Forest talk on Coal River.

To comprehend the crisis in the "mother forest" of central Appalachia you have to get beneath the canopy and listen.

On a mid-December morning, my commuter plane enroute from Washington, DC, to Charleston, West Virginia, traverses in a matter of minutes Virginia's historic Piedmont. Gaining altitude, the plane bisects the ridge and valley of the Shenandoah, where Skyline Drive meanders south toward the Blue Ridge Parkway. Soon after, our horizon opens onto the great Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus, a crumpled terrain of low ridges, coves, and hollows cloaked in a leafless forest. On this forest - the world's oldest and biologically richest temperate-zone hardwood system - the pioneering ecologist E. Lucy Braun confered the name "mixed mesophytic."

Centered in southern West Virginia, the mesophytic has issued for more than a hundred million years from the black, unglaciated loam of the Central Appalachian coves. Studying the virgin forest in 1916, Braun theorized that this wellspring of arboreal diversity, which ecologists have nicknamed the "mother forest," is the likely ancestral source of most temperate-zone forest species in the eastern United States.

Whereas most forest types are dominated by two or three species, the mixed mesophytic harbors 80 woody species including beech, yellow poplar, basswood, sugar maple, chestnut, sweet buckeye, red oak, white oak, yellow locust, birch, black cherry, cucumber tree, white ash, red maple, sour gum, black walnut, and various hickories. Yet the coherence of this forest remains one of American's best-kept secrets.

In the 1950s Braun returned to the central Appalachian coves to examine a second-growth forest that remained "mixed mesophytic." In the 1990s, however, ecologists are warning that this second-growth forest could be suffering a fatal blow from nitrogen emissions and sulfate issuing from electrical and chemical plants in the Kanawha, Ohio, and Tennessee river valleys.

To comprehend the condition of the forest, you have to get under the canopy and listen. From Charleston, drive the interstate as far as Marmet and then head south along Route 94 as it follows the famous tributary of Lens Creek to Racine. From there Route 3 winds eastward through District 17 of the United Mine Workers, where the event of the John Sayles movie "Matewan" are local history. The road runs through dozens of coal camps, towns, and hollows along the Big Coal River - until it comes to Montcoal on the Marsh Fork, where science writer John Flynn directs the Lucy Braun Association's Appalachian Forest Action Project from an old coal-company house. Since last summer Flynn has been working with residents of the hollows and coal towns along his native Coal River to establish permanent plots for monitoring forest health.

Because little historical data is available on species mortality in this portion of the forest, scientists have begun culling the collective memory of long-term residents for information on species decline. In beer joints and living rooms, on porches and on ridgetops, one hears people talking about a forest on the wane.

"The men that like to hunt and be out ginsenging and will be all over the woods," said Robert Allen of Peach Tree. "I've heard a lot of them talk about the way the timber is falling and dying out."

Following in the wake of the American chestnut are red mulberries, hickories, red and black oak, and yellow locust - that last a rot-resistant cove species known among early colonists as "shipmast locust" and distinguished locally from the junk black locust that sprouts in open fields and makes a bad fence.

From a porch at the head of Rock Creek Hollow, John Flynn and Ben Burnside discuss the vanishing nut trees. "Of course, the butternut," said Ben, "they're just about a thing of the past - most of them are dying."

"Remember the chincapin (chinquapin) nuts?" John asked him, referring to the shrub Castanea pumila.

"They're gone too, ain't they?" Ben observed.

Not entirely.

"Chincapins is about all died out, but there's one tree growing up Sandlick," Mae Bongalis, 78, informed us later in Naoma. "I seen this little branch a-hangin' by the door of that little market right by the road? And the guy owns that place, he's a good friend, and I said, 'Beano, where did you get them chincapins?' He said, 'You know, Mae, nobody knows what they are how did you know?' I says, 'I picked many a one of them,' and he said, 'Right up there in that hill's one tree.' And I said, 'Any little ones comes up, dig me one.'"

Around the unique biological diversity of this forest, residents of the Cumberland and Allegheny plateaus have for generations created a rich and distinctive culture. The fertile coves that once replenished the eastern deciduous forests teem with plants, wildlife, and ruins that are touchstones to community history and values.

That's why, on Coal River as elsewhere, harvesting timber without regard for community values amounts to cultural assault. As Vernon Williams, 48, of Peach Tree put it, "They're taking our dignity by destroying our forest." Hence, clearcutting (not to be confused with selective cutting) is dreaded even more than stripmining (not to be confused with deep mining), and the talk unfolding on Coal River bristles with the indignation of those forced to witness plunder. Here one doesn't hear that corporations "harvest" timber. Rather, one hears that they "tear the woods to hell," they "log it to death," and they "don't think about the wild game."

From the highway the canopy appears verdant in summer and still enthralls viewers in fall. But to those accustomed to spending time beneath the canopy, the dieback and disease feed a growing sense of a world gone awry. Old-timers here grew up tracking the demise of the American chestnut. A middle-aged generation eulogizes the red mulberry.

Up on Clay's Branch, Danny Williams, who cuts timber for a living, tabulates the present crop of decline: "Now it's the red oak, now it's going into your beech - you can't find no solid beech, no solid gum. Your poplars is not as bad but getting there, and then your hard sugar maple, they're hollow. Yellow locust is gone. And if it's standing up, it's dead. It just ain't fell yet."

Other residents report trees snapping off in high winds ("snap locusts" as Joe Aliff wryly terms them), littering the forest floor with pieces of the canopy. The trees seem to fall over "for no reason at all," disclosing dessicated root wads and dappling deep woods with unaccustomed light, "throwing" limbs on people walking and working in the woods, gushing water "like a faucet" onto chainsaws, and erupting into sylvan grotesques of exaggerated, nitrogen-induced growth.

