Welcome to Tread the Red – your Red River Gorge Podcast! 😉Â
This week we have a very special episode featuring a super cool and awesome guest, Whitney Hamblin from Kentucky Heartwood! Whitney is the Communications and Outreach Coordinator for Kentucky Heartwood and is here to chat all about WHAT Kentucky Heartwood is and does, WHY this organization is so important, and HOW you can become involved to make a difference in the forests near you.Â
Kentucky Heartwood was formed in 1992 by people concerned about logging, mining, and off-road vehicles on the Daniel Boone National Forest (DBNF). The group advocates for the greatest protections of Kentucky’s public lands, with the twin values of protecting and restoring ecological integrity and a reverence and respect for wild nature as their guiding principles. Through public education, outreach, forest monitoring, and the suite of administrative and legal avenues of public participation and recourse, Kentucky Heartwood continues their tradition of effective advocacy.
There are a couple of ways you can get involved immediately!Â
1) You can RSVP for the Virtual Meeting on July 13th at 7 PM for an opportunity to raise your voice in defense of mature and old-growth forests in the eastern US and around the nation! You can visit the link in their instagram bio (@kentuckyheartwood) and RSVP or head to the link in their website!Â
2) Make a public comment to the U.S. Forest Service by July 20th to urge the agency to recognize their logging as the primary threat to carbon storage in eastern national forests, and to advocate for the protection of mature and old-growth forests in the fight against climate change. The few remaining old-growth forests provide unmatched natural benefits and beauty, but the U.S. Forest Service continues to target them in timber sales. If the older, most resilient forests’ incredible biodiversity, water-purification power, and boundless opportunities for recreation are not enough to convince you they’re worth protecting, their potential to store and sequester mass amounts of climate-harming carbon should. Please consider making a personal comment or using their premade form and signing!!
As always, thank you so much for listening! We hope that this episode shines some light on some really major game-changing things that are impacting the forests surrounding us (we’re a hiking podcast, so we know y’all listeners care about them)!!Â
Tread the Red 