Ecologist leads effort to rescue plants on mining, logging sites

Sunday Gazette Mail, Sept. 5, 2004
by Tara Tuckwiller

ARTIE – Unfortunately for goldenseal, it likes to grow where coal and timber do.

It was unfortunate for Dean Myles, too. His job as an intern with the U.S. Department of Agriculture was to find patches of the elusive medicinal herb in Southern West Virginia for researchers to study.

Trillium

He asked locals who had lived in the hollows for years, many of whom had long harvested medicinal herbs to treat their own ailments. They knew where the goldenseal was, all right. At least, where it had been.

"Every person I would talk to said, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s some up on the mountain, but they’ve stripped and timbered it away,’" Myles said. "Probably 50 percent said [the goldenseal] had been destroyed by mining and timbering."

And it wasn’t just goldenseal. It was ginseng, cohosh, lady’s slipper and trillium. Serviceberrry, dogwood, flame azalea and butternut. Native plants that provide medicine, extra cash, or simply beauty to the people of Southern West Virginia.

	Goldenseal

Some of the plants are quite picky about their habitat. They won’t grow just anywhere. And their habitat was being destroyed.

Myles decided to try to rescue valuable plants that lay in the paths of bulldozers all over the coalfields. He launched the Conservation of Appalachian Medicinal Plants project at Mountain State University, where he was a student.

Now employed full time by the MSU Medicinal Botanicals Program, Myles spent every moment he could this spring and summer searching out plants in danger. In the fall, when the plants are dormant, he and his cadre of volunteers – some ecologists like him, and some local people who just want to help – will move the plants to safe places where they can be used for teaching.

…Recently, Myles visited a possible rescue site, 4,000 acres on a remote mountainside in Raleigh County that’s scheduled for mountaintop removal. …"You can see where they took the top of the mountain," he said. He turned around and faced the creek that split that ridge from the next one. That ridge will be mined, too. "It’s like that everywhere," he said. "All through Dry Creek, Whitesville ... It’s pretty much one big surface mine."

	Lady's Slipper

Preliminary results show that… if you cut down the trees that shade a stand of goldenseal, the extra sunlight will throw the levels of two medicinal alkaloids in the plant out of whack, reducing its value.

That is, if the plant survives at all.

…"I have now seen firsthand how fast the habitat, populations of plants, and entire ecosystems can be destroyed," he wrote.

"One natural population of goldenseal that I observed in a healthy forest in August 2003 is now extinct, and the forest is a desolate mountain, stripped of its trees and wildlife for a coal mine operation."

…Goldenseal, along with ginseng, is listed in Appendix II of the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates international trade of such plants. In 1997, the World Wildlife Fund named goldenseal as one of the 10 most threatened species in international trade. Goldenseal grows only in the northeastern quarter of the United States, and usually only in thin groups in very specific microclimates (at the head of an ephemeral stream on a north- or east-facing slope with rich soil that remains constantly moist and is shaded by large deciduous trees).

Ginseng

Nine states consider goldenseal endangered or threatened, but not West Virginia.

"I don’t think the state will ever put ginseng or goldenseal on the endangered species list because of coal mining," Myles said. "Nobody wants to stop the production of coal." But OVEC aims to end MTR!