Hiking with the Lorax of Shawnee National Forest Midwestern environmentalists’ plan to save the world, one climate preserve at a time

Sam Stearns is a bona fide, all-American, natural philosopher of the type usually associated with the nineteenth century. Sam is caretaker of the War Bluff Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, a 500-acre Illinois Audubon Society property in southeastern Illinois, and founder of the Friends of Bell Smith Springs, a National Natural Landmark. He loves to take visitors hiking in the surrounding Shawnee National Forest, a rugged, biodiverse landscape between the great rivers that converge at Cairo.

Sam speaks for the trees and can tell you their habits and preferences. He knows all the best trails and how their other-worldly rock formations came to be, geomorphology-wise. He knows the regional critters, nonhuman and human alike, and their conjoined histories. He knows the river towns on the Ohio and, because he is a good companion and a savvy educator, will take you to a diner where after breakfast you can order from an extensive menu of pies baked that morning and have a slice with more hot coffee before you start hiking.

Sam is also a rascal and has seen lively times. Some of those have been while working with other environmentalists—for almost four decades without pay and at significant personal risk—in defense of the Shawnee National Forest, which they hope will become a National Park and the world’s first climate preserve.

•  •  •

Illinois is a tall state. Most of it was scraped flat by glaciers over the last 1.5 million years, but the bottom eighth of the state was spared. These surviving rock formations, wooded hills, and wetlands make up the Shawnee National Forest—289,000 acres of natural splendor that catch many visitors to the Midwest by surprise.

On a map the Shawnee looks like a great green cat standing in Southern Illinois, facing east, with its front paws in the Ohio River and its back paws in the Mississippi. Its tail runs up the river in the direction of St. Louis. (Some of the area under its belly and over its back is more protected land, managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources [IDNR] or the US Fish and Wildlife Service.)

Sam Stearns on the Mill Branch Trail. (Photo by John Griswold)

Paleo-Indians and Native Americans hunted and lived in the region for 15 millennia. It took little more than 100 years after the arrival of settlers for deep Southern Illinois to be denuded by logging and farming, and its soil exhausted. At the start of the twentieth century white-tailed deer were considered extinct in the state.

“At the time of European settlement, about 39 percent (13.8 million acres) of Illinois was forested,” the IDNR says. The forests contained massive, centuries-old trees and had been interconnected for thousands of years. It is impossible to overstate the damage done by development, including to the “‘mycorrhizal network,’ which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals.” This has been called the “woodwide web [and in] healthy forests, each tree is connected to others via this network,” the National Forest Foundation says.

“Less than 0.3 percent of the forest acreage in Illinois [is now] classified as high-quality natural areas,” IDNR says.

Franklin Roosevelt designated the Shawnee National Forest in 1939 to prevent environmental collapse, and the Civilian Conservation Corps planted millions of pines for reforestation and erosion control. Oaks, maples, and other trees returned. Now the Shawnee gets as many as one million visitors per year, contributing greatly to the local economy. Four of the five least-populated counties in Illinois are at the bottom of the state, where jobs are hard to find after the closure of coal and other mines.

But environmentalists such as Sam Stearns, who actually live there, see more dangers to the health of the Shawnee every day. The main problem, they believe, is the very policies of the United States Forest Service (USFS), an agency of the Department of Agriculture, which they say has a commodity mindset. Making it a national park would mean transferring it to the Department of the Interior.

John Wallace, another Shawnee Forest activist, speaking on a panel for the Global Justice Ecology Project, quotes USFS Shawnee district ranger Tim Pohlman: “The Forest Service is an organization that cuts trees. It’s in our Congressional mandate.”

“And that is really what the issue is,” Wallace says. “They couch it under every different term you can imagine: restoration, forest health, on and on…. They’re going to cut trees, period. It’s not for forest health. [T]hat’s what the Department of Agriculture is known for. It’s not for caring for the farmland. Their goal is to produce a crop that produces revenue. […] The Forest Service is driven by the revenue they get, and they get a lot more revenue when they lose taxpayer money selling trees [at a loss].”

