The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of the Robinson Forest and the Fight for Its Future by Erik Reece and James J. Krupa (review)

To envision paradise, one must be awakened to its treasure. One must allow imagination to journey through forest lands of oaks and pines, hickories and maples, to climb steep-sloped hillsides while scrambling over rock outcroppings—each “a naturally sculpted piece of art.” We step around plants, ferns, lichens and mosses; listen to the water music of riffles, runs, and pools that form the lifeblood of Robinson Forest.

Authors Erik Reece, professor of English and James J. Krupa, special faculty in the Department of Biology, describe Robinson Forest, a fourteen-thousand acre preserve of natural beauty. The Embattled Wilderness is their plea to maintain sanctuary for this forest: “It is one of the last and largest examples of the oldest, most biologically diverse ecosystem[s] in North America.” Nestled in the corners of Breathitt, Knott, and Perry Counties, it is held in trust by the University of Kentucky. In alternating chapters Reece and Krupa answer two questions: Why is Robinson Forest worth saving? And how should it be managed in the future?

Reece describes a spring excursion into the main entrance of the forest. He travels up Coles Fork, “the cleanest body of moving water in Kentucky.” With intimate knowledge of his subject, Reece gives an overview of Eastern Kentucky and then the strip mining of the area. In further chapters, he explores educational opportunities and management of the forest with suggestions of how UK might make the area a premier research model.

Between 1780 and 1797 very few settlers had migrated into the hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky’s virgin forest. By the 1830s homesteaders had built homes, and their simple lives changed little until advent of the railroads. Environmental damage of immense proportion began between 1880 and 1920 with commercial logging. Companies erected dams to collect water, then dynamited them systematically to move trees downstream toward the sawmills of Troublesome Creek. Farmers expected nature’s flooding, but that was nothing compared to what humans caused. They lost their fields, sometimes their barns and outbuildings. Because of the outcry the practice stopped in 1912.

But then large scale clear-cut logging began in 1913 when F. W. Mow-bray and E. O. Robinson bought fourteen thousand acres, and the settlers moved mostly to mill towns. The timber barons built tracks and tram rails, and harvested almost every tree. “The topsoil ended up as sediment in the streams,” and in 1923 Mowbray and Robinson deeded the useless land to the University of Kentucky. Named Robinson Forest, it was to be utilized “for agricultural experimentation that would ‘tend to the betterment of the people of the mountain region of Kentucky.’” In the mid-twenties a tent camp cleared trees using less invasive methods as did the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) in the mid-thirties as they cut trails and built structures which became classrooms. Ninety years later, Robinson Forest is now once again a spectacular mixed mesophytic (though second-growth) woodland.

James J. Krupa gives the forest’s natural history. He expounds on the geography of the region, the rock strata, and the development of the layers of coal. He tells about the formation of the Appalachian Mountains dating back more than 320 million years. He explains the biodiversity: sandstone outcrops, flora and fauna on the slopes, streams which are the habitat of numerous plants, fish, birds and mammals. He describes the endurable streams—Coles Fork has recovered, almost pristine—but what it cannot survive is mountaintop-removal. “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.”

Robinson Forest tells its story through these...