2025 FOREST COUNCIL

May 23-25, 2025 • Memorial Day Weekend
Camp Crestfield • 195 Taggart Road • Slippery Rock, PA, 16057

SPRING HEARTBEATS

The latest Heartbeat is available! Click here for a PDF version, or become a member to receive print versions. Heartbeat is the biannual newsletter of the Heartwood community, with a Spring and a Fall issue timed to coincide with our two annual Events. Circulation is distributed throughout the Heartwood region and to all our Member Groups. We welcome your volunteer contributions!

Send your campaign updates, campfire yarns, socio-political insights, poetry, art, photos, rants or recipes to our Editorial Committee at info@heartwood.org for consideration.

ANALYSIS OF THE NEW RULE IMPLEMENTING THE NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACT

Read this thorough analysis of this very important legal document by Rocky Smith

Call to Action: Save Our Mature and Old Growth Forests!

The public has a second chance at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect our last remaining old-growth forests. On June 21, 2024, the US Forest Service published a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), a study of five alternatives for implementing Executive Order 14072, issued by President Biden on Earth Day 2022, which directs the USFS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to protect old-growth forests. The publication of this DEIS begins a 90-day public comment period, with comments accepted until September 20, according to their online announcement. This is a historic opportunity to provide meaningful protections to the last of our old-growth forests. More than half a million Americans participated in the first round of public comments to produce this DEIS. In this second opportunity we hope to see half a million new voices calling for genuine protections.

Resources, Links and Action Items

Resources, Links and Action Items from the 2024 Heartwood Forest Council. This website contains follow-up items from this year's highly successful gathering.

Watch this new video on YouTube:

Eastern U.S. Forests & Heartwood Forest Council (video interview with Matt Peters of Heartwood)