“A lot of these people, I don’t think they understand what’s at stake.”
It’s early Friday afternoon, and the autumn leaves are mostly yellow and orange, more still clinging to the trees than on the ground.
“Sometimes,” Dave Shoopman said, “it gets so quiet out here on the porch that you can hear your heart beating.”
Shoopman, retired and lounging outside with his two dogs, is expecting company at his Possum Trot Road residence.
By the end of this weekend, there may be a few hundred people, maybe more, camped out at his place. They will arrive with an intention: to try to stop state forestry officials from cutting down hundreds of trees in the rugged Yellowwood State Forest Back Country Area.
In August, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources announced a plan to log the 299 acres in northwestern Brown County, a site that has long been protected. A state news release from 1981 heralded the establishment of a 2,700-acre “back country” area that would remain in its primitive and natural state.
But the logging plan proposed for the area would fell between 1,500 and 7,000 mature trees — each side of the issue has its own count. Forest protection proponents and environmentalists say logging the woods and cutting down trees, some more than 200 years old, violates the intent of state officials who said the site would be protected from man-made intrusions.
The trees are to be marked this week, and timber buyers will show up Thursday to place bids at a state-run timber auction.