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\n <\/figure>\n \u201cWhile both TNC and The Dogwood Alliance share a commitment to working on forest conservation, climate change and environmental justice issues, we must also share the knowledge that reasonable people can disagree on approaches,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last September, I joined Smith for a trip across a stretch of the Black belt where North and South Carolina meet in the watersheds of the Pee Dee and Lumber Rivers, a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast. The area is heavily logged, and at just about every bend of the road there were vast clearcuts, ugly stretches of land that had been scalped. The dominant industries in this part of the Carolinas are those that feed on the forests: wood pellet mills, paper mills, pulp processors, and power plants that burn wood chips. \u201cYou can go anywhere across the coastal plain and find the same dynamic,\u201d said Smith as we drove. \u201cI\u2019m 55, and in my lifetime I\u2019ve seen a landscape-level change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Smith grew up in South Carolina, acquainted with swamps, cypresses, snakes, and the bewitching light of the wetland woods. After a dispiriting stint in corporate law, she turned to full-time environmentalism, joining Dogwood Alliance in 1997 and becoming its executive director at the age of 30. \u201cI knew how to gather evidence and build a case,\u201d she told me, \u201cto advocate for the trees and the forests.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We were headed to the 2,000-person, majority-Black town of Britton\u2019s Neck in Marion County. We passed dozens of clearcuts, the land gray and barren, the slash from the downed trees in sad, jumbled piles. These were followed by plantations of hybridized pines, non-native, bioengineered, planted in rows, even-aged, and, hewing to industry practice, soaked in chemicals to keep the insects off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tops of the pines formed unbroken eaves, like the rooftops of rowhouses. \u201cCan you see the tree line, homogenous all the way down?\u201d said Smith. \u201cLook at the perfect rows!\u201d We turned onto South Carolina state highway 41, a few minutes north of Britton\u2019s Neck, and passed a clearcut that formed on both sides of the road an empty prospect as far as the eye could see. The cut went on for miles. \u201cAnd it keeps going, one after another. These are our southern forests. They\u2019re not ecosystems. They\u2019re fiber farms, corporate plantation croplands. This is what TNC is supporting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Smith had arranged a meeting in Britton\u2019s Neck with Reverend Woodberry, a community organizer who had been dubbed \u201cthe EJ pastor.\u201d Woodberry made a name for himself in the environmental justice community as one of the chief planners of the 2017 People\u2019s Climate March in Washington, DC, which is where Smith met him. The two joined forces that year to help organize residents in Hamlet, North Carolina, to stop construction of an Enviva pellet plant. The effort failed, but in the course of it they became fast friends. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Woodberry is a fierce-looking 69-year-old who likes to bring environmentalism to the pulpit, making connections, for example, between the rivers that became blood in the Biblical Book of Revelation and red tides of toxic algae. \u201cIf we\u2019re stewards of the Earth,\u201d he once told a reporter<\/a>, referring to the Book of Genesis, \u201cwe\u2019re supposed to be doing something about this.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of his projects in South Carolina has been the documentation of how logging of wetland forests has led to an increase in flooding. It\u2019s well known among ecologists that intact forests, with their extensive root systems and firm soil, absorb more water during storm events than logged forests. To experience up close the flood devastation that logging brings, however, is altogether different. \u201cWe\u2019ve been in homes where the flooding was so bad the floor has fallen in, and you can peer in and see the ground,\u201d Woodberry told me over the phone before I arrived in the Carolinas. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen homes totally taken over by black mold, where children are sick.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I met him, the reverend was accompanied by two members of the Concerned Citizens of Brittons Neck: Johnny B. Graves, 78, and Marvin Woodberry, 66, the reverend\u2019s cousin. The Pee Dee River flows near town, and in 2018, when Hurricane Florence hit, the river leapt its banks, and Johnny B. was evacuated along with some 2,000 residents. Marvin told me he has fled his house three times in the last five years due to flooding. After Hurricane Matthew in 2015, Woodberry tested the local drinking water and discovered it had been infiltrated with pesticides and other chemicals from the surging river, along with contaminants from overflowing sewage systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seeing all this havoc was personal for the reverend. \u201cThis is an old community, formed in 1749,\u201d he told me. \u201cMy family came from here. My uncle says we\u2019ve been here since slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We came to a halt at a section of cracked tarmac that was the terminus of the last big flood, during Hurricane Florence. Marvin showed me a map of town on his phone. He pointed to an area southeast of where we stood, a half-mile distant, that had been repeatedly logged. Beyond the logged area was the Pee Dee River. \u201cIt\u2019s all through there the water comes, where those trees used to be absorbing the water,\u201d Marvin told me. \u201cWe got to stop this. We got to keep our trees.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe got to keep our trees!\u201d echoed the reverend.<\/p>\n\n\n At the banks of the Pee Dee River along a dirt road, we came to a stretch of wetland where tall old trees still stood, and the banks sloped to the sleepy black water. It was unlogged land, and it happened to be the spot where Marvin had been baptized when he was a young man. Cypresses towered above us, shaggy with vines, disheveled, their wide trunks furrowed and buttressed. The river ran glassy and slow, the sun shone in clear azure sky, a lone cicada rattled, and a breeze whispered in a stand of loblolly pine. To my northern eyes \u2014 I had never seen cypresses in the flesh \u2014 it was a marvelously exotic scene. To Leo and Marvin Woodberry, it was native ground, and that it hadn\u2019t been logged was meaningful in a way no outsider could comprehend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The southern coastal plain has become home to biomass mills that gorge on the region\u2019s forests and turn them into wood pellets. The biomass industry asserts that wood pellet production is clean, green, and sustainable. The people I met in the shadow of the mills disagreed. Debra David, a 64-year-old homemaker turned activist, lives three miles from an Enviva mill in Hamlet, NC, which commenced operations in 2019 \u2014 the year, as it happens, that David started having trouble breathing. I met with her last autumn in a one-room Pentecostal church in town, where she and a neighbor and fellow parishioner, 50-year-old Debbie Short, described the collapse of their health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI use a nebulizer now. I can hardly walk,\u201d said Short. She attributes her exploding case of asthma to air pollutants from the mill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI never had respiratory problems before Enviva came,\u201d David told me. \u201cTwo years ago, I went to the hospital, it got so bad. They put me on a ventilator.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Debbie Short, left, and Debra David, right, live near Enviva’s wood pellet mill in North Carolina. They both have health problems they attribute to pollution from the mill. Photos by Christopher Ketchum \/ Grist<\/em><\/p>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n Both women are Black, and both live in a relatively impoverished community: Hamlet\u2019s poverty rate is 29 percent. They told me that widespread health problems among friends and family began with the powering up of the pellet mill. Short\u2019s son, who is 29, gets headaches daily. David says her adult son suffers routine nosebleeds, though he never had them prior to Enviva\u2019s arrival. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That the community is being sickened should not come as a shock. A 2018 investigation<\/a> by the Environmental Integrity Project, or EIP, found that of 21 wood-pellet processing facilities it looked at across the South, more than half \u201ceither failed to keep emissions below legal limits or failed to install required pollution controls.\u201d At least a third of the facilities investigated were operated by Enviva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (In response to Grist\u2019s request for comment about the EIP report, an Enviva spokesperson said the report has \u201cnumerous false statements about Enviva\u201d and that \u201call our plants operate well inside the U.S. federal and state regulatory emission standards, presenting no risk or issue to public health or the environment.\u201d The spokesperson insisted that Enviva has never received any community complaints about its plant in Hamlet.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Manufacturing wood pellets is a filthy job. The logged material is dried in a wood-fired process, then pressed into pellets. Each step produces air pollution. EIP\u2019s investigation found that emissions from the 21 facilities \u2014 which together produced 16,000 tons of air pollutants annually \u2014 included nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds. The pellet mills spew the particularly noxious type of soot called PM 2.5, which is so fine that it can pass deep into the lungs and depress lung function, worsen asthma, and trigger heart attacks. When exposed to sunlight, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides transform into ozone, which is especially dangerous to children and the elderly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of these environmental justice concerns, there is the climate cost of biomass. The industry\u2019s vaunted declaration that it\u2019s a carbon-neutral energy source would seem at odds with the fact that burning wood pellets for power emits more carbon per unit of electricity produced than coal. The industry, along with many European governments that have widely subsidized biomass as green energy, counters that these emissions are rendered moot, because trees are regrown in the logged trees\u2019 place to absorb whatever carbon is released with burning. The staking of climate neutrality, however, ignores the all-important time frame of the need for decarbonization in the next two decades to avoid catastrophic warming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2021, 87 scientists and economists<\/a>, taking stock of the evidence, charged biomass proponents with a kind of carbon accounting fraud. The industry and its supporters in the European Union, they said, had failed to