The Kentucky Kernel

Issue date: 9/24/07 Section: Campus News

Media Credit: Allie Garza Robinson Forest, 15,000 acres of land owned by UK in Eastern Kentucky, is the site of a commercial logging research project that local environmental groups oppose. [Click to enlarge]

Despite opposition from environmental groups, UK plans to go ahead with a forestry research project that will commercially log more than 800 acres of Robinson Forest over the next 12 months.

The logging, which UK's Board of Trustees unanimously approved in 2004, will begin in the next month, said Scott Smith, dean of the College of Agriculture. With the start of the project nearing, local environmentalists have raised concerns that it will cause long-term harm to the forest's streams and ecosystems.

Robinson Forest consists of nearly 15,000 acres of Eastern Kentucky land owned by UK and used for research, teaching and extension education.

Environmentalists, including Kentucky writer Wendell Berry and members of UK's Greenthumb, Kentucky Heartwood and Kentucky Waterways Alliance, are petitioning UK's Board of Trustees to stop the project, which will clear-cut about 10 percent of the forest's acreage.

Greenthumb will host a public forum about the logging plan tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m. in room 102 of White Hall Classroom Building.

Berry suggested in a Sept. 4 letter addressed to Smith that instead of logging parts of Robinson Forest, UK should "send its forest scientists to places where sustainable forestry is being practiced in order to study what is being done."

"Though you have published 'Sustainable Management Guidelines' for Robinson Forest, you and your colleagues apparently are assuming that sustainable forestry actually does not yet exist, and that it can begin only with such a drastic experiment as you propose," Berry said in the letter, which he also sent to UK President Lee Todd, Board of Trustees members and environmental group leaders.

E.O. Robinson donated the property to UK in 1923 and placed it under a trust requiring the forest to be used "for the purpose of agricultural experimental work and teaching, and for the practical demonstration of reforestation."

The logging proposal meets that requirement, Smith said in an interview.

"This plan is solely about research," Smith said. "That is the purpose of the property and what it has always been used for."

The project will measure the effects of logging on perennial streams, said Jeff Stringer, an extension forestry professor who has helped develop the plan and obtain bids from logging companies.

Approximately 1,100 acres of Robinson Forest will be used in study, Stringer said, and about 800 of those acres will be logged.

"The size was dictated by research," Stringer said in an e-mail. "To this end, experimental units had to be large enough to contain a perennial stream."

UK will receive revenue from selling the timber to commercial logging interests. The university has not announced a winning bidder or the projected value of the project.

The study will consist of 10

sub-watersheds, drainage areas that feed into larger basins and eventually reach streams, with each test area being slightly less than 140 acres, Stringer said. Two of the areas will be used as controls and will not be affected, while the other eight will be logged.

Ann Phillippi, a biologist who graduated from UK and was president of Students to Save Robinson Forest from 1982 to 1983, said this approach to research will cause long-term damage to the forest's ecosystems.

"This specific research proposal fails to adequately explain that the slopes of Robinson Forest, especially in the areas where they propose to log, are very steep," Phillippi said. "When walking up the slopes from many of those streams, one can usually reach out and touch the forest floor from head-height without bending over.

"The watersheds are much too steep to log without destroying that fine, high-quality, old-growth forest ecosystem and the streams that traverse it."

Stringer acknowledges that the research will have some short-term effects on the basins but said it will not create lasting harm.

"These changes will not permanently impair the sub-watersheds from regaining their integrity over time," Stringer said.

"Streams in these watersheds will be little affected," he said. "All timber is being removed uphill, and no treatments or cutting will occur around the main branch of the primary watershed involved."

The Comprehensive Timber Management Plan, which the Board of Trustees passed unanimously in 2004, specified how the revenue from timber in the forest must be used.

Half of the first $250,000 of the profit in a fiscal year must be used to maintain research infrastructure in the forest, according to the plan. The other half goes to the Robinson Scholars Program, which also receives money from private donations, Smith said.

Of the remaining profit, 40 percent must go toward supporting research and education in the forest, with the remaining 60 percent going to the scholarship, which supports first-generation college students from Eastern Kentucky.

Some opponents of the logging plan question UK's financial motives.

"We are concerned with the apparent dependency that the university has on timber profits to support the scholarship fund," said Jason Flickner, water resources program director for Kentucky Waterways Alliance.

"While maintaining the Robinson Scholars Program is important," he said, "KWA is concerned the capital generated through the currently proposed logging project will only supplement the scholarship's budget for a minimal duration, and future logging and potential mining proposals will be brought forward for revenue generation."

Berry said he had similar concerns.

"We must assume that the proposed clear-cut is not an alternative to strip mining, but instead is the first step in a business plan that will culminate in strip-mining," Berry said in the letter to Smith.

"I feel sure, and for good reason, that the pressure on the forest is not scientific but financial," Berry said.

Concerns about mining Robinson Forest are unfounded, Smith said.

"There has been implication recently that this research project is an attempt to mine Robinson Forest," he said. "There is no plan to mine. In my opinion, this opposition is a false issue."

In 1991, UK approved mining in 5,000 outlying acres that E. O. Robinson donated along with the forest's central block. The proceeds from that mining were used to establish the Robinson Scholars Program in 1995.

Todd told UK trustees in 2003 that he had "no interest in pursuing mining of coal reserves in the main block of Robinson Forest," according to a Sept. 16, 2003, news release.

The board voted in 2004 not to allow mining on the 10,000 acres of the forest's central block in Breathitt, Knott and Perry counties, Smith said.

"As far as I'm concerned, that option is still off the table," he said. "It was the decision of the Board of Trustees in 2004 not to allow mining on the main block. That has not changed."

E-mail bthomas@kykernel.com

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