This blog’s headline was the original title for our upcoming coffee table book planned for release this fall.
But as the project’s epic scale became apparent, the name evolved into Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves.
So Andy’s stand against U.S. Forest Service plans to log, burn, and chemically spray 30,000 acres of the Hoosier’s Orange County woods called Buffalo Springs — in the name of ecological restoration no less — became the book’s final chapter.
Accordingly, even though I’ve made four trips to the Lazy Black Bear in the past year to talk and explore with Andy, and two more to photograph him in his activist-in-action persona, we had only touched on Buffalo Springs until we spent the afternoon of July 5 touring the area in southern Orange County.
We were joined by Limestone Post Assistant Editor Anne Kibbler, who is writing an article on our project for the nonprofit online news magazine that publishes “in-depth, informative, and inclusive stories about the communities in and around Bloomington, Indiana, and beyond.”
Along the way, we drove backcountry roads through some of the wildest, oldest, and most magnificent hardwood forest in the state of Indiana or, honestly, east of the Mississippi. Andy, who has lived surrounded by the Hoosier National since 1979, reminisced about old friends, living and dead, whose beloved woods are at risk from Buffalo Springs.
We stopped at two pioneer cemeteries.
The one at Apple Chapel, built in 1877, involved an in-depth and successful cemetery search for the headstone of Andy’s recently departed Orange County neighbor and friend Nova “Novy” Lincoln Wells, who schooled him in the ways of country culture and kindness.
Epic is not exaggeration for the Andy Mahler story.
His mother and lifelong inspiration and artist Annemarie Ettinger-Mahler escaped Nazi Vienna in 1938 and came to the United States alone at age 13.
Had father Henry Mahler not died at 62, he may have won a Nobel Prize for his work in biochemistry that earned him the nickname Mr. Mitochondria.
Here are a couple excerpts from the Mahler family saga.
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When she was maybe 4 years old, Annemarie started doodling with a piece of paper and a pencil.
“I started to draw a man with a cane, and Frieda, the maid, came, leaned over me, and called to Lina, the cook: ‘Come and look what the child can do!’”
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Henry’s research attracted so much grant funding that he became the highest paid professor at IU.
“There was this big scandal at one point where the state legislature discovered that there were at least six professors on the faculty who were making more than the governor,” Andy says.
Andy moved to the Orange County woods in 1979 to ride horses, play old time music, and experience the forest-farm lifestyle he had fondly imagined. He spent the rest of his life with wife and partner Linda Lee at the farm and lodge called the Lazy Black Bear.
Along his way, he helped organize a citizen uprising against Forest Service plans in the 1980s to clearcut nearly the entire Hoosier and build off-road-vehicle trails in Orange and in Brown Counties.
Epic story short: Andy played a lead role in state and regional coalitions of forest defenders, who got ORVs permanently banned in the Hoosier and shut down commercial timber harvesting not only in Indiana but in national forests from Missouri to Pennsylvania to Alabama, in some cases for decades.
Here are a couple excerpts from that part of the book.
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For Andy, the ORV victory was validation that grassroot citizen action could be successful and set an example for others to follow.
“We were successful,” he says, “something people in environmental efforts around the country very seldom get to experience. We had a complete victory—the first national forest in the country entirely closed to off-road vehicles.”
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Through effective political and legal strategies, the laughable notion of a no cut logging policy on the Central Hardwood national forests became a reality, for a while.
“We shut down the logging in that entire heartwood region within ten years of Heartwood’s founding,” he says. “I mean, these are in the millions of acres.”
