Research forest is in Eastern Kentucky
By Stephenie Steitzer
ssteitzer@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
Environmentalists have mobilized opposition to the University of Kentucky's plan to commercially log up to 1,000 acres of a nearly 15,000-acre research forest it owns in Eastern Kentucky.
At least four environmental groups have started lobbying trustees and UK President Lee Todd to reconsider the plan, which the board of trustees approved in 2004.
Kentucky poet Wendell Berry and Tracy Farmer, a philanthropist, horse breeder and banker, have joined the fight, which has intensified in its urgency since the school announced logging could begin within 12 months at the site north of Hazard.
In an eight-page letter to Todd and the trustees, Berry said: "The questioner's opposition to the planned experiment may be summed up as their inability to accept, or believe, 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."
UK College of Agriculture Dean Scott Smith said the purpose of the project is to better understand what happens to the surrounding environment when a forest is logged. 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.
"This particular project is designed to assist in improving timber harvesting and minimize its environmental impacts in Kentucky and elsewhere," Smith said.
He rejected the notion 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."
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.
The controversy is the latest chapter in 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.
"Unfortunately for the research forest, there's coal under it," FitzGerald said.
The state declared in 1991 that the main tract of the forest, which consists of about 10,000 acres and is where the timber project is proposed, is unsuitable for mining.
The following year, UK leased the mining rights on some outer tracts, generating about $37 million, a portion of which went to the Robinson Scholars program to help students from the mountains.
In 2002, Todd suggested mining the coal in the main tract to raise money for the struggling scholarship program, but later backed down.
Smith said he could only speak 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.
The proposed project also has opened a new debate over the intentions of logging magnate E.O. Robinson when he deeded the land to UK in 1923 and 1930.
Robinson gave the land that he had clear-cut on the condition that it be used for agricultural research and reforestation. And, if money was made off the land, it should go to the "betterment of the people of the mountain region."
Smith said the timber project fits exactly into Robinson's purpose. Opponents say it's not the purpose that is the problem, but the size. They argue that hundreds of studies have been conducted at Robinson forest, but none have 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."
Reporter Stephenie Steitzer can be reached at
(502) 875-5136
. 