(A USDA spokesperson responded to a question about the commodity mindset: “As set forth in law, such as the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, the Forest Service manages 193 million acres across 154 National Forests and 20 National Grasslands for their many uses. These include a sustainable supply of timber, mining and energy production, as well as world-class recreation opportunities, critical conservation projects, and other environmental and economic activities. Productive forests are healthy forests. Using science-based, sustainable active management practices—including responsible timber harvest—the Forest Service works to maintain forest resilience, support biodiversity, and reduce wildfire risk. These efforts ensure thriving forests that serve communities through recreation, conservation, and sustainable economic contributions. Sustainable forestry supports forest-dependent economies, creating good-paying jobs and ensuring rural prosperity for generations to come.”)

“Never in the history of the planet has a forest been logged back to health,” Sam Stearns says.

Now a new “proforestation” movement in North America advocates “the practice of protecting existing natural forests from human disturbance”—leaving them almost entirely alone to become old-growth again, eventually—“which is the most effective forest-based climate solution,” its proponents say.

Two hundred climate scientists sent a letter to members of Congress in 2020, stating, “The growing consensus of scientific findings is that, to effectively mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, we must not only move beyond fossil fuel consumption but must also substantially increase protection of our native forests in order to absorb more CO₂ from the atmosphere and store more, not less, carbon in our forests.”

One of the spearheads of this movement has become the Shawnee Park and Climate Alliance, which educates, lobbies, and fundraises for the Shawnee National Forest to become a national park and climate preserve, so that conservation, not commodity thinking, can prevail. Sam Stearns and John Wallace are founding members.

The allied Shawnee Forest Defense says, “The Shawnee National Forest is currently under assault by the USDA Forest Service…. Hundreds of acres of commercial logging projects are either underway or are about to commence, including those within sensitive watersheds and around popular recreation sites. Logging coupled with the artificial burning of 10,000–15,000 acres annually on the Shawnee…are despoiling our natural heritage and setting the stage for disaster.

“As the impacts from global warming bear down on our planet, our country and our region, incredibly, Shawnee FS personnel push on with outdated management practices that actually create hotter, drier, and more flammable forest conditions. These management schemes not only release vast amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere, logging and burning diminishes the forest’s ability to effectively sequester carbon.”

(On this and other matters specific to the Shawnee, the Forest Service office for that National Forest did not respond to a request for comment.)

•  •  •

Blue paint means the trees will be logged. These, Sam felt, should have stayed. (Photo by John Griswold)

I was introduced to Sam Stearns by the environmental and labor-history writer Jeff Biggers, who has known him for years. (Jeff amalgamated him into a character in his recent novel set in the woods and floodplains of Southern Illinois.) At the start of February, I drove down to Pope County, Illinois, three hours southeast of St. Louis, and Sam took me hiking for two days to show me his corner of the Shawnee.

Sam has white curly hair and a Sam Elliott cowboy mustache, and he wears overalls that he calls his “signature look.” He is 71 now and looks like a retired farmer or miner, and a slim, kindly grandpa. Meeting strangers on the trail, he lays back and lets them talk excitedly about what they have seen. When he speaks to them, he is gentle, respectful, almost country-formal. He emphasizes the blessings of the day and the pleasure of being in the woods. He creates instant rapport.

But it has long been my theory that in converted rascals may lie our salvation. As Sam puts it, “Somebody’s got to work outside the system, and that’s where I’m very comfortable.”

Sam Stearns grew up in Ledford, Illinois, less than 20 miles from his beloved Bell Smith Springs (“one of the most beautiful recreation areas the Shawnee National Forest has to offer,” the USFS says). Ledford was a small coal mining town, multiracial and -ethnic. Sam’s people were Hungarian miners and bootleggers; a notorious bootlegger named Charlie Birger also lived in and worked from Ledford and murdered a man there in 1917. Sam’s maternal grandparents left the old country in the late 1800s after his grandfather killed a game warden, according to family lore.

“All the men that I grew up with,” Sam says, participated in the early twentieth century “mine wars” between unionists and owners’ hired armies. In 1932, Ledford’s residents joined those who split from the UMWA, which had agreed to bargain with capital, to follow the more radicalized Progressive Miners movement.

Sam grew up running around the ridges and hollers of the Shawnee and saw Forest Service employees as heroes of the landscape he loved. He wanted to do that. His Harrisburg High counselor told him he was lucky: There were only two (two-year) forestry schools in the United States, and one was in Harrisburg. Sam graduated high school in 1972 and immediately started forestry school at Southeastern Illinois College. He says he eventually learned the program began “because they intended to start logging the Shawnee as much as they could, and they were going to have all these forestry students available as labor. Prior to that they had free labor from the Civilian Conservation Corps and various government programs….”

