PHOTO | CAPE FEAR RIVER WATCH

An overhead photograph of a wood pellet mill in near Ahoskie, N.C., where trees are converted into pellets for exportation to Europe. Although government agencies don’t classify logging-related emissions as a pollutant, cutting trees removes a prime source of oxygen for the planet via conversion of carbon dioxide.

This is the second of a three-part environmental justice series made possible by a National Association of Black Journalists Black Press Grant supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

When Anita Cunningham relocated from eastern Maryland to Lumberton in 2018 to help her sister care for their ailing father, she thought it was a good time to embark on a new chapter in her life. But the timing could not have been worse for the retiree.

Three days after she arrived, so did Hurricane Florence, a Category 4 storm with 130 mile per hour winds and more than 30 inches of rain. Downed trees from prior storms exacerbated flooding of the Lumber River, the primary drinking water source for much of Robeson County.

Cunningham spent four days trapped inside with no electricity and water up to her knees, unsure if she would make it out.

“Two or three minutes away, the area was flooded, and people had to be rescued by boat,” she recalls. “I had never experienced a weather event like that. It was life-changing. I thought ‘there’s got to be a better way.’”

The storm changed Cunningham from someone who never thought much about climate change or environmental justice to someone for whom these were defining issues.

“I always voted but I had never been involved in environmental activism or in politics,” she said. “Coming to Robeson County, I got a chance to see how all of that plays out and how it’s all connected. It was more impactful because of the degree of harm that was being inflicted on the community that I live in.”

Cunningham quickly learned about what she calls “dirty industries” like hog and poultry farms that populate places like Lumberton. She earned a peer support specialist certificate and began organizing to draw attention to the impact of deforestation and pollution on the state’s poorest communities. Cunningham is now program director of the Robeson County Cooperative for Sustainable Development, a multiracial team of organizers working to challenge the cumulative and disproportionate impact of climate change in communities of color.

Industry has a long, checkered history on the Lumber River. Over the last 50 years, textile plants, landfills, hazardous waste sites and industrial chicken and hog operations have greatly contributed to the pollution. Several years ago, a Duke Energy power plant left behind more than half a million tons of toxic coal ash in an unlined pond basin, spurring charges of environmental racism in a county that is nearly 40% American Indian and 23% Black.  

Just 60 miles inland, Robeson is either the largest or second largest county in the state by land mass, depending on who you ask. It is also one of the poorest and least educated. The fight for environmental justice got its start in this part of the state.

Nearly 40 years ago, a state trooper pulled over and arrested Ben Chavis, a member of the Wilmington 10, for driving too slowly. Chavis had just finished leading a protest over the state’s decision to dump cancer-causing chemicals in a poor Black community in Warren County.

“This is environmental racism,” Chavis yelled, as the jail door slammed shut. Chavis’ words, credited for sparking the environmental justice movement, continue to resonate with people burdened by one environmental injustice after the next.

Chickens come home to roost
For decades, Robeson County might have considered itself lucky. While neighboring Sampson and Duplin counties became infamous for having more hogs than people by a factor of 40 to 1, Robeson largely escaped the industrial hog farming industry. Its luck ran out with the recent boom in poultry industrial farming.

An Environmental Working Group and Waterkeepers Alliance investigation found that in the last year alone, North Carolina added nearly 1,000 poultry factory farms with virtually no oversight. According to EWG, since 2012, the estimated number of chickens and turkeys in Robeson County has increased by about 24 million. And because poultry is largely unregulated, state legislators aren’t allowed to disclose the precise location of the operations. Even the environmental regulators don’t know where most of the farms are located.

Robeson is now slated for its own wood pellet factory, which activists say could bring even more pollution to the community.

About 10 years ago, Derb Carter, Senior Advisor and Attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, heard that Enviva Biomass, the world’s largest wood pellet producer, planned to build its first U.S. pellet mill factory in Ahoskie, a small, mostly Black town in Hertford County near the Virginia border.

