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Q&A: On Old Coal Mines, Re-Growing Native Appalachian Forests [1]
['Will Wright', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2024-03-29
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Anyone who’s ever walked on a large, reclaimed coal mining site full of invasive species atop hard-packed dirt would be impressed by a successful reforestation effort. The soil on mines like those — at least the ones I’ve been to — isn’t quite at Mordor levels but it wouldn’t make for a good tomato patch, either.
Michael French is the director of operations for Green Forests Work, a nonprofit that has planted more than 6.1 million trees across more than 11,600 acres on Appalachian mine sites. They’ve worked across the Appalachian coalfields, including in my home county in southwestern Pennsylvania. I wanted to ask Michael about himself and reforestation, and about how much work lies ahead.
Will Wright, The Daily Yonder: Tell me about where you grew up, and what made you want to do reclamation work.
MF: I’m a Kentuckian by nature. I live in Indiana now but I went to the University of Kentucky. When I was working in college for the American Chestnut Foundation I wanted to do restoration ecology work. One of the biggest problems that I could see in the Eastern U.S. was the loss of American chestnuts and what bringing it back would mean for eastern forests: for the wildlife, for people.
But as I was traveling around Eastern Kentucky, I started looking at all of the surface mines and just the complete loss of forests. So many of them were being converted into grasslands and not really being utilized; and invasive, exotic species were moving in.
I knew a lot of the researchers that were doing mine land reforestation work, and I thought if we could tie the American chestnut restoration to surface mine reforestation, it would just be a win-win all around. So we all started working together.
We worked with the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative to convince the active mining industry to do better reclamation practices for reforestation: plant more native, high-value hardwood trees, including the American chestnut. And it worked out really well.
We started Green Forests Work as a nonprofit that could raise funding, solicit donations, apply for grants, things of that nature, to do these large-scale ecological restoration projects.
DY: And part of the problem with reforestation is how compact the soil is on these reclaimed mine sites, right?
MF: Right. When they passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, they were really focused on slope stability: eliminating the landslides; keeping boulders from coming down mountains and going through people’s houses, sometimes killing people and damaging property; and also water quality concerns.
So when they implemented that law, the mining companies really started compacting the soil, and seeding aggressive grasses and legumes. When you planted trees in that environment, it was like planting trees in a compacted gravel parking lot. The density of the soil was just so tight that roots couldn’t extend easily. Water just kind of ran off of the surface, so the trees in a lot of cases would just die or they would basically be bonsai forests where the trees wouldn’t grow to their potential.
Green Forests Work have planted more than 6 million trees across more than 11,600 acres since 2009. (Image: Green Forests Work)
DY: Can you tell me about the amount of work it takes to go from non-native grasslands and gravel parking lot-like soil to somewhere where trees can thrive?
MF: It really depends on the site. On some of the sites we just bring in a large bulldozer and rip everything up. It’s basically like tilling your garden except on a forest scale. It exposes a lot of soil, so native seeds can just land on it, germinate, and the trees survive.
But if you’ve got thickets of autumn olive, bush honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and a lot of other exotic, unwanted vegetation, we’ve got to first clear that off with a small bulldozer. They use the blade, scrape along, and push all of that off to the side or into piles to make what we call “rabbitat,” basically habitat brush piles for rabbits, small mammals, birds, foxes, and other native wildlife. After that’s done, we’ll bring in the large bulldozer to rip everything up and break up the compaction of the soil.
In the springtime, we’ll purchase hundreds of thousands of tree seedlings, and bring in volunteers and professional planting crews to get the areas planted.
In a lot of cases, we’re also sowing native warm season grasses and wildflower mixes on these areas. Those benefit pollinators, ground nesting birds, things of that nature, and improve the biodiversity to help hold the invasive species at bay.
DY: In the conversation around mine reclamation I’ve heard people talk about these grassland reclamation sites in a positive light, particularly as it relates to species like elk. It seems like there’s more to the story. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
MF: When mining companies are doing the revegetation that they’re required to do for reclamation, they’re not really focused on the diversity of Appalachian wildlife that was there prior to the mining. Many animals like bobcats, warblers and migratory neotropical songbirds require large blocks of intact contiguous forest.
On those grasslands, you do get habitat generalist species that’ll utilize them to a certain extent, like deer and turkeys and elk. But if you look at the elk reintroduction, they released them up onto the mine lands. But the elk started to utilize the forests pretty quickly. They went out and browsed and behaved similar to what the elk, the Appalachian elk, did before they were extirpated from the area.
DY: Tell me about how much is left to do and what the state of funding is for these projects.
MF: Oh, there’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done across the Appalachian region. The Appalachian coalfields extend from Alabama up into Pennsylvania. Since the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act was enacted, about a million and a half acres have been mined and reclaimed.
There are hundreds of thousands of acres out there that are suitable for reforestation — it’s just a matter of raising funding to do that. If we were to do a half a million acres, it would cost around a billion dollars. So there’s always more work to be done, but it’s a great investment in the region.
We’re hiring local contractors to do this work. We’re sometimes bringing in work from outside of the region, which benefits the secondary industries like retail, hospitality and transportation sectors. So we’re not only providing jobs for Appalachians, but also just stimulating local economies through this work
And the ecological benefits extend from cleaner air to cleaner water, because as the forests are growing and the trees are uptaking water, it’s being released directly into the atmosphere instead of to downstream watersheds. So by restoring the forests, you’re buffering those watersheds from storm events and potentially mitigating flash flooding.
And then of course, you’re just benefiting the biodiversity of the area by restoring the forests that were there prior to mining. It benefits, you know, not only the neotropical songbirds, but bears, bobcats, turkey, deer, all of the wildlife that depended on those forests originally.
DY: When you go back to visit a site, when you’ve seen it the way it was and now as the forest is regrowing, I can see it being emotional on some level. Do you feel that at all? What’s your reaction personally when you see this transformation?
MF: Oh, it’s very inspiring and encouraging. You know, I take a lot of satisfaction when I go back to our projects and see that after 10 years, you’ve got a closed intact canopy and you see the leaves building up on the forest floor and there are new species moving in that we haven’t planted.
When we go out and plant, we may plant a dozen tree species, but when you start everything back over and expose that mineral soil, there are so many other native plants that come in that we didn’t plant. You see nature healing itself and there are new species popping up all of the time.
We’re seeing on some of our sites different native wildflowers and orchids popping up. And we know that they’re benefiting the local wildlife — our native bees and pollinators, butterflies and moths.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.
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