A BEAUTIFUL MINE

Rowdy, Ky.

MY home state contains the largest contiguous forests in southern
Appalachia, which is home to the most biologically diverse landscape
in North America. To sit quietly in such a place is an extraordinary
thing to do. I have heard ovenbirds and black-and-white warblers,
sometimes a wood thrush, as steep ridgelines rose around me, mountains
older than the Himalayas. There is a lot to see in this forest: 250
different songbirds, 70 species of trees, bears, bobcats and my
favorite nonspeaking mammal, the Southern flying squirrel.

Alas, many of these species are vanishing because their habitat is
vanishing. A form of strip mining called mountaintop removal has
ripped apart all of the ridgelines that surround this forest, leaving
miles of lifeless gray plateaus, lunar wastelands. Mountaintop removal
entails the blasting of entire summits to rubble in an effort to
reach, as quickly and inexpensively as possible, thin seams of
bituminous coal. Trees, topsoil and sandstone are dumped into the
valleys below. More than 1,000 miles of streams have been buried in
this way, and an Environmental Protection Agency study found that 95
percent of headwater streams near mines have been contaminated by
heavy metals leeching from the sites.

When it comes to mountaintop removal, a certain fatalism seems to take
hold in Appalachia -- the coal companies are too powerful, the
politicians are corrupt, the regulators won't regulate and the news
media don't care. But we cannot give up on rehabilitating Appalachia.
While most efforts to reclaim the land destroyed by strip-mining have
done little to restore the landscape or improve the region's economy,
one effort holds out special promise. It is a three-year-old program
within the United States Office of Surface Mining called the
Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative, and it is based on
decades of research.

Pioneering foresters found that the best way to grow trees on a strip
mine is not to compact the soil, as has been done on most strip mine
sites, where regrowth has been scant and slow, but simply to plant
saplings in the loose mix of sandstone and shale, known as spoil, that
mines leave behind. High-value hardwoods will grow twice as fast in
this loose rubble as in their native forest, because there is plenty
of room below ground for the roots to take hold, and no competition
from taller trees above ground. The porous spoil acts like a sponge
during heavy rainfalls and greatly reduces the flooding caused by
compacted strip mines.

Last spring I took a ride with Patrick Angel, the initiative's point
man in Kentucky, to a large mountaintop removal site called Bent
Mountain. It was covered with mounded sandstone where foot-high
saplings grew. On one acre, 1,000 disease-resistant American chestnuts
waved like lawn flags in the gray rock. More small trees grew in the
loosened spoil. Mr. Angel told me that the trees' survival rate was 75
percent to 90 percent.

Then Mr. Angel drove me to one of the state's largest strip jobs, the
Starfire Mine. We pulled away from the heavy machinery and cratered
landscape, toward a test site established nine years ago. Back then it
looked like Bent Mountain. Nine years later, we were wandering among
30-foot tall poplar and 20-foot tall white ash. The trees had already
developed a canopy. If I hadn't heard the sounds of mining in the
distance, I could almost imagine myself in a young forest.

"A culture," wrote the poet W. H. Auden, "is no better than its
woods." Over a million acres have been strip-mined in Kentucky since
1980, and the numbers in West Virginia are worse. Mountaintop removal
sites across Appalachia will soon reach the size of Delaware. And much
of that acreage has been "reclaimed" as pasture: companies spray the
mines with a layer of grass seed and hope it takes.

But to replace the forest with a grassland monoculture does not
reclaim what has been lost. A forest sequesters 20 times more carbon
than a grassland, prevents flooding and erosion, purifies streams,
turns waste into food and insures species survival. Reforesting wasted
mine sites would replace failed industrial methods with a system that
mimics nature. Toward that goal, foresters have planted two million
high-value trees on 2,700 acres of abandoned mine land.

Appalachia's land is dying. Its fractured communities show the typical
symptoms of hopelessness, including OxyContin abuse rates higher than
anywhere in the country. Meanwhile, 22 states power houses and
businesses with Kentucky coal. The people of central and southern
Appalachia have relinquished much of their natural wealth to the rest
of the country and have received next to nothing in return.

To right these wrongs, first we need federal legislation that will
halt the decapitation of mountains and bring accountability to an
industry that is out of control. Then we need a New Deal for
Appalachia that would expand the Appalachian Regional Reforestation
Initiative, or create a similar program, to finally return some of the
region's lost wealth in the form of jobs and trees, rebuilt topsoil
and resuscitated communities. Financing should come from a carbon tax
on Appalachian coal bought and burned by utility companies across the
country -- a tax that would also discourage the wasteful emissions of
greenhouse gases. Such a project would educate and employ an entire
generation of foresters and forest managers, who would be followed by
locally owned wood-product industries and craftsmen like Patrick
Angel's brother Mike, who makes much sought-after hardwood chairs just
like ones his grandfather fashioned.

We know that our species, and most other species, will survive only in
a future that burns no coal or oil. The question now is whether we
have the nerve to get there before the world's oldest mountains are
gone.