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

Introduction

1 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 2—Introduction 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 Introduction—3 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...