After a year he saw that the remainder of the curriculum was going to be “logging, logging, logging, and hydraulic equipment maintenance. And when I asked the instructors about that, they said, ‘Well, that’s so you guys can learn how to log, how to cut these forests down.’ I thought, ‘That’s not really what I had in mind.’” He quit. (Southeastern Illinois College did not respond to a request for comment.)

He was working at the Norge factory in my hometown of Herrin, Illinois, when he became “a fairly big-time pot dealer,” redistributing 40-pound bales brought down from Chicago on the train to Carbondale, “the hub of the drug universe” then, as he puts it, and home to Southern Illinois University. Sam says the Chicago men were older and “brought the culture from Chicago of doing drugs and dealing drugs. [I] worked for them and with them and was having a great time.” Sam got busted and spent two-and-a-half years in Menard’s maximum-security correctional center.

When he was paroled, his brother got him a job in a Ziegler Coal Company mine in Murdoch, Illinois. Sam says he “realized pretty quickly…I did not want to be underground…I was just absolutely terrified the whole time I was down there. […] I wanted to get the hell out of the mines, and I did.”

He began working in and managing health clubs, something he did very successfully off and on for decades, including at an Air Force base, and as far away as Boston. But in the early days, when a girlfriend broke up with him, Sam says he was miserable and near-suicidal and “drove down to Florida, got a job on a shrimp boat [that was] the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life, far harder than hauling hay [in Southern Illinois] or working on the oil rig [later] or working in coal mines…. Fucking shrimp boats. That was hard. […]

“I always volunteered for the most dangerous jobs on every damn thing on the boat,” he says. Later, on the oil rigs in the Gulf, “I became a derrick man, which is at the highest point on the rig…20 stories above the surface of the water. I just didn’t care if I lived or died.” Even when he traveled on his time off, he would visit war zones, such as in El Salvador, to see what was happening.

That changed after he married, and he and his wife had a daughter and moved back to Southern Illinois. “[W]hen we realized that we were going to have a child to raise, we wanted to raise her here in the Shawnee Hills. In particular…close to Bell Smith Springs, because that was my favorite place.” Sam lost his urge for destruction and began to see that he wanted to protect the natural world for his child’s future.

“If her generation wants to asphalt the whole Shawnee, it’s theirs to do,” he says. “My job is to be the placeholder just to keep…these trees standing until…the next generation can make the decision.”

His adventures did not end with fatherhood, however. At one job he served as office manager for a local medical doctor who was “mobbed up [and] every once in a while, on a weekend…there’d be several black limousines of Chicago guys show up, [a]nd he had a place in his house where he did surgeries on guys that had bullets in them. But…I didn’t find all that out until I read the FBI transcripts….”

Then there have been the legal adventures and threats to his life from his activism.

Once, a small logging contractor working a parcel near Sam’s house had previously been caught doing a “timber trespass,” taking extra trees outside his contracted parcel, Sam says, and was supposed to be prohibited from entering into another logging contract with the Forest Service. When Sam posted an 800-word flyer about the previous transgression on a wooden sign at the entrance to the man’s parcel, the man got him charged with federal crimes, for “illegal posting of notices” and “destruction of government property” (the thumbtacks’ holes). Two days before the trial, the charges were changed to “illegal entry into a closed area,” since Sam had leaned a foot over a gate to post his flyer.

Sam acted as his own counsel, and when he put the contractor on the stand to question him, he says he realized the man’s voice was that of a late-night caller who had been threatening to kill Sam and his family. During the trial, Sam’s longtime activist friend Joe Glisson noticed that evidence photos of “closed area” signs at the site were timestamped after the date the feds said Sam had trespassed. He was acquitted.

There was also the time at a public hearing in Marion, Illinois, Sam says, to discuss commercial equestrian campgrounds that were operating illegally on Federal land without required Special Use Permits. (It was also a problem that large groups of horse owners illegally rode trails in the Shawnee and tore them up with shod hooves and the grazing of endangered plants.) The owner of a horse campground, who stood to lose money, stood up and shouted, “The next time I catch you in the forest, I’m going to kill you!” Sam says Forest Service employees were on both sides of the man but later told the police they did not hear anything. Sam told John Wallace that if someone ever struck him in that sort of situation, Sam intended to go down as if he had been poleaxed and would not open his eyes until the media and the State’s Attorney showed up.

