Environmental groups are urging president-elect Barack Obama to support a federal policy that would protect national forests, including 384,000 acres in Virginia.

"It's all about keeping wild places wild," former U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck said Monday in a teleconference with legislators and advocacy groups.

At issue is the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, issued eight years ago by former President Bill Clinton. The rule preserves 58 million acres of the country's most pristine national forestland in 38 states.

With about 384,000 acres of roadless lands in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, Virginia has more at stake than any other state east of the Mississippi River, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Conservationists are courting Obama's support at a time when they say logging, gas and oil companies are poised to push deeper into national forests, aided in part by the Bush administration.

The current administration has been "almost myopic in its efforts to reverse the rule," said Wilderness Society President William Meadows, who joined the teleconference with Dombeck and U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., who leads the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.

In 2005, federal officials replaced the rule with a process by which governors were required to petition the U.S. Department of Agriculture if they wanted protection for roadless areas in their states. That rule was later struck down in the federal courts, which have yet to make a final ruling on the initial policy issued in 2001.

Grijalva said he expects Obama to support the original version of the rule, which has been called one of the most important land protection measures in recent years. "It's an important statement that needs to be made early on" by the Obama administration, Grijalva said.

Environmentalists are asking Obama to suspend road building, drilling and other development in roadless areas of national forests until the rule can be fully restored.

In Virginia, a large timber sale in Rockingham County is one example of proposed activity in roadless areas, said David Carr, public lands program director for the Southern Environmental Law Center. Other lands that could be added to the roadless inventory in the Washington and Jefferson forests are also at risk, he said.