The environmental legacy of coal mining in Appalachia is not pretty.
Strip mining sheared mountaintops, polluted waterways, and left scars on the land.
An estimated 1.5 million acres of land in seven states—Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee—covered by the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI) remain barren. Grass was planted on some former mine sites, but as time went on it became apparent that was not the solution.
“They’ve turned the world upside down,” Cliff Drouet, a forester with the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, says of the strip mining operations.
Indiana University researcher Michael Hendryx goes further, decrying the environmental, health, and economic downside of strip mining.
“Blowing up mountains, deforesting large tracts of land, polluting streams, destroying roads from all the trucks going by, coating the landscape in dust, making people sick—what other employers are going to move into that area?” he says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, published at the Yale School of the Environment.
Early efforts at reclaiming land that had been strip-mined focused on piling rocks into the excavated mines and covering them with a thin layer of topsoil. Grass, frequently non-native varieties, was planted, and if the new grass held after two years that surface was considered to be successfully reclaimed.
But the land was not good for farming or grazing, and various efforts such as starting vineyards or installing solar arrays were not very successful, Cliff says.
So a new approach used by ARRI—a coalition of government and state agencies, universities, environmental foundations, and the coal industry—focuses on restoring native forests and wildlife so the former mine sites can be used for recreation and hunting.
Erik Reese, in his book Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, calls ARRI a “visionary organization” that could go a long way toward restoring forests that have been decimated by strip mining.
To encourage that reforestation Cliff started a program to train unemployed miners, veterans, and former inmates to operate bulldozers that drag giant claws to break up the compacted soil placed on played-out strip mines. It was a “huge success,” Cliff says, but had to be shelved when funding ran out.
Now he’s hoping the Biden administration will provide seed money to restart the program.
“We’ve got our signs in the front yard,” Cliff says. “People are looking at this ARRI program.”
Indeed, President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $11.3 billion to reclaim abandoned mine land over 15 years. The federal government has also provided millions through separate funding initiatives to states such as Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia for mine reclamation.
Cliff, an affable retired Army engineer who served four combat tours, is especially proud of two programs he worked with through ARRI that have restored former strip mines in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
On 7 acres of land owned by the Boy Scouts’ Camp Tuscazoar in Ohio, the state’s Abandoned Mine Land Program cleaned up an old underground mine and a surface mine, making the area safe for tree planting. Cliff says about 300 volunteers showed up in the pouring rain to plant trees.
The reclamation won an Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation National Award in 2019.
And at the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, volunteers began planting trees in 2012 on 1,000 acres of an abandoned strip mine where one of the four planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, crashed, killing all on board. The trees are being planted to honor the 40 passengers and crew who died in the foiled hijacking. Nearly 3,000 volunteers have helped plant trees, and volunteers will be able to help again in 2022.
Other tree-planting programs that rely on volunteers take place on Earth Day and Arbor Day, but they have been set back by Covid-19.
“Oh my gosh, it hit the brakes,” Cliff says of ARRI’s reclamation work during the pandemic.
Volunteer events were canceled in 2020 and 2021, but are back in full swing in 2024.
More than 50 events for Arbor Month and Earth Day were held across Appalachia in the spring. Hundreds of students plus dozens of state and federal employees, nonprofits, for-profits, elected officials, Scouts, local businesses, and others helped plant trees in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other states.
Volunteer events are listed here on the mining agency’s website.
Featured photo courtesy of the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative.