About Us

Natural Bloomington is a work in progress, but wherever it eventually leads, the purpose is to celebrate and share the unique natural beauty of the Bloomington area and the broader Southern Indiana bioregion. Our experiences -- be they by vehicle, photograph or prose -- explore the region's unique backcountry ecosystems and natural features.

 

Over the past four years, Natural Bloomington's focus has shifted from ecotourism to nature books, published by IU Press. A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana In Spring 2016. A companion Guide to Natural Areas of Northern Indiana will be released in Spring 2019.

 

The latest book project, Rewilding Southern Indiana: The Hoosier National Forest, will be a coffee table book that will be published in 2020.

Natural Bloomington is a project of Bloomington-based environmental journalist, author and photographer Steven Higgs, who has spent 40 years exploring, photographing and writing about Southern Indiana. From 1985 to 1996, he worked as the chief environmental reporter at the Bloomington Herald-Times. From 1996-2000, he served as the senior environmental writer at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Since 2002, he has published the online news site The Bloomington Alternative.

His work has been featured in regional newspapers and magazines, as well as websites around the world, including CounterPunch, The Progressive, NUVO, Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Indiana Alumni and others. His journalism has been recognized by journalistic organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists, Hoosier State Press Association and Associated Press Managing Editors, as well as public and private groups, including the Hoosier Environmental Council, Indiana Environmental Institute, Indiana Public Health Association and Indiana Environmental Health Association. In 1996, he authored Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana, IU Press.

Higgs has won more than three dozen awards for his writing, most recently in 2009 and 2010, when stories he penned for NUVO in Indianapolis were awarded second and first places for best reporting on the environment by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2009, the Age of Autism named him Best New Blogger by for his Autism and the Indiana Environment blog, which he produced from 2008-2012.

Since 2002, he has served as an adjunct lecturer at the IU School of Journalism, teaching online and traditional classroom courses in information gathering; reporting, writing and editing; online journalism; and the environment in the news.