Feeling sad, scared, frustrated? Come plant a forest in Eastern Kentucky | Opinion

A culture is no better than its woods.

- W.H. Auden

As a response to Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, I helped start a tree-planting organization called Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation. During the next eight years, we planted more than 8,000 native saplings on abandoned strip mines in the eastern part of Kentucky.

Each of those trees, over its lifetime, will sequester more than 20 tons of heat-increasing carbon. And as the most recent floods in that region have reminded us, those trees will also play an integral part in preventing future flooding by absorbing rainwater and reducing erosion.

Now Trump has been elected again and the new administration appears even more determined than the first to extract as much coal and gas from Appalachia as possible while it deregulates those same industries and vindictively shuts down clean energy initiatives. It also aims to bypass endangered species protections to ramp up logging in national forests.

So again, I ask myself the same question I asked nine years ago: how can despair and frustration get converted into something useful for the land and the people of Kentucky?

As the Trump administration summarily dismisses federal stewards of the land, often in heartbreaking fashion, I believe it becomes even more important for the rest of us, as citizens, to step into that void to care for the God-given, natural world.

I therefore no longer wish to only call on artists and writers, but on all Kentuckians, to join in an effort to combat flooding, climate change and loss of vital species in the woodlands of our state. I want to call on all Kentuckians to help resurrect barren strip mines and turn them once again into thriving forests.

Therefore, Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestations will now become Kentuckians for Reforestation. I urge anyone reading this to join this work. We will begin our inaugural tree planting on Saturday, April 12 on a former strip mine site in Knott County. Contact me at: erikreece@uky.edu, and I will give you all the details you need to begin helping this cause.

We will partner with Green Forests Works, a non-profit forestry organization that has pioneered a technique for growing native hardwoods on strip mines. It works like this: invasive shrubs will be bulldozed from the planting site. The mines’ heavily compacted soil will be ripped loose with an impressive tail-dragger. Then we will plant over a dozen species of native hardwood saplings in that mix of sandstone and shale. These trees will grow twice as fast as they normally would because of the loosened soil, with an inspiring survival rate of 75-90%.

John Keats once imagined that human beings might one day transcend all of the animus that divides us and, instead of being “a heath of briars,” we would “become a grand democracy of Forest Trees!” I often think about all the things a forest has to teach us about human communities: the importance of integrity, stability, diversity, thrift, subsistence, interdependence, cooperation and health.

Through our work as Kentuckians for Reforestation, I believe we can begin to restore the health of our native landscapes at the same time we work to replant the saplings of a real democracy.

Erik Reece is the author of “Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness” and “Clear Creek: Toward a Natural Philosophy.” He teaches writing at the University of Kentucky.

This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 11:21 AM.