Heartwood Council
The Heartwood Council are volunteers who direct, advise, inspire, inform and do the work of Heartwood. We are representatives of our individual bioregions and communities. We are representatives of small, grassroots groups. We are community leaders and network organizers. We are activists. We bring literally hundreds of years of experience and passion to our work. We are people helping people save the places that they love.
Ernie Reed
Ernie has been
teaching high school for 35 years on the range of subjects that connect
nature, art and personal action. He did his graduate work in economics at the
University of California at Santa Barbara and founded the Living Education
Center for Ecology and the Arts in Charlottesville, VA. He is on the board
of directors of Wild Virginia and is Heartwood's current Council Chair. He
has children in Charlottesville, Tucson, Seattle and the East Village of NYC.
Ernie lives in the Eastern Appalachian foothills of Virginia but his roots
stretch to the Pacific Coast and the Sierras of Northern California.
Jillian Borchard
Jillian’s passions are medicinal herbs, healthy forests, and music. She
has been involved in forest protection work and Heartwood since 1994 and
was a co-founder of Missouri Heartwood in 1997. Jilliian now makes her
home in Maryland working as a clinical herbalist. She is the owner and
operator of Greenspring Herbs, her own private practice and apothecary.
She is also on faculty at Tai Sophia Institute, a graduate school for
the healing arts, and is the resident herbalist at Roots Market, an
independent health food store.
Gwen Marshall is a life time Cincinnati, Ohio resident. She grew up in
the suburbs back in the days when kids were allowed to explore and play
in the woods and creeks without direct parental supervision, but now
lives within the City of Cincinnati where there is even more and better
woods near her home. Her love and appreciation of the out-of-doors
comes from being a Girl Scout and later a Girl Scout leader. She
learned to sail in her high school Mariner Girl Scout troop, but became
a more proficient sailor as a member of her college sailing club while
studying to be a secondary Social Studies and/or Math teacher. During
the mid 1970’s to the late ‘80’s she ran bareboat sailboat charter
trips from South Florida to the western Bahamas including captaining her
own trips from the mid to late 1980’s. The degradation of the coral
reefs that she witnessed while on these trips led to her interest in
wildlife habitat political activism which is why she attended the first
Heartwood meeting at the Lazy Black Bear in 1991.
What Gwen most likes about Heartwood is the way it allows us to connect with other like minded folks from around the region who are working to protect the forests and all of its related parts. Gwen appreciates how Heartwood has helped keep forest activists from feeling isolated in our desire to protect the land for its own sake when so many around us only view the land as a commercial opportunity. At Heartwood events, Gwen can most often be found at the registration table which she enjoys for giving her the opportunity to meet all of the people who attend the event.
Leigh Haynie—the larger of the two in the accompanying photo—is a
member of the Heartwood Extended Council. She lives in Alabama and
enjoys hiking, canoeing, and all other manner of tree-hugging
activities.
Michael Hendrix was born and raised on an old family farm in Central
Kentucky. Upon graduation from Eastern Kentucky University he began
a career in public accounting becoming a a certified public
accountant. After ten years in public accounting he left the firm of
Coopers and Lybrand in Louisville, Kentucky and accepted a position
with one of the largest contractors in Kentucky as Treasurer and Chief
Financial Officer and returned to the old family farm. Retiring after
twenty-five years he and his wife, Miranda, continue to farm and raise
Hereford and Angus cattle. Always an avid environmentalist, he is a
long-time member of the Sierra Club and currently serves on the Council
of Kentucky Heartwood.
In his spare time Michael teaches firewalking 101.
Rhonda
Baird
Rhonda Baird, a sixth generation inhabitant of southern
Indiana, divides her time between homeschooling her children on their suburban
homesteading project, working as Director of Indiana Forest Alliance, and
apprenticing as a permaculture teacher, designer, and activist. (Permaculture
is a way of using our understanding of systems to re-knit human communities
into their ecological communities.) Former stints in graduate school found her
studying labor and social reform movements in American History and Southeast
Asian religions. She even enjoyed spending two years learning Sanskrit. Her
handspun/handwoven items sometimes show up at Heartwood auctions. If she could
be any animal, she might be an otter.
Elizabeth
Glass
Elizabeth grew up with fairies and noblemen in an enchanted land where she played inside bushes, had forts in the hemlocks, climbed apple trees, and made friends with bugs, worms, cicadas, leaves, sticks, and acorns.
She moved where there were more trees, and also unnatural expanses of green, so she fled into a world with secret houses, creeks with crawdads in them, and trees that weren’t good for climbing, but were fun to run through. She climbed over rocks and sat on downed trunks writing and reading. It was her retreat, her solace.
Now she enters the woods whenever she can. She hikes, inhales, enjoys, looks at, and breathes in the earth. While she hikes she look at fiddleheads, old springhouses, rock shelters, mossy areas, tree roots, mushrooms, fungi, and wildlife. It’s magical and wonderful. Forests are a part of her, she is the earth. The earth is magical, and if she contains one fraction of that magic everything is wonderful. It’s Elizabeth’s time to give back to the earth, to defend her, protect her, and fight those who seek to take away her enchanted lands. She takes up her sword, and her pen, and remembers where she comes from, a world of enchantment with noblemen and women, fairies, friends, good food, and music. She comes to Heartwood.
Jim
Scheff
Jim Scheff is currently the Director of Kentucky Heartwood and lives in Berea,
Kentucky with his partner, Tina Marie Johnson, his two children, Chris and
Zaida, and step-children, Percy and Sylvia. Prior to moving to Berea, Jim
lived in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was involved with Missouri Heartwood
and was Coordinator for it's later incarnation, Missouri Forest Alliance. Jim
holds a M.A. in Environmental Science and B.S. in Biology, has worked as an
adjunct biology professor, is an intermittent landscaper, and loves the smell
of good dirt. He joined the Heartwood Council in 2002.
Andy Mahler
Andy Mahler, Heartwood's Network Support Coordinator has been a forest
activist and community organizer for more than twenty years. In addition to
his work with Heartwood, he has worked on local and regional food issues,
including helping start a member owned,
natural foods grocery, and
organizing farmers markets in Orange
County, Indiana.
Andy participates in regular weekly music jams at the farmers markets, and
Wednesday evenings at the Lost River Market and Deli. He and his wife, Linda
Lee, an orphaned possum rehabilitator, own a rustic and eclectic farm and
lodge called the Lazy Black Bear surrounded by the Hoosier National Forest in
the gently rolling, forested hills of southern Indiana.
Paul Michael Ash
I grew up in Southern Indiana exploring the hills, hollows, streams and caves.
I studied at Indiana University and Northwood Institute and never got a degree in anything but did manage to give all of my GI Bill money to formal education.
I discovered that education is something that you don't need money for, just desire and time. I have spent a great deal of both satisfying some of my curiosity.
I love my friends and am lucky enough to have married my best friend, Miriam.
I write, I sing, it's just that simple.