At a recent multi-state conference for forest advocates, Sam was interested to hear a new term: “revenge logging,” an alleged practice by the Forest Service in areas deliberately adjacent to the personal properties of environmental activists, with project details obscured to avoid public scrutiny and legal challenges. Sam believes it may have used near where he used to live.

•  •  •

Sam drove us first to Burden Falls Wilderness, a 3,800-acre unit of the Shawnee, in Pope County. Burden Falls is several miles down an unimproved road that sometimes washes out in low spots, but its first waterfall is just a few steps beyond the tiny dirt parking lot. Several couples were posing for photos by it when we arrived.

A Forest Service sign nearby warns: “This is a wild land where nature rules.” Sam guided me across the stream emerging from the pool at the waterfall’s base, then followed it down through the woods until the stream eventually poured over the lip of the next waterfall into a canyon several stories below. It was dizzying to stand near the edge. Stalactites of ice dripped on the cliffs all around, and mossy, wet boulders the size of cars were the path to reach the canyon floor. Sam clambered down them as he has done since he was a boy, when his father would drop him off to camp there all weekend, sometimes alone. He says if his friends were along, they would camp in the overhangs in the cliffs, but if he was alone, he was terrified at night and slept under his blankets near the road.

He pointed out a slope to the north where a private plane had crashed once. The supervisor at the time did the correct thing not to allow machinery in to remove the wreck; instead it was cut up onsite and packed out with mules, as in the old days. (There are “loosely-enforced rules” about motorized vehicles on National Forest land, Sam says, but in Congressionally-designated “wilderness” (10% of the Shawnee, including Burden Falls) motorized vehicles/equipment are strictly prohibited.) Hunting is allowed, which Sam has no problem with, but hunters cannot use even a wheeled cart to carry out game, so they sometimes merely trophy-hunt, cutting off deer’s heads and leaving the bodies to rot. This makes Sam mad, because the meat goes to waste.

Sam drove us to the Bell Smith Springs National Natural Landmark, where we hiked the Hunting Branch Trail and the Hill (or Mill) Branch Trail, where a stream flows down long smooth rock and cascades in steps into the canyon. Sam’s mother used to sew three or four extra layers of denim on the back of his jeans so he could use the stream as a water slide. The trails follow the rims of the canyon and its floor, which can be underwater in flood season.

We drove again and walked a levee along a lake next to rock formations like white elephants. I fell in the mud, which had been churned up by four-wheelers or trucks, and made the sound of a baby elephant being born into muck from a great height. I stood up quickly, and when Sam turned he was kind enough not to comment on my being covered in mud and clay.

That evening, Sam took me to the War Bluff Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, the Illinois Audubon Society property he cares for, and where he runs educational programs. The land, farmhouse, and outbuildings were left to the society in the will of Dick and Jean Graber, PhDs in ornithology who worked for the University of Illinois’ Natural History Survey. Sam first met the Grabers at a RACE (Regional Association of Concerned Environmentalists) meeting. RACE works for the protection of the Shawnee against Forest Service plans and policies, especially logging, petroleum extraction, and herbicide use.

The people at the first meeting that the Grabers attended were “a bunch of 20- and 30-year olds,” Sam says, and the Grabers “seemed like old people then, but they were younger than I am now. They said, ‘Are you those kids who try to preserve the forests?’ When RACE members said yes, the Grabers said, ‘We want to help you.’ They used to use their farmhouse to host as many as 200 people plottin’ and a-schemin’ to save the forests.”

Sam said that once he met the Grabers, “I realized they were true scientists [and were] in fact the two most-quoted scientific experts in the Shawnee Forest Management Plan at that time. That changed my view of RACE and all it represented for me.”

On the drive to dinner through an idyllic landscape, I remarked on the number of birds. Sam said, “Oh, that’s good. We thought there were a lot less than there used to be. There must be none up by you.” He said when he used to drive home, bugs were all over the windshield, but now it seemed like a big deal if there was one. The original prairies in the state, with their rich topsoil two to three feet deep, were mostly lost too.

