As the About page explains, I cannot say exactly what this website will be, aside from serving as a repository for my ongoing, half century of work as an environmental photographer and journalist based in Southern Indiana’s Hoosier National Forest country.
But there will be a heavy emphasis on the Hoosier National, which I began exploring, photographing, and writing about exactly 50 years ago.
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In the beginning, I will share blog posts, photographs, and excerpts from a full-color coffee table book called Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves, which we are on target to release in early fall 2025.
The book will detail, in 100-plus pages of words and photographs:
- The remarkable, two-generation Mahler family journey from Nazi Austria to the deep woods of Orange County, Indiana, and
- The Hoosier National’s natural and human journeys from the Amazon and Ohio Rivers to Andy’s front, back, and side yards.
(All proceeds from the book will go to Heartwood and other nonprofits working to defend our imperiled national forests and other environmental, social, and economic justice causes.)
Photograph by Raina Ricely
Here’s a couple excerpts from the first chapter, titled “Metaphor of the Cicadas.”
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Andy Mahler says he was stunned at his friends’ reactions to news that he has Stage 4 cancer.
“Steve, this is where I’m so humbled and grateful, because I had no idea,” he told me, while resting on a downed, bench-sized tree limb in his beloved Orange County woods.
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I wasn’t even mildly surprised at the outpouring of love and support directed Andy Mahler’s way.
I’ve known and written about him for four decades now. The first chapter in my 1996 IU Press book Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana was titled “Andy Mahler: Saving the Forests.” He’s one of the most charismatic and beloved favorite sons to have evolved from the college town of Bloomington, Ind.
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StevenHiggs.com will also feature photo galleries, blogs, and other posts from my past and future photo travels, which in the past two years have carried me from the Alps to the Adriatic to the Amazon, through Austria, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Peru, and Colombia.
Next year I plan to explore the Arctic Circle in Finland, Sweden, and Norway.
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The site will eventually feature work from my five-year exploration of my home state’s public preserves, forests, lakes, rivers, and parks to produce two Indiana University Press travel books in 2016 and 2019: A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana and A Guide to Natural Areas of Northern Indiana.
Together, their 800 pages feature photographs and descriptions of 244 backcountry jewels where nature lovers can experience the state’s natural heritage, from the Oxbow in Dearborn County to the Indiana Dunes National Park in Lake County, from the Twin Swamps Nature Preserve in Posey County to the Robb Hidden Canyon in Steuben County.
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Aside from the Andy book and my travel adventures, what this site will be about is indeed still open.
But that’s a taste for now.
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