Chestnuts Used to Restore Strip Mines

For the past 30 years or so, federal regulations essentially said that once a forested mountainside was scraped open and the coal extracted, mine companies had to smooth the soil over and seed it with grass.

But recently, federal regulators have begun promoting the planting of chestnuts and other hardwoods to improve drainage, reduce erosion and return the landscape to a more natural state.

The project has the added advantage of helping to bring the American chestnut back from the brink of extinction.

American chestnuts "were a critical part of the forest and they are gone now, for all intents and purpose," said John Johnson, a former leader in the militant environmentalist group Earth First! and now an employee and student in the University of Tennessee forestry program. "So this in a way is like double research like, how to bring chestnuts back and how to reclaim these sites."

Earlier this month, 60 volunteers in a public-private partnership clambered over a coalfield on Zeb Mountain, 50 miles north of Knoxville, and planted chestnut seeds. The same thing will be done in the coming weeks in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia.

The Zeb Mountain planting was so popular, volunteers had to be turned away. Students, retirees, mining regulators, mine operators, researchers and conservationists participated. They left muddy, wet and enthusiastic after planting more than 200 germinated nuts over a two-acre plot of rocks, boulders and sandstone.

"I was just so excited to be part of it," said Jeff Gately, a senior in civil engineering at the University of Tennessee. "I just thoroughly enjoyed it, just being a part of something that could help reclamation in the future."

In pioneer days, American chestnuts towered 100 feet over the American landscape, providing timber, oil for tanning hides and food for people and wildlife. But a still-lingering blight wiped out 3.5 billion chestnuts from Maine to Mississippi during the first half of the 20th century.

With any luck, the seeds on Zeb Mountain will be 3- to 5-foot saplings next year. But the trees are still susceptible to blight, and Barry Thacker, an environmental engineer and organizer of the Zeb Mountain planting, said they will probably live for only 10 or 15 years. But by then, scientists hope to have developed a blight-resistant hybrid.