“At the same time, what will you do with your life?” he said. “Give up?”

The next morning Sam drove me to the Dari-Barr diner in Golconda, Illinois, an Ohio River town sometimes mentioned as a possible National Park headquarters and gateway. I had biscuits and gravy, then the custard pie.

Sam drove us around town, narrating, and down the river to inspect what remained of an old Army Corps facility, then northwest a few miles to Millstone Bluff, an igneous bubble of a hill that was once home to Woodland and Mississippian Indians and has remains of their stone fort and petroglyphs. Sam explained that in government nomenclature, a “natural area,” which received protections, could be designated because of a unique botanical, zoological, geological, or archaeological feature. He said the natural area of Millstone Knob, as it is known locally, goes halfway down the hillside, but there was no marker where it ended, and the lack of signage in the Forest often leads to abuses. The smaller trees, he thought, meant it had been clearcut in the 1970s.

A former Army Corps of Engineers building on the Ohio River, near Golconda, IL. (Photo by John Griswold)

We went to see John Wallace and Karen Fairley at their home. Sam first met John Wallace in 1990, when John had locked himself by the neck to a logging truck in a nationally-covered protest in the Shawnee. John and Sam contributed, with numerous others including attorney Tom Buchele, to legal work that led to a federal judge’s 17-year injunction against logging, oil and gas extraction, and ATV use in the Shawnee.

Karen helps them stay in touch with new threats, as the injunction was lifted in 2013 and logging is moving forward again, thousands of acres at a time, often changing official names for the same parcel-project, to escape notice.

I tried to follow along as they talked shop and briefly explained the complicated legal situation. The 1999 court ruling, by a judge familiar with environmental law, required the USFS to conduct a more thorough environmental assessment on the impacts of logging in an area near Bell Smith Springs, but it failed to do so, and there were subsequent attempts to bypass the ruling by using a “categorical exclusion.”

This term, Sam explained, means that as long as a project is 70 acres or less, with a half-mile or less of road building, it is exempt from environmental protection laws. Both men felt that if the Forest Service is allowed categorical exclusions,  it will log the entire 3,800+ acres, 70 acres at a time, which Sam says “they have been salivating to do ever since we shut them down with that court injunction years ago.”

John and Sam agreed it was a challenge to educate the courts on environmental law, including NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, enacted in 1970, that requires federal agencies to assess potential environmental impacts of their proposed actions before making decisions.

“NEPA is so important—because it involves the public—that it’s been called the Magna Carta of environmental laws,” John Wallace said.

Wildfires and forest health have been used as justifications for increased logging, but John and Sam believe this is misguided and historically inaccurate (as when academics or the government say Native Americans burned their lands regularly). In reality, they said, logging raises wildfire risks, and the real driver is pressure from the timber industry and Congress.

“The biggest threat to old growth is chainsaws, is mechanized logging,” John said. “The old growth has survived wildfire, insects and disease for millennia.”

They mentioned a Freedom of Information Act request that they say revealed that the Forest Service’s own report showed the area has highly erodible soils and steep slopes that are already eroded.

Later that afternoon Sam walked me up to Sand Cave, a massive rock shelter in the bluffs that was used by Native Americans and was a stop on the Underground Railroad. The trail to the cave is a washed-out mess, deep below grade, from horse and ATV use. Sam said there used to be organized, paid trail rides on Easter Sundays for sermons in the cave, which is big enough to fit dozens of horses. The erosion of the trail would only worsen, he said, until it was left alone long enough for moss to colonize it, and that was unlikely to happen.

(There are many such tragedies of the commons in the Shawnee. Sam has witnessed 220 horses in a single group ride, and 4×4 club members laughing and shouting over their engines as they churned the forest floor into the kind of mud you can no longer walk on. Sam also told me that, at one point, the Forest Service had one law enforcement officer to cover all that acreage. With federal budget cuts and agency firings, things could get even worse.)

We visited the Bell Smith Springs logging site, cut back from a former Turkey Federation parking lot. Sam said the hunting organization got federal money to put the lot in but did not maintain it, so there is only a tiny patch of gravel to mark where it used to be. Sam said the logging operation, down a muddy, wide track cut through the woods, has been designated a “Gap-phase dynamics group selection.”

