Confirmed Presenters for the 2007 Heartwood Forest Council

Clint Trammell - Forest Manager, Pioneer Forest
Topic: Pioneer Forest

Since 1978, Mr. Trammel has been Forest Manager of Pioneer Forest. This 154,000-acre commercial forest has demonstrated over the last 50 years that silviculture can simultaneously be an economic, biological, and recreational success. Mr. Trammel's career has been spent on Pioneer Forest applying uneven-aged forest management techniques. Mr. Trammel notes: "One of the foundations of my professional life is the strong belief that a forest can be managed to produce good and services for the public without destroying that forest in the process. We must still have a forest, in the greatest sense, the day after the harvest techniques."

Russ Kremer - President, Missouri Farmers Union
Topic: Building Opportunity and Sustainability from the Rural Landscape

Russ Kremer is a diversified family farmer from Osage County, Missouri and president of the Missouri Farmers Union. His farming operation consists of naturally grown hogs, cattle, hay and vegetables. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Farmers Union and serves on their Executive, Cooperative, and Education committees. Kremer currently serves on USDA's 21st Century Agriculture Advisory Committee. Kremer is a board member of Cooperation Works, a national network of cooperative developers and has served on the board of directors of the National Campaign of Sustainable Agriculture. He is an advisory board member of the University of Missouri Sustainable Farm and Food Systems Program and a board member of the Missouri River Community Network.

A former director of the Westphalia Young Farmers Association, Kremer has served on the agricultural advisory committee of five different Missouri governors. He is actively working with various community based, value added, cooperative projects such as cooperative distribution; sustainable production, processing and marketing of livestock; organic dairy and vegetable processing; goat processing, wind energy and biomass recovery.

Nancy Smith - Board President of Ozark Quality Hardwood Cooperative
Topic: Ozark Quality Hardwood Cooperative

Nancy Smith considers herself a grower first and foremost. She has owned Herbal Comfort nursery, greenhouse and display gardens for 15 years. In addition, Nancy has spent the last 4 years as a consultant with Missouri Farmers Union working on the development of Ozark Quality Hardwoods Cooperative. This cooperative is a Value-added hardwoods processing plant which encourages sustainable practices from grower to end-user.

Nancy was a regular teacher at the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, AR for 15 years, and has taught organic gardening techniques and herb growing throughout MO and AR. She is also a regular speaker at Baker Creek Heirloom Seed festivals.

Anne Petermann - Co-Director, Global Justice Ecology Project
Topic: Zapatismo: The Art of Acting Locally to Change the World

Anne Petermann has been working on forest protection issues since 1991. In 1993 she co-founded Native Forest Network's Eastern North American Resource Center, coordinating it until 2003. In that time she coordinated a campaign that won a ban on herbicide spraying on Vermont forests. From 1999-2001, she coordinated NFN's work to stop genetically engineered trees, co-writing and editing a groundbreaking 24 page report on the issue in July, 2001.

She is currently the co-director of Global Justice Ecology Project which she co-founded with her partner Orin Langelle in September, 2003. She is also the Steering Committee Chair for the Stop GE Trees Campaign.

Since 2004, her work on the GE trees issue has taken her around the world to meet with indigenous groups and local communities threatened by the technology, and to speak on the links between global warming, GE trees, indigenous rights and biodiversity at United Nations meetings including the UN Forum on Forests, the meetings of the Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. In October, 2004 she co-founded the Durban Group for Climate Justice in Durban, South Africa.

In March of 2006, she co-led an effort in Curitiba, Brazil that won an historic UN Convention on Biological Diversity decision warning of the dangers of GE-trees and urging countries to use a precautionary approach regarding the technology.

In 2000, she won the Wild Nature Award for Environmental Activist of the Year.

Charlie Stockton - FORGE (Financing Ozarks Rural Growth and Economy)
Topic: Financial assistance for small landowners

My name is Charles Stockton. I am the Loan Fund Manager for FORGE (Financing Ozarks Rural Growth and Economy) a revolving loan fund based in Huntsville Arkansas. I've worked at FORGE for 10 years and have made numerous forestry sector loans including: bandsaw mill loans, solar kiln loans, horse logging loans, shitake mushroom loans, value added loans and loans to people who wanted to start value added businesses using timber as their basic resource. I'm a rancher and tree farmer and have land in Arkansas and Texas. Before I worked for FORGE, I worked for CARE in Africa managing reforestation projects.

Marti Crouch - Ph.D. Biology, Consultant on Biotechnology and Agriculture
Topic: The Dirt on Roundup and GMOs

Marti Crouch is a consultant on the relationships between biotechnology, agriculture and the environment. She was trained in botany as an undergraduate at Oregon State University, received her M.S. and Ph.D. in plant developmental biology from Yale University, and was an Associate Professor of Biology at Indiana University for 20 years before leaving academia in 2000. While at IU, Marti taught courses at the interface of science and the liberal arts, such as the Biology of Food, the Ecology of Everyday Life, and Life Through the Eyes of a Potato: the Changing Face of Agriculture. She now examines the relationships between people and plants.

