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.
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.