account for the effect of logged trees that no longer remove carbon from the atmosphere, the massive loss of carbon in soils due to logging\u2019s ground disturbance, and the carbon emissions from the fossil fuels burnt to topple and haul trees and process them into pellets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Smith and Woodberry have questioned why TNC has never spoken publicly about logging\u2019s immense carbon impacts. A group of researchers from NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, and the World Resources Institute found that logging was the single largest driver of carbon emissions<\/a> from U.S. forests between 2006 and 2010, five times more impactful than fires, land-use change, insects, drought, and wind damage combined. An open letter to Congress published last November and signed by hundreds of scientists concluded that \u201cgreenhouse gas emissions from logging in U.S. forests are now comparable to the annual CO2 emissions from U.S. coal burning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn 2020, we joined environmental and justice groups and scientists from across the nation in an effort to engage The Nature Conservancy in conversation about this ongoing forest crisis,\u201d Woodberry and Smith wrote in their editors\u2019 introduction to the \u201cThe Nature Conspiracy.\u201d They asked that TNC make a public statement about logging as a driver of carbon emissions in U.S. forests and commit to advancing environmental justice in communities on the front lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TNC, as Woodberry and Smith put it, \u201clistened at first, but then declined to act.\u201d The attempt by the coalition they built to engage the nonprofit was in fact a 10-month endeavor, involving multiple letters, phone calls, and meetings with TNC officials, including one directly with Morris that lasted four hours, according to Smith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe forestry industry is just like the fossil fuel industry. It is extractive, polluting, climate-disruptive, and destructive of biodiversity,\u201d Smith told me. \u201cTNC doesn\u2019t want to hear this.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2015, a conservation biologist at Duke University named Stuart Pimm, who specializes in extinctions, wanted to know whether the system of land protection in the U.S. was up to the task of preserving biodiversity at a time when many species are collapsing. He looked first at the land trusts of the Nature Conservancy. With annual revenue of over $1 billion, TNC has funded the purchase of many millions of acres of land trusts as conservation easements intended to be protected from development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pimm, to his surprise, discovered that one of the lowest concentrations of protected land<\/a> was in the southeastern U.S., which is more biodiverse<\/a> than most other parts of the country. It also has the highest rate of endemism, defined as species that only occur in a particular area and nowhere else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pimm expected that the planet\u2019s most endowed conservation group would be more attentive to places teeming with life. Curious as to why there were so few TNC acquisitions in the American South, the nation\u2019s biodiversity hotspot, Pimm believed he found the answer by overlaying on the map of land trusts a second map of U.S. counties coded by income and wealth. Most of TNC\u2019s land acquisitions were in the richest counties, overwhelmingly in the Northeast, New England, the Upper Midwest, and in a selection of wealthy enclaves elsewhere across the country. Failing to protect the more biodiverse but economically bereft regions of the South amounted to \u201ca spectacular failure of TNC\u2019s national leadership,\u201d Pimm told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In August 2021, Pimm, a self-described Christian, joined with Michael Malcolm, an environmental justice pastor and executive director of the People\u2019s Justice Council, to write a letter to the chief scientist at TNC, Katherine Hayhoe, one of the few publicly-prominent evangelical Christians who believe in climate change. The intractable problem facing TNC, as Pimm and Malcolm remarked in the letter, is that it \u201cnow has a very unfortunate reputation for dismissing science for its own political convenience.\u201d The group\u2019s positions \u201con issues involving climate change and biodiversity in the southeast USA,\u201d they charged, \u201care unconscionable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur Christian values teach us to stand and speak out against the things that harm community,\u201d Pimm and Malcolm told Hayhoe. (Hayhoe, through intermediaries at TNC, did not respond to Grist\u2019s requests for comment). \u201cYour not speaking out against current TNC practices harms nature, harms people, and it harms you and the reputation you have worked so hard to establish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hayhoe didn\u2019t respond. \u201cWe got nothing. Zip,\u201d Pimm told me. \u201cIt showed a level of arrogance that I found was exceptional.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Fund for Investigative Journalism provided additional funding for this article.<\/em><\/p>\n This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline Logging is destroying southern forests \u2014 and dividing US environmentalists<\/a> on Jun 29, 2022.<\/p>\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/grist.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/marion-county-south-carolina-sign.jpg\")
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