"There's something wrong with the roots of the trees," said Kenny Pettry, 69, of Sundial. "You can snap off the roots of the locust. Back when I was a kid, we had to blow out the stumps of locust with dynamite."

Ecologists are linking these symptoms to long-term deterioration from airborne toxins. Ironically, the "low-sulfur" coal barrelling out of the central Appalachian hollows in massive trucks returns its sulfur through the air, via the towering smokestacks of coal-burning plants in the Tennessee and Ohio river valleys, to asphyxiate the standing forest. Here the hollows breathe, "drawing air like a chimney," inhaling and exhaling what Joe Aliff, a disabled coal miner in his 50s, calls "that damned blue haze." It comes, says Aliff, "like a thief through the air."

Forester, acknowledging a problem, argue the causes, implicating a complex array of blight, fire, agricultural abuse, and disease. Ecologists counter that a healthy forest system has historically been able to tolerate such incursions, and that the unprecedented failure of multiple species to regenerate is worth serious and immediate scrutiny.

Orie Loucks, who holds the endowed chair of ecosystems studies for the state of Ohio, argues that three factors have profoundly altered the mixed-mesophytic system: 1) aluminum toxicity, related to acidification (from sulfates, in excess of 30 pounds per year per acre) and from loss of calcium that buffered the soft on the southern slopes; 2) nitrogen deposition, which upsets the carbon-nitrogen balance and reduces the capacity of trees on the northern slopes to resist fungal infections; and 3) ozone deposition, which diminishes the photosynthetic capacity of trees, which in turn diminishes the roots.

What constitutes a normal, healthy, mature forest? And how are forests to be defined? Local collective memory, formed over generations of interaction with the forest, contains some answers.

"When I was young" said Kenneth Pettry, "I hunted a lot. You couldn't go a hundred feet in the mountains until you found walnuts, beeches. You don't see 'em no more. Hickory was thick then. You could go into a grove of hickories and had to watch where you stepped or you'd fall in the nuts. It ain't that way now. Dad showed me and my two older brothers how to tap sugar maples. Show me a sugar maple today you could get a pint out of. The walnuts that stood in our barnyard was six foot through."

The big trees are scarce but not gone. Residents monitor them in conversation - "You know," said Dennis Dickens of Peach Tree, a retired coal miner and avid ginsenger, "there was a red oak up this hollow here that fell down, I'd say about five years ago, was the largest red oak I ever saw. I believe it was five foot in diameter."

The forest talk we hear on Coal River may not at first blush seem relevant to national goals of forest preservation and management, particularly since none of the forested land on Coal River falls within a national forest. Yet the National Forest Management Act of 1976 charges the Forest Service to maintain for the nation "a natural resource conservation posture that will meet the requirements of our people in perpetuity."

On Coal River, descriptions of the forest in crisis spell out those requirements, modelling a forest that is a dynamic, healthy, and human environment. This forest comprises a landscape of commons for gathering, hunting, working, and contemplation. Regarding that last benefit, Danny Williams advised me, "You get downhearted; you don't feel like nothin'. You come to these woods in the fall, go back as far as you can go. Back on a sunny ridge, and under them trees and lay down and just think. You can hear a leaf break loose from a limb. That's how peaceful it is. Twenty or 30 years from now, you're not going to have that."

Mixed-age stands in this diverse forest provide den trees for squirrels, hive trees for bees, and a rich variety of nuts and berries. There are places for bears to den, bedding and feeding areas for deer, and coves for harvesting ginseng, ramps, bloodroot, yellow root, woolly britches (a spring green) and molly moochers (morel mushrooms), and for relishing moccasin flowers (yellow orchids), and lady's slippers (pink orchids). Here we learn that every wrinkle viewed from the air more than likely has a name, and that the names cryptically index forest or natural history: Ground Squirrel Hollow, Honey Camp Hollow, Redbud Hollow, Seng Creek, Isaac's Fork, Dogfight, Beelog Hollow, Ma Kelly Branch.

"There used to be a lot of wild bees around here," said Robert Allen, "and now they're dying out. The wild bees would be in the older trees. The younger trees wouldn't be big enough."

Opponents of stricter environmental regulation often argue that cleaning up the environment costs jobs. Indeed, high rates of unemployment in central Appalachia, where most of the resources are controlled by absentee owners, are cited to rationalize controversial forms of resource extraction and use. In the national media, workers are often aligned with corporations promising jobs against environmentalists. In Stickney, Gary Bone, an unemployed coal miner, challenges the pitting of economic progress against environmental health: "You can't destroy our environment just because we have a depressed economy."

Forest talk on Coal River constitutes a perspective missing from the national debate over environmental policy. Under the present system of national resource management, most of the local talk can be dismissed as anecdotal, unscientific, uninformed conjecture. A national "politics of time" authorizes "natives" to represent the past, not to shape the future.

A key strategy in this politics entails exploding time and space into vast quantities that trivialize present human impacts and concerns. Thus, for instance, in his bid for "ecorealism," Gregg Easterbrook writes, "North America does appear a great deal different compared with how it must have looked five centuries ago. But what is nature's perspective? . . . Mining scars and forest clearcuts exist in distressing number, but there are a hundred wooded, placid acres for every one in the distressed category."

Left gapingly at issue here is the process for determining who has to live with the abused landscapes. Federal agencies, endeavoring to shift toward "ecosystem management," grapple with the question of where human beings fit into ecosystems and how to factor conflicting human values into forest management. As we sift through the rubble of progress and tally the cost, the voices beneath the canopy deserve a hearing.

MARY HUFFORD - an official of the Lucy Braun Association for the Mixed Mesophytic Forest, is a folklorist with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.