In the late 20th century, forest conservation in the eastern United States was rarely a matter of sweeping victories or clean resolutions. It was a practice shaped by hearings that dragged on, injunctions that arrived too late, and landscapes divided among agencies with overlapping mandates and uneven resolve. The work tended to fall to people willing to read environmental-impact statements closely, show up repeatedly, and keep doing so after public attention moved elsewhere. Out of that terrain emerged a form of activism that was neither professionalized nor episodic. It relied on local knowledge, personal trust, and a refusal to accept that extractive outcomes were inevitable simply because they were customary. It was also suspicious of hierarchy. Movements rose and fell, coalitions shifted, and leadership often came from those most able to hold people together through disagreement. One of the figures most closely associated with that approach was Andy Mahler, who died on August 30th 2025. He spent more than five decades working to protect forests in the Midwest and Appalachia, bringing to the work the instincts of an organizer and a belief that politics began with place. Mahler was best known as a central force behind Heartwood, a loose yet persistent network of grassroots forest defenders active across several states. Heartwood was never designed to scale efficiently. It functioned through gatherings, shared meals, and long discussions that made room for conflict and resisted easy resolution. Mahler believed that alliances built too quickly were brittle. What mattered was whether people stayed…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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