The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of Robinson Forest and the Fight for Its Future

By Erik Reece, James J. Krupa and Wendell Berry

Robinson Forest in eastern Kentucky is one of our most important natural landscapes—and one of the most threatened. Covering fourteen thousand acres of some of the most diverse forest region in temperate North America, it is a haven of biological richness within an ever-expanding desert created by mountaintop removal mining. Written by two people with deep knowledge of Robinson Forest, The Embattled Wilderness engagingly portrays this singular place as it persuasively appeals for its protection.

The land comprising Robinson Forest was given to the University of Kentucky in 1923 after it had been clear-cut of old-growth timber. Over decades, the forest has regrown, and its remarkable ecosystem has supported both teaching and research. But in the recent past, as tuition has risen and state support has faltered, the university has considered selling logging and mining rights to parcels of the forest, leading to a student-led protest movement and a variety of other responses.

In The Embattled Wilderness Erik Reece, an environmental writer, and James J. Krupa, a naturalist and evolutionary biologist, alternate chapters on the cultural and natural history of the place. While Reece outlines the threats to the forest and leads us to new ways of thinking about its value, Krupa assembles an engaging record of the woodrats and darters, lichens and maples, centipedes and salamanders that make up the forest’s ecosystem. It is a readable yet rigorous, passionate yet reasoned summation of what can be found, or lost, in Robinson Forest and other irreplaceable places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780820345697

Erik Reece

Erik Reece is the author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness; Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia; and An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God. He has also written for Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, and Orion Magazine. He is currently the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where he teaches environmental journalism, writing, and literature.

Book preview

THE EMBATTLED WILDERNESS

THE EMBATTLED WILDERNESS

The Natural and Human History of

ROBINSON FOREST

and the Fight for Its Future

Erik Reece and James J. Krupa

© 2013 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Designed by Erin Kirk New

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro

Printed and bound by Sheridan Books

Maps by XNR Productions

Frontispiece: John J. Cox, Songdog Photography

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013934088

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-4123-1 (hardcover: alk: paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-4123-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4569-7

IN MEMORY:

Dave Maehr, Junior Marshall, and Will Marshall

A culture is no better than its woods.

W. H. AUDEN

Contents

Foreword   Wendell Berry

Acknowledgments

Introduction   Erik Reece and James J. Krupa

CHAPTER 1

The Cleanest Stream in Kentucky Erik Reece

CHAPTER 2

Ridgetops and Outcrops James J. Krupa

CHAPTER 3

A Timbered Classroom Erik Reece

CHAPTER 4

Slumps and Slides and Steep, Steep Slopes James J. Krupa

CHAPTER 5

Thinking Like a Forest Erik Reece

CHAPTER 6

Riffles and Runs and Cool, Clear Pools James J. Krupa

CHAPTER 7

The Embattled Wilderness Erik Reece

Works Cited and Consulted

Illustrations

Foreword

As that rare Kentuckian Guy Davenport, among others, has helped us to understand, nothing in existence is now worth as much as whatever theoretically might replace it. No place, no building or garden or park or farm or natural wonder, is any longer safe from destruction. This is because by the determination of industry and the connivance of our institutions, and with the tacit consent evidently of most people, every place or thing has become merely a property exactly equaled by its market price.

The inestimable service of this book, then, is to restore to a renowned and much-loved place its membership, both natural and human, and its history. Robinson Forest, like any place larger than an urban backyard, is a multiplicity of places, each distinct and even unique in character, inhabited by a multiplicity of creatures. The creatures in fact are too numerous to be counted, and their interdependences with one another and with their places are too complex to be fully understood or described. The history of the place is the history of rocks and water, of numberless generations of plants and animals, and finally of humans.

And so it is hardly surprising that The Embattled Wilderness, rightly named, is a collaboration of two authors who have collaborated in turn with many predecessors who have lived in, visited, studied, admired, and loved Robinson Forest. Their book certainly is not the last word on the forest. And we may hope that, because of their work and the continuing efforts of others determined to preserve the forest, they will not be among the last to know it.

As this book abundantly demonstrates, the study of Robinson Forest, like the study of any natural place, reveals it to be not merely a property but also a wonder. It is at present the property of the University of Kentucky, but as a wonder it belongs to us all. The long study of the forest and the records of it kept by university scholars are of inestimable value to the land and people of Kentucky, but so also is the diversity of its uses and interests to all who have been there, who go there now, and who may go there in the future.

The Embattled Wilderness, in addition to the instruction and gratification it will give to its readers, is exactly the full and discerning evaluation of the forest that the University of Kentucky should have authorized long ago as a part of its stewardship. That this book has no such authorization will surprise nobody, but that its authors teach there is at least somewhat to the university’s credit.

Erik Reece and Jim Krupa have given us a book that we would not have had except for their intelligence, dedication, and generosity, a gift greatly needed and not at all to be taken for granted. It belongs honorably to a kinship of such books written over the last century and a half that have begged us for mercy toward our world, which—despite their pleas—has suffered ever increasingly as an accountable sum of exploitable properties.

