The Natural Bloomington Blog

Perusing the Hoosier National Forest website this past week, I was struck by how lasting the impact has been from the clearcutting wars of the 1980s – and reminded of just how important it is.

As a staff writer at the Bloomington Herald-Telphone/Herald-Times, I covered the debate over the U.S. Forest Service's 1985 plan to clearcut 81 percent of the Hoosier, which, after seven years of political struggle, ended up eliminating logging there for a decade or two. Today, the agency acknowledges that timber is harvested in the 202,000-acre Hoosier. But preserving its natural and cultural resources certainly reads as the agency's top priority. And thus far, I've heard little from people in the know to convince me otherwise.

From the forested ridges and ravines of the Brown County Hills, through the gulfs and caves of the Mitchell Karst Plain, to the barrens overlooking the Ohio River on the Crawford Uplands, the biodiversity held therein is indeed awe-inspiring. And, comprising roughly half of all public lands in Indiana, the Hoosier also assumes a prominent role as a refuge for regional and global biodiversity.

I couldn't begin to report everything that has happened since I last committed words to screen for this blog. It's been a month. And a lot has happened. So I'm going to jump to May 3, the official beginning of Natural Bloomington's second calendar year, and look forward and back. I promise to keep it short.

Not surprisingly, Nature Photography has emerged as the predominant element in Natural Bloomington's first year in operation. I've been a photographer for far longer than I've been writing. it comes easier.  And it's the theme for our next ecotour on May 17 – an excursion to the Brown County hinterlands with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Blair.

Since I led a couple Chinese students on Natural Bloomington's first ecotour on May 5, 2013, I have published 700-plus photographs in 37 Photo Albums from 22 Southern Indiana natural areas, from Beanblossom Creek to the Ohio River. I've also presented slide shows/talks to two ecotourism classes at IU, the Endwright Center in Ellettsville and the Bloomington Press Club in the IMU Sycamore Room.

So it is fitting that our first ecotour of Year 2 – the May 3 Hoosier National History Ecotour – produced our first photo album of our guests' work on the Natural Bloomington Facebook page. And next is the first of what I hope will be a series of Nature Photography Ecotours.

From a bankside perch on the Fourteenmile Creek a few hundred yards upstream from the Ohio River, a question leaps to mind. What does the Charlestown State Park brochure mean when it says, "During the periods when the water level is increasing, Fourteenmile Creek actually appears to be flowing in reverse"?

From the overlook on Trail 5, the brochure's description of Fourteenmile as a "ribbon lake rather than as a flowing stream" was apt. And from the temporarily closed Portersville Bridge down in the valley, its glowing green waters did indeed appear to be running upstream, away from the swollen Ohio.

When the park ranger calls about other matters, I'm going to ask if the water is in fact running up instead of down, or if it only appears to.