Sam said this is “a euphemism the Forest Service came up with decades ago in order to obfuscate clear cutting. Other terms they have used for logging are ‘wildlife habitat enhancement,’ ‘ecological restoration,’ ‘thinning,’ ‘shelterwood cutting,’ ‘oak-hickory regeneration,’ etc. These latter two terms are what they are calling the current technique proposed for this timber sale.”

At the Bell Smith logging area. (Photo by John Griswold)

Sam waved at the denuded area ahead of us. “Do you know what a clear-cut looks like?” he said. “It looks like shit.”

Worse, “trees from the Shawnee, especially the Garden of the Gods area, so far, are trucked to Missouri then shredded into livestock bedding, which is used and discarded within a year, thus contributing to greenhouse gases, from the moment the soil is disturbed by logging until the time that discarded, shredded bedding finally disintegrates.”

Sam said the site had been called “Bell Smith Springs clear cuts,”  then was changed to “Opportunity Area 6 Project,” then “McCormick Oak-Hickory Regeneration,” and now was called “Vplow.”

“They keep changing this name because they don’t want us to be able to track it down,” he said.

As far as oak restoration went, he pointed at a large tree. “Well, that’s one of the nicer oak trees we’ve seen out here. And you can see by the blue paint at the bottom that it’s scheduled to be cut.

“When a hillside like this one is denuded, and the earth is compacted from logging machinery, silt runs off into the creek, and the sediment winds up in the creeks at Bell Smith.”

“[W]hen there’s a good layer of leaf litter or pine needle duff, invasive-species seeds can’t reach the soil to germinate, but when they burn it, the soil is exposed. Then all these invasive, exotic species start seeding in here [and] will be the first thing to come up…. And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to use herbicides to get rid of those.’”

(Sam says he knows of property owners and a Forest Service biologist who saw or were caught in what he calls Agent Orange spraying in the past in the Shawnee. There are many herbicides; The Federal Register says “Transline, Garlon 4, and Rodeo” have been used on Kudzu in the Shawnee, for example.)

“If War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength, can you keep a forest healthy by killing it?” Sam said.

Sam said he has often encountered USFS workers at this logging site, and they know his take on things. He said he does not hold much against them, because they are usually young guys a couple years out of Southern Illinois University forestry school.

“But if they last in the Forest Service for a couple of decades,” he said, “they will come back to these areas they have been involved with and see that they have failed, that the goals of their projects have failed.”

The last place we visited was Camp Ondessonk, nearly a thousand acres of some of the best land and rock formations in the Shawnee, owned by the Catholic Church and used as a youth camp. Back in the day, Sam says, he used to do odd jobs for the camp caretaker, who was alone there nine months of the year and would keep him informed of goings-on. Sam laughs about locals gathering in the off-season, and how he and others rappelled from a suspension bridge into canoes in the moonlight; another friend, now a Pentecostal preacher, jumped off the enormous Packentuck Waterfall there. (Sam gave up drinking 30 years ago, he says, but still uses psychedelics and weed.) When priests were about to arrive for a retreat, Sam would get a warning from the caretaker and knew to tell others to stay away.

•  •  •

Sam Stearns at Burden Falls. (Photo by John Griswold)

Sam has been speaking for the trees a long time, and he praises the people he learned from along the way. One of them is Dr. Joe Glisson, the now-deceased owner of the Pomona General Store, a Shawnee landmark, who told The New York Times for a 1987 profile that he was a “geriatric hippie.” (He was 39 years old.)

Glisson, who became Sam’s “mentor, hero and dear friend,” was responsible, with others, for the formation of RACE. He was the first to teach Sam (who may still have thought “environmental types were like the hippies, acting more on emotion than science”) that the Forest Service had lied to him when they said there was no recourse for a certain parcel being logged. He taught Sam that citizens could always give input that could very well stop timber sales.

“I learned a lot [from Joe],” Sam told The Southern Illinoisan. “I learned I couldn’t believe the studies about the effects of clear cutting because they were financed by the timber industry. I learned I couldn’t always trust the forest service to protect this area, and I learned that citizens like Joe Glisson and myself can have an impact on public land management. I learned just enough to make me dangerous,” Sam told the newspaper and laughed.

