with a car or two a day. Real roads: built for trucks, built for extraction, built to carry traffic in and resources out. The Roadless Rule has kept these forests intact for 25 years. A sort of sanctuary for the snakes and other animals who call them home, with no roads fragmenting them and turning open backcountry into a grid of mortality. Roads don't just kill the animals unlucky enough to be crossing at the wrong moment. They cut populations off from each other. They block migration. They sever the gene flow that keeps species healthy over generations. One rattlesnake on one quiet road is heartbreaking. A forest laced with roads is a tragedy. In their Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the Forest Service has chosen to rescind the Roadless Rule entirely. Not weaken it. Remove it. If a road with one car a day can kill a snake in one of the quietest times of the year, what happens when we build roads through millions of acres of the roadless forest they depend on? We still have a chance to say no. Visit our Save Roadless Forests page, where we provide several ways for you to take action. We have until Monday, September 21 to comment and defend the Roadless Rule. A Black-tailed Rattlesnake manages to make it across road. Ready for a Snake Break? That story stays with me too. Some days, this work is heavy. So thank you: for reading, for taking action, for still caring even when the news is hard. As a bit of a reset, here's my July field highlights video: For the ones who don't make it across the road, Melissa Amarello (she/her) Executive Director, ASP PS. Visit our Save Roadless Forests page and pick the action that fits your time. We have until Monday, September 21. Advocates for Snake Preservation is changing how people view and treat snakes. We're located on the occupied lands of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache, and would like to pay respects to the Apache and all native elders, past and present. Our mailing address is: PO Box 2752, Silver City, New Mexico 88062