EFFORT GAINS SUPPORT OF INFLUENTIAL VOICES
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LEXINGTON --
Kentucky author Wendell Berry and philanthropist-horse breeder-banker Tracy Farmer are among the opponents mobilizing against the University of Kentucky's three-year-old plan to commercially log part of its research forest in Eastern Kentucky.
The school has announced that logging on up to 1,000 acres of the nearly 15,000-acre Robinson Forest could begin within a year at the site north of Hazard.
In an eight-page letter to UK President Lee Todd and the Board of Trustees, Berry wrote that the opposition to the plan stems from the inability to accept "the proposition that the only way to preserve the forest is to clear-cut it."
"And this in Eastern Kentucky, the scene already of total industrial war against the land, the forest and the people," the letter continued.
At least four environmental groups have started lobbying Todd and the trustees to reconsider the plan. The board approved it in 2004.
College of Agriculture Dean Scott Smith rejected the idea that the project is clear-cutting, saying it is a more selective method that doesn't wipe out all the vegetation.
"The harvest method, it leaves a low density of trees throughout the harvest area most significant for this particular study," Smith said. "It leaves the trees and the vegetation around any stream or waterway, no matter how small, undisturbed."
The proceeds of the timber, worth an estimated $500,000, would pay for the project and go to college scholarships for students from the mountains.
Smith said the purpose of the project is to better understand what happens to the surrounding environment when a forest is logged.
"This particular project is designed to assist in improving timber harvesting and minimize its environmental impacts in Kentucky and elsewhere," Smith said.
Tom FitzGerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council, an environmental group, said that regardless of how much vegetation is removed, the project still would disturb 1,000 acres in a 3,800-acre watershed that is so pristine it is used as the gold standard in studies on clean streams.
"They are going to take one-tenth of the forest to study one issue and in the process take out decades of baseline data," he said.
Opponents argue that hundreds of studies have been conducted at the forest, but none has been larger than 50 acres.
"One thousand acres is a huge piece of property," said Farmer, who also is a former member of the Board of Trustees. "It would really do harm. Select-cutting dead trees and so forth would be fine, and that's what everyone thought it was."
There has been an ongoing battle to preserve the state's largest contiguous tract of forest from being mined for the estimated 100 million tons of coal underneath it. Some environmentalists believe that eventually would happen if the timber is harvested. In 1992, UK leased the mining rights on some outer tracts.
Smith said he could speak only for himself when he said he is "categorically opposed to mining the main block of the forest."
When asked for comment from Todd, UK spokesman Jay Blanton said Smith speaks for the president on this issue.
