FALL 2023
KENTUCKY HEARTWOOD
A N N U AL A P P EA L
I KNOW YOU ALEADY CARE ABOUT THE FOREST. Today, I want to tell you about a place I love. It's a misty, drizzly, leaf-bright afternoon in October, and I'm standing beneath the largest red hickory (Carya ovalis) known to science. A short walk away is the second largest red hickory known to science. The forest floor is covered in fallen leaves and seeds and the dried stalks of medicine plants gone dormant for the season. Steep slopes rise and fall around us, and I'm careful to plant my feet gently as I lean in close to this enormous, mossy, furrowed trunk. A yard or two away, another tree–another member of this community, sharing nourishment and knowledge via mycorrhizal mycelium running from root to root–is slashed with blue paint, marked for the chainsaw. Most of the sizable trees in sight have been marked. Pink flagging runs just below me, right through the rootzone of the official National Champion Red Hickory, laying a trail for a bulldozer to follow any day now to tear a new roadway for hauling out the body of this forest.
This is just one stand in over 3,000 acres of the Redbird District of the Daniel Boone National Forest slated for logging. Many of these groves include trees who have been growing for multiple centuries and would naturally grow for centuries more–and then continue to be a vital part of what makes a functional old growth forest, even as they slowly decay back to earth. Just a few miles away from where I stand, the slopes above Bear Creek have already been ripped apart and mostly denuded of mature trees, an open wound for colonizer species to fester in and where landslides will inevitably deform the geologically fragile topography in the next decade.
Xyara Asplen Kentucky Heartwood Council
Xyara Asplen grew up in a holler in Estill County Kentucky and currently belongs to a holler in Rockcastle County, with various other states, prairies, and mountain ranges in between. She's been involved with Kentucky Heartwood for nearly a decade and has served on the council since 2018. She also works as a nature connection mentor, land steward and amateur restoration ecologist, and intergenerational caregiver.
It's sickening.
And, we maintain, it's illegal.
kyheartwood.org
We've had to accept the reality that the culture of the Forest Service right now–here and nationally, despite language from the Biden administration theoretically prioritizing old forests–is increasingly opaque and adversarial, and encouraging blatant violation of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). In addition, the frequency and scale of logging-based management has continued to explode. And so last year, for the first time in decades, we initiated litigation over the South Redbird 'project': our last legal hope of protecting these precious forest communities. As our legal challenge moves through the court system (at a pace that makes watching lichen spread across a rock face feel like a speed race) government employees continue to sell off the rights to huge swathes of our beloved public forests to private logging corporations.
TO BE CLEAR, IT'S NOT 'JUST' REDBIRD, EITHER. The next planning phase of a 10,000 acre, forty-year logging project in the Jellicos is slated to drop any day. Trees are being bulldozed and cut near Pine Island Double Falls and the Beaver Creek Wilderness. And areas logged within the last few decades–cuts we couldn't stop, though we've stopped so many–continue to come up in a mess of neglected colonizer species and red maple stump sprouts, despite the Forest Service's claims that they're managing for white oak regeneration (a species being devoured by the distillery industry at a catastrophic rate). Hillsides slough away into degraded creekbeds while the agency tasked with intergenerational stewardship of these lands mostly turns a blind eye.
All of this is in my mind as I rest my forehead against this magnificent hickory tree, in this magnificent forest already marked for the sawmill. My heart is breaking open, and I can only hope the mycelium that runs through the soil here will find its way into the cracks and help me to do my work as part of this wild community. I know we're surrounded by so many crises crying out for our care and attention.
THIS ONE BELONGS TO US – OR WE BELONG TO IT. THIS ONE IS OUR HOME. You might not know all the details, but your heart belongs to these Kentucky hills as much as mine does, I'm sure of it. This is the part where I ask you to act from that care. In the face of an agency that continues to brazenly undermine, ignore, and circumvent the NEPA process–the framework designed to allow for public involvement in decisions impacting public land–it's become clear that we need dedicated legal council involved in our ongoing work. Significant legal resources require a significant budget.
We truly need your help to make this happen. Those $20,000 donations, like the anonymous gift we recently received that we'll use to inoculate this fund (thank you!) are amazing. Those $50 donations and $5 donations are also amazing. Our circumstances are all different, and all I ask is that you listen with your heart open–listen as part of the land–and do what you can. As much as you can. Please.
That day last month, following the broken ridgeline through centuries-old hollowed out chestnut oaks (some marked for the cut), the smell of sandstone and bark and hexastylis leaves heavy and delicious in the wet air, it felt inconceivable to me that our community of humans could allow this soil to be scraped bare, these ancestor trees toppled and dragged away. But now, back within the context of phone screens and devastating news cycles and the ten million heart-numbing distractions of every day, I'm terrified we could do just that. Please, let's refuse that future. In a time when we should be focusing all our strengths and skills and institutional leverage around nurturing ecological resilience through this era of rapidly destabilizing climate, it's literal insanity that this sort of 'land management' be allowed to reign.
And yet we're the only nonprofit in Kentucky working to protect our public lands from violent extraction, and one of very few environmental nonprofits who don't receive funding from the agencies you would assume they hold accountable. Instead, our funding comes from grants and from donations. From you. We'll never stop striving to protect our forests–but like the Red Hickory, we're part of a community, and without that network of support we would lose our strength. Thank you for being our community. When I'm overwhelmed, I often come back to the final lines of one of my favorite Rilke poems: "...But only longing for what belongs to us, and serving earth, lest we remain unused." In deep gratitude and solidarity,
Xyara Asplen Vice President Kentucky Heartwood Council
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FROM THE KENTUCKY HEARTWOOD ARCHIVE
For educational and archival purposes only.
On April 21st, 1992, Kentucky Heartwood, Earth First! and Appalachian Science in the Public Interest hosted a demonstration at the DBNF headquarters in Winchester in protest of commercial logging in the Daniel Boone, as well as the use of off-road vehicles. It was announced via a flier which contained the following image: On May 5th, the USFS contacted ASPI with a cease-and-desist letter that stated the image was “an inappropriate and unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear symbol.” The letter warned that the activists would be subject to criminal prosecution if they continued to use Smokey Bear in order to criticize Forest Service policies. The legal debate continued into 1993. The Forest Service refused to pursue real legal action and stuck to intimidation tactics and threats. On February 8th, 1993, US District Judge Dimmick ruled in favor of the environmentalists and their first amendment right to utilize depictions of Smokey Bear.