One of those books, J. Russell Smith’s Tree Crops, was published in 1929. Smith was sometime professor of industry at the University of Pennsylvania and later professor of economic geography at Columbia. The statement of his purpose in Tree Crops is a measure of our cultural decline over the last eighty-three years. It could not imaginably come now from any professor associated with industry or economics, or from most professors of any kind, but it exactly speaks for the work of Professors Krupa and Reece:

… this book is written to persons of imagination who love trees and love their country, and to those who are interested in the problem of saving natural resources—the basis for civilization.

Wendell Berry

Acknowledgments

We would first and foremost like to thank our editors at the University of Georgia Press: Regan Huff, Laura Sutton, Mindy Conner, and John Joerschke. For a multitude of other forms of support and assistance, our thanks go to Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency, Wendell Berry, John Cox, Phil Crowley, Steve Greb, Doug Mock, Rob Paratley, Randall Roorda, Rees Storm, Jeff Stringer, Melissa Young, all of the students in the Summer Environmental Writing Program, and the hundreds of students who have participated in the weekend field trips over the last twenty years.

Introduction

One of the oldest working fire towers in Kentucky stands atop a ridge in the middle of Robinson Forest. The view from the top of the fire tower is a study in stark contrasts: a contiguous fourteen-thousand-acre forest that is almost completely surrounded by strip mines. To look out over the forest’s steep ridges—slopes that novelist James Still called a river of earth—is to understand that Robinson Forest is simultaneously one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in North America and one of the most threatened.

That is why we wrote this book.

Three elements—size, age, and diversity—make Robinson Forest one of the most unusual and important American landscapes east of the Mississippi River. In the 1930s, botanist Lucy Braun discovered that central Appalachia, with its eighty species of trees, was home to the most biologically diverse ecosystem in North America. She called it mixed mesophytic—not too hot or cold, not too wet or dry. Today, Robinson Forest remains a rare example of what many scientists have called the rain forest of North America.

A century before Braun’s discovery, the first white settlers began moving into these remote hollows. They were resourceful homesteaders who needed almost nothing from the world beyond the mountains. For the next hundred years they farmed, hunted, and ran their hogs up and down the steep slopes. Their lives changed very little until the twentieth century, when the railroad finally stretched its tentacles up into the narrow hollows. Timber barons were quick to follow. In 1912, Cincinnati business partners F. W. Mowbray and E. O. Robinson bought a thousand acres of land spanning Perry, Knot, and Breathitt Counties. Over the course of the next decade they logged almost every acre of that land. When they were through, there were no more hickory nuts left to fatten the hogs of the families who had settled this marginal land. The homesteaders quickly migrated to the mill towns that were growing up across the Southeast, and in 1923 Mowbray and Robinson deeded the wasted land to the University of Kentucky. The deed instructed UK to use what would become known as Robinson Forest for agricultural experimentation that would tend to the betterment of the people of the mountain region of Kentucky. Such experiments were to include orchards, model farms, reforestation projects, and soil conservation. Ninety years later, Robinson Forest is once again a spectacular mixed mesophytic (though second-growth) woodland. Unfortunately, industrial development has churned under the mountains surrounding these fourteen thousand acres, turning Robinson Forest itself into an island of biological diversity surrounded by an ever-expanding desert.

From the top of the fire tower, one routinely hears the blasting that has toppled more than five hundred mountains throughout central Appalachia. Known as mountaintop removal, this form of strip mining is the world’s fastest and most destructive method of extracting coal from the ground. Such expediency, combined with this country’s thirst for cheap energy, has turned Robinson Forest into a bull’s-eye on a coal operator’s topo map. It has made Robinson Forest at once an exceptional refuge and an imperiled wilderness.

In an age of rising tuition and faltering support from state government, the University of Kentucky, like all land grant institutions, is under increasing pressure to find new sources of revenue. Coal industry spokespersons routinely call for UK to meet its financial obligations by mining Robinson Forest. Without doubt, coal worth hundreds of millions of dollars lies beneath the mountaintops. And because the value of coal is much easier to quantify than the value of mountain landscape, the argument to not mine Robinson Forest can be a hard case to make. But that is precisely what we do in the following pages. To make our argument, we must ask and answer two fundamental questions:

Why is Robinson Forest worth saving?

How should it be managed in the future?

As authors, one of us comes from the sciences and one from the humanities. We aim to answer our questions by bringing those two perspectives to these pages. We have organized the book into alternating chapters so readers can easily seek out the chapters about Robinson Forest’s natural history and the chapters about its cultural and political history. Having said that, neither of us holds great respect for the modern university’s disciplinary boundaries, and neither of us writes in any strict way within those boundaries. In the end, we believe that only an interdisciplinary approach can provide a comprehensive answer to our questions.

