"Reforestation Renaissance"

Like a potato bed in a giant gardener's vegetable plot, the eastern USA’s ancient Appalachian Mountains form a series of (almost) parallel ridges and furrows. Long ago they were higher than the Himalayas and their geology and geography has determined the course of human history for centuries, if not millennia.

Yesterday I drove for two hours north-west of Wise, to Hazard, Kentucky, to meet up with Patrick and Jim of the Federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. It was another beautiful autumn morning meandering through the kaleidoscope forests. The previous day I had driven through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and I was now on the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Instead of concentrating on driving on the “wrong” side of the road, I was whisked back to childhood Saturday morning TV watching black and white films of Laurel and Hardy singing The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. The juggernaut rapidly filling my windscreen soon brought me back to reality!

Appalachia’s natural resources have contributed immeasurably to the status of contemporary America. The country’s first oil fields were discovered here, high quality hardwood forests clothe the hills and beneath them the coal of fossil forests has powered the country for generations.

The most controversial and environmentally-damaging method of mining Appalachian coal is the brutal technique of mountain-top removal. It involves, literally, exploding the tops of mountains to extract the seams of coal underneath and filling neighbouring valleys with the rock waste. The remaining mountain stumps and in-filled valleys are then bulldozed and compacted to the n-th degree to reduce the risk of instability and landslides. The final environmental insult involves applying a legume-grass seed mix of aggressive species to provide a green quick fix. Ecologically the area, once rich in flora and fauna, becomes an ecological desert of little use to man or beast. These new, man-made topographies cover enormous areas (see Google Earth co-ordinates 37deg 24'16.37"N; 83deg 10'36.07"W) – a single site may spread over 12,000 acres.

Once there was a whole mountain top here

Patrick, as an OSMRE employee, is one of two full-time workers on the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI), which is working to return these devastated landscapes back to forests. It includes an impressive partnership of government agencies, academic institutions and forward-thinking mining companies who believe mediocrity is for the mediocre. Going forward with the current industry, the project has ensured 70 million native hardwoods have been planted in a process that involves undoing the compaction and subduing the aggressive weeds. Looking backwards, however, there are approaching one million acres of abandoned minelands that nobody owns and nobody is responsible for. This is the main focus of ARRI’s work today.

Patrick and a 3-year-old American Chestnut

ARRI has formed a key partnership with the American Chestnut Foundation. The American Chestnut is the legendary tree of the eastern US and is culturally iconic. It is now all but extinct because of an imported disease. A breeding programme has developed resistant varieties that are now being returned to the denuded land as part of the ARRI project, and often by groups of well-trained volunteers.

Today, Patrick and I drove to the Star Fire mining complex to meet Chris, a researcher from the University of Kentucky. The weather had turned into something horrible, but we were there to see trees and nothing was going to stop us. This site has several experimental demonstration plots that also serve to show what can be done, at very little cost, to these scarred landscapes. The pictures speak for themselves and tell of the passion and dedication of the people involved with ARRI.