As I count the days to my three-quarter-century mark, the life circles grow ever larger. Since August, I wrote a book about one character from the dawn of my professional career in 1985; and I wrote a column about a hike with another.
On Saturday, I will introduce Jeff Stant as the featured speaker at a Grass Roots Forest Forum at the Monroe County Public Library. He will talk about wilderness in Indiana.
I met Jeff in that very building in 1981, after he spoke about wilderness in Indiana and recruited me to be the Upland Group Sierra Club’s newsletter editor – my maiden journalistic experience.
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The forum is sponsored by a number of grassroots groups, including Indiana Forest Alliance and Heartwood, along with the Sierra Club’s Hoosier Chapter, Uplands Network, and Winding Waters Group.
The focus will be on the Trump administration’s Roadless Rule Recission, which removes protections that limit logging and road building in roadless areas of national forests like the Hoosier National.
Of particular interest are areas like Brown County’s Nebo Ridge and Browning Mountain, Monroe County’s Pate Hollow and Hays Trail, and the Hickory Ridge Horse Trails in Lawrence and Jackson Counties. All are part of a nearly 45,000-acre proposed expansion to the 12,953-acre Charles C. Deam Wilderness wildlands complex.
“At the forum we’ll screen Crown Jewels-America’s Old Growth Forests and hear from Jeff Stant about how rescinding the roadless rule will impact the Deam Wilderness here in Indiana,” the Sierra Club says. “We’ll also hear from Steven Higgs about our collective efforts to secure an expansion of the Deam Wilderness.”
When our circle began forming 45 years ago, Jeff was in college. I was transitioning from a Thoreauvian-style experiment of seven years living in woods to a roach-infested apartment and driving a city bus. I was urged to “go to a Sierra Club meeting or something.” Ordered, actually.
I did, and I witnessed this kid named Jeff Stant, clad in an olive-green Army jacket, passionately arguing for a protected wilderness in Indiana. 1981 was the last of a seven-year struggle to establish the permanently protected Deam.
As he spoke, Jeff surveyed every eye in the audience, including mine.
The Uplands Group board, which met in the Indiana Memorial Union, included the legendary Indiana Sierran Al Strickholm and future IDNR Nature Preserve Biologist Hank Huffman.
We put out one newsletter (I think), and I drove Sen. Richard Lugar’s Environmental Aide Jeff Burnham to the Deam’s dedication on Frog Pond Ridge in 1982.
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At the time I was searching for a way to earn a living with my Nikon and followed it into post-grad work at the once-great IU School of Journalism. The mission: find out if I could earn a living in photojournalism or, ideally, if I could write.
Jeff asked what I was going to do in journalism.
“Write about the environment,” I replied.
My Final Masters Project in 1985 was titled Clearcutting the Hoosier National Forest: Professional Forestry or Panacea?
Eleven years later, I dedicated a chapter about Jeff’s leadership as the Hoosier Environmental Council’s (HEC) first executive director in my first IU Press book Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana.
One of the 40-year circles I recently closed was with Andy Mahler, who joined Jeff in the successful struggle against the 1985 Hoosier National Forest Clearcutting Plan and worked with him up to the moment Andy died in August 2025.
After another intense, seven-year public debate, the U.S. Forest Service in 1992 adopted the Conservationists Alternative as the Hoosier National management plan, which had been written by the HEC, under Jeff’s leadership.
One lasting memory from writing Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves, was walking from the Lazy Black Bear drive to the house with Jeff’s voice resonating on Andy’s cell the entire way.
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In the book, Andy includes Jeff when brazenly asked to narrow the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of grassroots activists he’s worked with to a few to include in his legacy.
Here’s some of what he said:
“Jeff has demonstrated throughout his life that he will do what has to be done to keep the logging from destroying these last best places in the state of Indiana. And I’m deeply grateful to Jeff for his work.”
“He’s been doing it with a greater familiarity with the levers of power and the political and economic realities within the state of Indiana than I have, and with incredibly pure and fierce passion and commitment to protecting the wildest places left in the state.”
“Jeff will not rest until those forested areas have the highest possible degree of protection that can be afforded by law or administrative fiat.”
Jeff and I actually reconnected last February for the first of a planned series of adventures in search of old-growth forest in the Deam expansion area over the next year, which connects the second recently completed circle.
While in the early stages of planning an Andy Mahler-style book on the Deam, I am writing a series of monthly columns for the Limestone Post magazine called Revisiting the Deam.
I hiked the entirety of what was then known as the Hickory Ridge Trail, 20-plus miles, for my first public slideshow at the library called A Photographic Journey Through the Deam Wilderness in 1983.
In 2026, I’m returning with my digital Nikon for multiple projects.
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For the first of 12 Limestone installments, Revisiting the Deam: A Hike to Panther Creek Hollow, my grandson Vale and I briefly explored a Panther Creek Valley under a foot of snow and ice in February.
The second installment, scheduled for publication on April 7, focuses on the Deam region’s human history through a walk and talk with 42-year Forest Service veteran Teena Ligman, with whom I first worked in 1985, simultaneously with Andy. The piece has a working title Roscoe Hayes and Other Legends of the Indiana Wilderness. (Spoiler: Roscoe lived in a tree.)
Also in February, Jeff and I trudged thru a foot of snow in the Deam in search of the Mount Carmel Fault for a Photo Album called Bushwhacking the Deam Wilderness with Jeff Stant – Mt. Carmel Fault, Almost.
The third Limestone piece for May will evolve from a hike Jeff and will take to stand of old-growth on Miller Ridge the next time our schedules and the weather cooperate.
We’re talking true old growth – 200 to 300-year-old, oaks, poplars, beech, and other native species.
As I count the days to my three-quarter-century mark, the life circles grow ever larger. Since August, I wrote a book about one character from the dawn of my professional career in 1985; and I wrote a column about a hike with another.On Saturday, I will introduce Jeff Stant as the featured speaker at a Grass…
