Commentary: West Virginia stewardship is key to our prosperous future

This October I picked cranberries in the West Virginia bogs. It was a banner year with fields full of red. I could have picked more, but just harvested enough for myself.

The profusion of berries left me wonder-struck with the thought that if we sustainably harvested Appalachia instead of ravaging it, we’d be immensely prosperous. Such abundance. What would West Virginia look like if we fed the golden geese of our resources instead of killing the flock for a one-time prize?

Our history is a relentless teacher. Take timber for instance — the boom and bust cycles created frenetic towns now empty. And only a few old growth tree groves remain such as at Cathedral State Park in Aurora, West Virginia, evidence of our rapacious hunger and insatiability.

And so I tread carefully over the sphagnum moss in the bog which supports rare pink orchids and pitcher plants, their hairy mouth traps open for insects. If we are not mindful we may once again become a “place of ugliness, a monotonous panorama of destruction,” as one writer put it in 1900, amid our clearcut forests on fire and smoking from the destruction.

But there’s hope. Nature regenerates. Can it come back from mountain top removal mining? Usually not. Mine reclamation (the idea of returning mountains to their original contour before they were blasted, or spraying them with grass seed in lieu of a forest) is laughable. A despicable coal company ruse.

And reclaiming land after a future abandoned data center sounds impossible. Some damage is too Herculean to be undone. So we must be purposeful and highly circumspect in our land use plans.

West Virginia Agriculture Commissioner Kent Leonhardt echoed this point in a statement on the Department of Agriculture’s website writing, “When it comes to data centers and other large-scale developments, I strongly encourage developers to consider land that is less suitable for agricultural production. We should not be cutting ourselves short on the prospect of agricultural development by taking farmland out of production.”

This is particularly notable because some of our largest high-impact data centers are being built along prime Ohio River farming lands. We have little flat land in West Virginia. These developments undermine generations of future farming potential. Leonhardt writes that our agriculture annually has a $5 billion impact.

Healthy land is inextricably bound to West Virginia’s prosperity. Full stop. And our woods are slowly recovering from the late 1800s when about 30 billion board feet of lumber were cut in West Virginia. (So much that if laid side by side it is estimated to be enough to build a boardwalk 2 inches thick and 13 feet wide from the earth to the moon.)

And now West Virginia is the third most forested state with over 12 million acres of trees, writes the West Virginia Division of Forestry.

Such positive statistics are buoyed by human efforts such as red spruce restoration projects spearheaded by groups like the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative (CASRI) and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.

Spruce trees matter in West Virginia because they anchor a high-elevation ecosystem that shelters native wildlife, stores carbon and purifies water. Red spruce are regrowing in areas like Canaan Valley State Park, Kumbrabow State Forest, Cranesville Swamp and the Mower Tract in the Monongahela National Forest.

I saw progress in action this year when I volunteered with a group planting seedlings in Pocahontas County. We planted hundreds of 3-year-old seedlings. A senior wetlands scientist volunteer said: “If you remove the stress, the land will heal itself.”

Indeed, plants that were dormant generations are making comebacks, albeit slowly in human time — as it takes 1,000 years to create 1 meter of peat. But progress nonetheless.

Do not despair. Let’s re-calibrate our definition of an ecological victory. Small victories matter as much as big ones. Healthy land is sacrosanct and integral to a viable West Virginia future. Fixating on short-term gains is the antithesis of prosperity. We have a sacred compact with our land to be in reciprocity with it and to shift the power imbalance. Change is possible.