I will publicly unveil StevenHiggs.com and my new coffee table book Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves on August 15 in French Lick, Ind.
The occasion will be the annual gathering of the Indiana Democratic Party, which will give Andy a Legacy Award for his lifetime of contributions to the party, region, and state. I will be introducing Andy at the dinner and have been asked to include the following in my remarks.
“Andy has worked the polls for many years, ran for commissioner and been an active citizen at many county and state meetings, representing values our party believes in, in addition to the grass roots organizations he has initiated.”
Just in time for the event, hard copy proofs of our 120-page collaboration of words and photographs will be arriving three days before the French Lick event. So I will present Andy with the first copy that evening.
The book traces Andy’s personal history, from his parents’ escape from Hitler’s Vienna as teenagers in the late 1930s to Indiana University-Bloomington, in whose shadow Andy grew up.
In a narrative and photographs written and captured over the past 50 years, Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National also tells the landscape’s 350-million-year natural history and 15,000-year human history.
The Hoosier sections recount how the 204,000-acre national forest was decimated by unsustainable logging in the 19th Century and, driven by the emerging environmental consciousness in the mid-20th, has recovered its natural character.
It relates the struggles Andy and Indiana forest activists organized against plans in the 1970s and 80s by the U.S. Forest Service to clearcut essentially the entire forest and to allow off-road vehicle trails in Orange and Brown Counties.
The book relates Andy’s latest fight to save his beloved Hoosier National from federal government plans to clearcut, burn, and chemically spray 30,000 forest acres that stretch from Patoka Lake to the edge of Andy’s Orange County home of 40 years.
Lastly, in an essay written in june 2024, the Folk Hero responded to his then-fresh cancer diagnosis.