At the time, Carter was skeptical of the company’s claims to manufacture pellets using only sawdust, limbs and residuals from timber harvests.

“I thought there was no way to get a meaningful amount of energy from wood unless you substantially harvested forests all across the state,” he said. “So, they built their plant and the next thing I heard from a friend up there is that they were clear-cutting bottomland hardwood swamps to supply the pellet mill.”

Carter went to Ahoskie and was horrified by what he saw – dozens of trucks loaded with massive piles of bottomland hardwood logs headed to the mill.

“Basically, all of this began with a deception on the part of Enviva about what they were planning to do,” he said.

By this time, however, the wood pellet manufacturing train was barreling down the track at speeds too fast to stop. Policymakers have ignored warnings from scientists and environmentalists as the number of wood pellet mills has escalated dramatically. “The trees are the lungs of the forest and they’re cutting down like 60 acres a day in North Carolina,” Cunningham said.

Pellet mills are 50% more likely to be located near communities with above-average poverty levels and a population that’s at least 25% nonwhite, according to an analysis by the environmental nonprofit Dogwood Alliance. According to DEQ’s mapping system, 90% of the residents who live in the vicinity of the Lumberton site are people of color and two-thirds are low-income.

The lure of jobs and economic development can be tempting in impoverished communities with high unemployment, but those assurances often fail to pan out. The people of Ahoskie were promised green energy jobs that would boost the local economy. They got about 50 direct jobs, tree loss, air pollution, and combustible dust that threatens their health. In addition, round-the-clock noise and heavy traffic diminished their ability to enjoy their homes or spend time outdoors. The same thing happened next door in Northampton County two years later when Enviva opened a new plant there.

License to pollute
Residents and activists believe they will suffer the same fate if Active Energy Renewable Power opens its wood pellet mill in Lumberton. The company received $500,000 in state taxpayer money to purchase and upgrade the old Alamac Knits factory to manufacture wood pellets.

There are already signs that AERP won’t be the kind of good corporate citizen the people need and deserve. The company violated its air quality permit and made unpermitted discharges of industrial stormwater pollution into the Lumber. The Southern Environmental Law Center sued the company in federal court in March for violating the Clean Water Act.

“Active Energy Renewable Power can’t pollute the Lumber River without a state permit to limit pollutants,” SELC staff attorney Heather Hillaker said at the time. “Given the harmful toxins present on Active Energy’s property, pollution limits and frequent monitoring are crucial to protect the health of the Lumber River, people, and wildlife.”

All the logging and wood pellet manufacturing is done for export to Europe. The European Union declared that burning of wood was carbon neutral in 2009 and turned to biomass, fuel produced using plant or animal material, to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. This spurred a huge market for trees, which it found in abundance in rural communities throughout the southeastern U.S., where local governments are amenable to big energy projects regardless of their environmental impact.

Burning wood releases more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced than coal or gas, but the wood pellet industry touts the harvesting process as sustainable and carbon neutral if trees are replanted, even if they take decades to grow.

Economist John Talberth at the Center for Sustainable Economy says no one is counting the carbon emissions associated with logging because the accounting rules were written by loggers for loggers.

“That’s why you hear of agriculture as a big source of emissions, but not logging and wood products,” says Talberth.

That assertion is backed up by a 2018 report by the Environmental Integrity Project which found that 21 wood pellet mills emit thousands of tons of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, per year. These pollutants are associated with illnesses from respiratory and heart disease to cancer. In addition, the wood pellet mills themselves emit 3.1 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.

Convincing people in politically conservative Robeson County – Donald Trump won by nearly 20 points in the 2020 presidential election – that climate change is real is a tough sell. Even some who agree with the mission think the fight is futile. Cunningham is not deterred, however. After all, they stopped the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

“I need to connect with people one-by-one, community-by-community and show them the devastation it is causing and how it relates to them personally,” she says. “It doesn't matter how long it takes. I'm just gonna have to engage my kids, my grandkids and the communities to understand that this is the only planet we have.”

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