Erik is responsible for the odd-numbered chapters and Jim for the even-numbered ones. Chapter 1 is an overview and introduction to the human history of Robinson Forest. It follows the forest from the main entrance to the headwaters of Coles Fork, the cleanest stream in Kentucky, along the way recounting the early homesteading of the watersheds before they were called Robinson Forest. Then it tells the story of how loggers, strip miners, and the University of Kentucky all found their way into these woods. Chapter 3 explores the educational opportunities that the forest provides as a laboratory for experiential learning. Chapter 5 considers the management of Robinson Forest in the past, present, and future. It proposes steps the University of Kentucky can take to enact a more progressive management plan—a plan that might make Robinson one of America’s premier research forests. Finally, Chapter 7 argues that Robinson Forest represents a crucial model for bringing our unsustainable human economy into line with the inescapable economy of nature.

Chapters 2, 4, and 6 cover the natural history and biodiversity of Robinson Forest from the ridgetops, down the slopes, to the streams that carved out the hollows. Chapter 2 focuses on the ridgetops accentuated by sandstone outcrops, sculptured monuments to events that occurred 300 million years ago. They are the remains of quartz sands that were carried west as the Appalachian Mountains were forming and eroding away. Chapter 4 examines the steep slopes of Robinson Forest and their flora and fauna. The height and steepness of the slopes create diverse conditions ranging from warm and dry near the ridgetops to cool and wet near the streams at the bottom. This range of conditions creates numerous niches, and the slopes thus have a greater diversity of life than any flat forest. Chapter 6 examines the ecology of the streams that flow through Robinson’s hollows and are home to a diverse collection of plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Streams are emblematic of ecological resilience. Almost everything that nature and humanity inflict on the land above them ends up in the streams. Their ability to recover is remarkable, but ecological resilience has its limits. The one event from which the streams of the Cumberland Plateau cannot recover is mountaintop removal.

While we will argue that Robinson Forest is a place of exceptional beauty and biological diversity, its tale is not unique. The story of Robinson Forest is all too familiar to anyone who lives in the United States and cares about preserving natural places. It is as old as the debates between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton about whether the United States should be an agrarian nation of small farms and small towns (as Jefferson wanted) or a country based on manufacturing, big cities, and concentrated wealth (as Hamilton desired). And because Hamilton’s legacy so obviously won out, Jeffersonian Americans have been fighting to preserve rural landscapes ever since. We think of George Perkins Marsh in the Adirondacks, John Muir in Yosemite Valley, and Aldo Leopold in the sand counties of Wisconsin. But the struggle to restrain the forces of industrialization and commercialization continues today in every county in every state—anyplace someone sees an opportunity to convert the natural world into a stack of dollar bills. Those willing to wage the battle must, as Wendell Berry once said, accept heartbreak as a working condition. Certainly, advocates for the land lose far more often than we win. But the alternative is unacceptable: do nothing, let the heart harden, let the destroyers win without a fight. Robinson Forest is a microcosm of what the eastern broadleaf forest once was; but the political, cultural, and economic debates that always loom over the forest are also a microcosm of what happens whenever and wherever the forces of industrial capitalism come into a region that is rich in natural resources but poor by other standards. The story of Robinson Forest is the story of thousands of threatened landscapes, and we believe the lessons culled from this particular place can be applied to many others to show that the natural world is more than a resource meant for human consumption.

In the introduction to his classic story of the land, Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey warned readers not to go looking for the western landscapes of his book, because most of what I write about is already gone. Then he added: This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hand. This book is not a tombstone; nor is it an elegy. Sections of Robinson Forest have been unwisely mined or logged, but at this writing the forest survives. We will make a case for its preservation by explaining its natural and human history, and giving readers a clear understanding of why that past is so important to ensuring that Robinson Forest has a future.

CHAPTER 1

The Cleanest Stream in Kentucky

Erik Reece

There is nothing more eloquent in Nature than a mountain stream.

—JOHN MUIR

On the first day of spring, I pull my truck off a narrow back road at the confluence of Buckhorn Creek and Clemons Fork, deep in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Each stream begins miles from here, up in the headwaters of Robinson Forest. Just up the road I can see the main entrance to the forest. This morning is cool, but the sun has just emerged above the steep eastern ridge behind me. I unroll an old topo map of Robinson Forest on the tailgate, anchor it with a cup of coffee, and try to get my bearings. Fading purple lines undulate out from the ridgetops, defining the contours down to each streambed. Robinson Forest, shaped like a horse’s head looking east, sits atop the eastern section of the Cumberland Plateau between the North Fork and Middle Fork of the Kentucky River. The Cumberland Plateau itself is a 360-million-year-old tableland of sandstone and shale. Stretching from Alabama through Tennessee and across most of eastern Kentucky, it is the world’s largest hardwood forested plateau. And I am standing in its last large forest.

The two main watersheds of Robinson Forest—Clemons Fork and Coles Fork, both about four thousand acres in size—drain into Buckhorn Creek, which flows west in a gentle loop toward Troublesome Creek, which then empties into the North Fork of the Kentucky. Most of the ridgetops in Robinson Forest crest at around twelve to fourteen hundred feet. A steep, straight ridgeline running north from where I am standing divides Clemons Fork’s watershed from Coles Fork and Buckhorn Creek. The stream I’m most interested in today is Coles Fork. Stretching almost to the forest’s eastern boundary, Coles Fork is the cleanest body of moving water in Kentucky, the benchmark by which the Environmental Protection Agency measures