As that rare Kentuckian Guy Davenport, among others, has helped us to understand, nothing in existence is now worth as much as whatever theoretically might replace it. No place, no building or garden or park or farm or natural wonder, is any longer safe from destruction. This is because by the determination of industry and the connivance of our institutions, and with the tacit consent evidently of most people, every place or thing has become merely a property exactly equaled by its market price.

The inestimable service of this book, then, is to restore to a renowned and much-loved place...

One of the oldest working fire towers in Kentucky stands atop a ridge in the middle of Robinson Forest. The view from the top of the fire tower is a study in stark contrasts: a contiguous fourteen-thousand-acre forest that is almost completely surrounded by strip mines. To look out over the forest’s steep ridges—slopes that novelist James Still called “a river of earth”—is to understand that Robinson Forest is simultaneously one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in North America and one of the most threatened.

That is why we wrote this book.

Three elements—size, age, and...

On the first day of spring, I pull my truck off a narrow back road at the confluence of Buckhorn Creek and Clemons Fork, deep in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Each stream begins miles from here, up in the headwaters of Robinson Forest. Just up the road I can see the main entrance to the forest. This morning is cool, but the sun has just emerged above the steep eastern ridge behind me. I unroll an old topo map of Robinson Forest on the tailgate, anchor it with a cup of coffee, and try to get my bearings. Fading...

Robinson Forest is in a geological region known as the Cumberland Plateau, and in the Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, named for the layers of bituminous coal beneath the surface. The Cumberland Plateau runs along the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains from Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia down through Tennessee into Georgia and Alabama. The rock strata exposed in the plateau date back more than 320 million years and are tied to the formation of the Appalachian Mountains.

Although old and weathered now, the Appalachians may once have been as impressive and imposing as the Himalayas are today. They were...

One Sunday morning in March, I was driving a truck full of college students up a narrow logging road that runs along the western boundary of Robinson Forest. It was the middle of the spring semester. Back in January, on the first day of “eng 401: Nature Writing,” I had informed the class that there would be a mandatory weekend field trip to Robinson Forest. I wanted this small group of students to experience the forest firsthand, and I was hoping that by writing in an untrammeled natural setting, some of them might experience the minor epiphanies that define Thoreau’s...

To truly experience Robinson Forest requires complete immersion in the woods away from roads and buildings, but few who visit the forest have the time or the opportunity to do that. Most visitors view the tall, steep slopes that define Robinson Forest from the comfort of Camp Robinson, or perhaps hike the path to the fire tower for a deeper experience. Labored breathing and sweat make it clear that these slopes are steep and tall. And yet this hike is a very mild dose of the challenges Robinson’s slopes can offer. You must get off the path to understand that....

If you stand at the top of the fire tower in Robinson Forest and look around, as I have often done, your gaze will slowly register a strange and most unnatural contrast—the most biologically diverse forest in North America is surrounded by nearly barren plateaus created by mountain-top-removal strip mining (MTR). From the fire tower you can see that Robinson Forest is an island of life surrounded by a ring of death: the laws of nature hemmed in by the unnatural hubris of the industrial mind.

Because the strip mine is a product of the industrial mind, it embodies...

Water is the lifeblood of Robinson Forest. Pumped into the forest as rain and snow, it trickles through the forest floor like blood moving through a maze of capillaries. When trees are leafed out and growing, they pull enough water to fill several reservoirs up their trunks and into their leaves, where it is transformed by photosynthesis into sugar and oxygen. Much of the water departs the leaves as vapor. Water that escapes capture by trees trickles down into the hollows and forms the headwaters of infant streams. Like veins, headwater streams merge into larger streams that increase in volume...

On a sunny day last November, I took a long walk up Clemons Fork to see the forest’s last great display before it settled into winter dormancy. The maples and beeches that grow along the banks wore a final shimmer of orange and gold; closer to the stream, hornbeams slowly let fall their slender red leaves. A belted kingfisher swooped back and forth over the water as if running cable for an invisible suspension bridge. After a few days of rain, the current was running strong beneath the low-hanging fronds of hemlock, and at least in my mind, the pull...