Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People

Appalachia: A History of Mountains and People was an eye-opener for me. The four-part TV series recently shown on PBS and available here on DVD introduces us to earth’s oldest mountains — bet you didn't know that — in a new way.

It also introduced me to Chris Bolgiano, a woman who is one of the show's talking heads and author of The Appalachian Forest: A Search for Roots and Renewal, a book I am now eagerly reading.

According to Bolgiano (pp. 3-5), the Appalachian Mountains were raised in a series of three "upthrusts." Beginning 480 million years ago, land masses that included today's North America and Europe were "heavy-footed partners in a slow dance." As the land masses borne atop continental plates kept "coalescing, then coming apart," they pushed up the Appalachians like a rug getting bunched up when you try to slide a piece of heavy furniture over its edge.

There were three periods of coalescing: 480-440 mya (million years ago), 400-350 mya, and 290-240 mya. The first two "raised mountains from Pennsylvania to Newfoundland," and even "across Greenland to Ireland and northern Great Britain before finally ending in Norway." In the third period, "mountains erupted from Pennsylvania to Alabama," in what is called the Appalachian Revolution. Geologically, the mountains to the north are but distant cousins to the mountains to the south, which is why today's Adirondack State Park "is not considered to be geologically Appalachian." Nonetheless, we consider the Adirondacks and other northern mountains to be part of Appalachia.

At some point, for a speck of geologic time measuring a mere 70 million years, a shallow inland sea existed in what was becoming today's Appalachia. "That," writes Bolgiano, "was around four hundred million to three hundred million years ago, in the interval between the second and third of the three geologic upheavals that formed the Appalachian Mountains." It was then that "club mosses and horsetails grew a hundred feet tall" in the area around the inland sea. Though there were as yet no actual trees on earth — they hadn't yet evolved — these plants were "dense and prolific enough to die in vast mats, which were slowly compacted into thick seams of carbon." The Appalachian Revolution raised these seams high up to become subsurface coal, the mining of which in the mountains of Appalachia today fuels up to one half of America's electric power generation.

Time has long since worn down what plate tectonics thrust up. "Although the peaks of the Appalachians today are all below seven thousand feet," says Bolgiano, "they may originally have reached fourteen thousand like the Rockies or even twenty thousand feet like the Himalayas." The size-really-matters crowd can console themselves, however, with knowing that the Great Forest once occupying so much land east of the Mississippi "that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without ever touching ground" (p. 22) — the untouched parts of the Appalachians are pretty much all that's left of its vastness — is the primeval ecosystem of perhaps the greatest diversity on the planet:

Here, time has had enough time to grind rocks into a filigreed foundation of soil and stability enough to raise an elaborate structure of biodiversity.

About a million and a half years ago, glaciers began to push southward in pulses of climate. They scoured the forests of the northern Appalachians but stopped about twelve thousand years ago, in central Pennsylvania. To the south, forests moved up and down the mountains in response to flows of cold from the north. Southern plant life was able to evolve fairly steadily, without catastrophic setback, for more than two hundred million years.

Since time began, the highest and best use of the Appalachian Mountains has been to grow trees. In Appalachia lives the richest temperate forest on the planet, rivaled only by its close relatives in a few sections of Asia, all of them remnants of the mother forest. In the coves of southern Appalachia are fifteen hundred species of flowering plants, including more kinds of trees than in all of northern Europe. Here are bewildering nuances of biodiversity, with mosses, fungi, spiders, salamanders, mussels, fish, birds, and peoples like none other on earth. (pp. 4-5)

As the TV series shows — and, I presume, as Bolgiano tells about in parts of the book I have yet to read — the Native American denizens of this magnificent wilderness, mainly Cherokees, managed to live in harmony with it for millennia, disturbing it little. Then came the Europeans, the first of whom kicked off a pattern of subjugating its inhabitants and despoiling its beauty with the expeditions of the Spaniard Hernando de Soto in 1540, in search of the luster of gold.

The Atlantic-seaboard English settlements which became the United States date from the following century. By the 1700s, the English speakers — many of them of my ancestral stock, the Scots-Irish — were pushing westward and speculatively buying up the land of the Piedmont and the Appalachians, in search of a fast buck.

Those who couldn't afford to actually buy the land were squatting on it anyway, taking cues as to how to extract a living from it from the Cherokees ... in between fighting them to secure the land for white settlers in general.

When the Cherokees weren't scuffling with whites, they were learning white ways and adapting to a cash economy in which whites would pay Indians handsomely for, among other things, animal pelts and hides, mainly of bison and deer. Result: animal populations that once renewed themselves seemingly endlessly began to die out, or nearly so.

Meanwhile, the English king wanted every tall tree in the Great Forest to make ships out of. If there was to be a worldwide British Empire one day, ships were a necessity.

Our Revolutionary War took away King George III's rights to the timber here. But if, in post-Civil War America, there was to be an Industrial Revolution, then coal was needed in abundance. Result: the Appalachians were plundered mercilessly for their carbon-rich coal.

As time has gone on, our greed for coal has turned uglier and uglier — see A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia. Coal greed has long served the interests of outsider fat cats who are today's versions of the original absentee speculators in Appalachian land. They live elsewhere and don't participate in the poverty of those they hire to dig the coal out of the ground. Those who are like me and are far removed from the miners' hardscrabble lives can view the films Matewan and Harlan County USA if we want to learn how difficult it was to get mine owners to recognize miners' unions in the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, chestnut blight was accidentally introduced to North America in the early twentieth century, possibly through imported chestnut trees or imported lumber. The Appalachians had been rich in magnificent chestnut trees, but the killer fungus spread and spread and all but wiped them out.

Chestnuts had been an important source of food, for humans in the Appalachians as well as for animals. Maybe someday soon they will be again. Plant breeders are today creating an American chestnut that is resistant to blight. Go figure: what kills the land — civilization and its values — also, eventually, heals the land.