Glisson’s obituary, from 2020, says, “Joe was able to sue the government as a private citizen on behalf of the environment. He litigated before the US District Court for the Southern District of Illinois and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. A retired US District Judge credited Joe with teaching him about the environment. District federal clerks told him that he wrote better legal briefs than most lawyers. […] Like most folks, Joe became an environmentalist because a place he loved was threatened. Once he found his legal niche, Joe dedicated his life to holding governments to account for their responsibility to protect the natural world.”

Sam credits longtime friends Judy and Les Winkeler, who retired as the outdoors writer for The Southern Illinoisan, for coming up with the idea of creating a Shawnee National Park. The Winkelers loved to visit national parks, Sam says, and with their input, “we found out a good model for us is the New River Gorge in West Virginia.”

Shawnee activists learned, from New River becoming a national park and preserve, that the protective regulations the Forest Service has in place for areas of the Shawnee, such as Garden of the Gods, Bell Smith Springs, Little Grand Canyon, and Larue-Pine Hills, “are no more stringent than what the Park Service would [have],” Sam says.

“So we came to understand…we could have those four units be National Park, and then all the surrounding Federal acreage [could be a preserve,] also under the management of the Department of the Interior, which is what we want. But even on Department of Interior lands there can be resource extraction.” Creating the nation’s first climate preserve “would accomplish what some of us are most interested in, which is protecting the ecology of the forest by eliminating resources extraction…. The forest would be like it was when that [17-year] court injunction was in place.. […]

“[We realized] that for the last 35 years we had been working against something. All this time we’ve been working against logging, we’ve been working against overuse of commercial horse traffic in places where horses are prohibited. So we think that we could be more effective having a positive message of being for something—being for the National Park proposal. Because I think people in general…can get behind a positive idea of supporting something.”

•  •  •

Sam admits it is a hard time to be suggesting more protections for the Shawnee, as well as an agency transfer and the revolutionary idea of a climate preserve, during the second Trump administration, which in many ways takes us back to the days of James Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior from 1981-’83.

Watt, who died in 2023, was a precursor to several of today’s cabinet secretaries who are not just hollowing out the departments they are meant to lead but actually making them the antithesis of their intent. My first college research paper was titled, “Do You Know Watt?”, so I may be unfair in remembering him as the very model of a modern disaster for the environment. President Trump’s first Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, got full credit for being worse in his time.

Sam also speaks at length about scattered attention in the Internet age, and how people are interested in their own things. How to get someone to create political change in the Shawnee when they are invested in anti-climate propaganda? “How do you get someone to care about this when aid is being shut off to people in need abroad?” he says.

But Sam says he has two periods in his life: Before cancer and after cancer. His diagnosis in 2019 further reinforced his commitment to his environmental work. He does not say the word Zen, but he acknowledges he is more accepting, compassionate, and focused now.

“A man has two lives. He begins living the second life the day he realizes he has only one,” he says, quoting Confucius.

When the US Forest Service gets categorical exclusions to log in places that are otherwise protected, activists call it “eating the elephant.” At Bell Smith Springs loggers are slowly eating the almost 4,000 acres, one clever bite at a time. It occurs to me that Sam and his friends help the elephant bite back, and, what is more, that this is a metaphor for how one lives a meaningful life, day by day.

A clear-cut skidding area at Bell Smith logging area, where felled trees will be dragged. (Photo by John Griswold)

Sam has been a plaintiff-intervenor in two previous legal cases and the background investigator in at least six more, “the guy on the ground doing the research, taking the pictures and chatting up the locals and getting information.”

Meanwhile, The Friends of Bell Smith Springs, the organization Sam founded, recently became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so it can accept donations, including from allied organizations such as Shawnee Forest Defense and the Heartwood Forest Council, for a new legal challenge. It has secured the pro bono legal services of Tom Buchele, the attorney who previously worked on Shawnee Forest issues. The case has already gained national attention, and the Heartwood Forest Council is coordinating a larger litigation strategy involving attorneys from multiple states to challenge the Forest Service’s use of categorical exclusions for logging projects. The outcome could not only determine protection for the Bell Smith Springs area but also set legal precedents that could be applied to similar cases across the country.

Sam tells me that when some people hear from him about plans for the Shawnee National Park and Climate Preserve, which would move the Shawnee away from the Forest Service and its commodity approach, they tell him, “You think the National Park Service will always be so great?”

Sam laughs and says he replies, “I intend to go to my grave fighting the Park Service.”