Terry Spence - Missouri Farmer
Topic: The fight against CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations)

Terry Spence owns and operates a second-generation family farm in northeast Missouri, near the Iowa border, where he was born and raised. He has been active in the factory farm issue since 1993, when the Missouri legislature exempted three counties in northeast Missouri from complying with the state's anti-corporate farming law and allowed the raising of swine by a corporate entity in his area. Along with this exemption came 1.7 million hogs, with 80,000 of them near his farm.

Terry is president of Citizens Legal Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) and of Family Farms for the Future (FFFF), and is a certified level III volunteer water quality monitor for Missouri Stream Team # 714. He has been active over the last ten years in organizing and working with groups throughout Missouri, and various other states which are facing the factory farm problem. He has presented testimony before the U.S. House Sub-committee on CAFO's, and at numerous Missouri Clean Water Commission Hearings, Missouri Air Conservation Commission Hearings, and has worked with various environmental organizations on a state and national level.

Terry has been involved in litigation involving CAFO's from the local Circuit Court, Missouri Court of Appeals, and U.S. Federal Court, which entailed a federal suit under the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and is presently involved in a class action lawsuit against the second largest producer in the United States.

Terry was selected as one of the Thirty Heroes for each of the thirty years of the Federal Clean Water Act and has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, Audubon Magazine, Sierra Club Magazine and various other state and local press.

Gary Anderson - The Forest School
Topic: Integrated Forest Management

Gary Anderson earned a B.S. degree in the Core Biology Program at Indiana University, with two years in the lab of Dr. Marti Crouch researching plant molecular biology. Gary continued in this field as a W. L. McKnight Graduate Research Fellow at UGA, Athens. Experience and scholarship revealed more risk and problems with biotechnology than was acceptable. Gary and his wife Beth came back to un-improved family land in Kentucky to conduct research of their own design.

The culmination of their 14 years of effort is Integrated Forest Management - the forest as food, energy and lumber. With minimal ecological disturbance and energy use, the Andersons generate over $40,000 per year from 40 acres of forest, and they do so by low-grading. IFM is applicable on 5 acres, or 50,000 acres, and the Andersons are working to make it the new industry standard in a post peak oil world.

Don Fitz - Gateway Green Alliance
Topic: Lead poisoning in St. Louis

Don Fitz edits Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is sent to members of The Greens/Green Party USA, as well as the Compost-Dispatch for the Green Party of St. Louis. He produces Green Time TV in St. Louis and has worked on environmental racism, incineration, dioxin, genetic engineering and lead poisoning. He is co-editor of Within the Shell of the Old: Essays on Workers' Self-Organization.

Angel Kruzen- Director, Missouri Water Sentinel Program
Topic: Missouri Karst and Water Resources

Director of the Missouri Water Sentinel Program since 2001. (A national Sierra Club program) She has been actively working with her Husband Tom Kruzen for over 25 years protecting the Ozarks.

Her true love is the protection of the Rivers and stream of the state. She is a trained Level 3 Stream Teamer. Serves on the Board of Directors of the Scenic Rivers Stream Team Association, and is also the President of the Missouri Watershed Coalition.

Tom Kruzen - Ozark Riverkeepers Network
Topic: Missouri Karst and Water Resources/ Lead mining from the Ozarks to La Oroya

Tom Kruzen is a long-time activist fighting to protect the land and the people of the Ozarks from a host of environmental and humanitarian threats. Tom helped form the Ozark Riverkeepers Network and has worked with a number of organizations, including Dogwood Alliance, Sierra Club, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and Heartwood.

Since 1996 Tom has actively opposed chip mills, CAFOs, lead mining, and other ecological nightmares. He organized major opposition to Doe Run in their smelter town, Herculaneum (affecting a 160 home buyout). Tom has been active in organizing opposition to Doe Run's foreign operations in Peru and elsewhere. He also helped develop State rules to keep CAFOs out of National Scenic Rivers. Today, no major chip mills are operating in Missouri and no lead mines have been expanded into the Scenic Rivers watersheds.

Jim Scheff - Coordinator, Missouri Forest Alliance
Topic: Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest: Beauties and threats/ Roadless Areas

Jim Scheff has his B.S. in Biology and M.A. in Environmental Science from Washington University. He is cofounder of Missouri Forest Alliance and has served as Coordinator for MFA since it's inception in 2002. He has served on the Heartwood Council since 2002 and been involved with several other organizations working on forest protection, anti-GMO, and other environmental and social issues.

Leslie Warden - Herculaneum resident fighting Doe Run Lead Co.
Topic: Herculaneum: It's Where We Lived

Leslie Warden is a now former resident of the appallingly lead polluted town of Herculaneum, home to Doe Run's primary lead smelter. Leslie helped organize the mass buyout by Doe Run of lead contaminated homes near the smelter.

Denny Haldeman
Topic: The Biofuels Myth

Denny Haldeman has been a member of Heartwood for 16 years and served on its board. He was a founder and board member of the Dogwood Alliance, and has been monitoring and doing the Cassandra gig on the burning desires of the bio-energy industry for the last 10 years. He is now living off-grid on Walden's Ridge near Chattanooga, driving less, downshifting, a peace activist, wood tick fodder, and focused mostly on helping people "get it" about the ethanol and biofools scams to devour forests, food and soil to keep the American Weigh alive and unwell.

If you have any questions regarding the Forest Council, please contact Jim Scheff at or (314) 991-4190.