Our tale begins with a story we’ve all heard: corporations with unlimited resources steamrolling the residents of a small, rural town. The villain? A wolf in sheep’s clothing. They call themselves the Renewable Biomass Group (Biomass), and they thought it would be easy to bring their noisy, dirty wood pellet biomass plant to the frontline […]
One of the first acts by former President Trump after he was newly elected was to issue an executive order to roll back protections afforded by the Clean Water Act of 1972. Seemingly overnight, the incredibly complex question of what constitutes the waters of the US (WOTUS) became the jurisdiction of Georgia’s modest Environmental Protection […]
Three years ago, as residents of Richmond County, North Carolina were fighting to stop a dirty Enviva wood pellet facility from building in their community. Meanwhile, residents in Colbert, GA were learning about a new polluting industry that had been proposed in their community – the Georgia Renewable Power Biomass Plant, promising to burn only […]
For most of us, especially folks living in the South, we see industrial air and water pollution expanding. We feel the negative health, environmental sustainability, and economic impacts across the region and beyond. Unfortunately, most policy makers haven’t gotten the memo. Why else would we continue to see the expansion of polluting, extractive industries like […]
Over and over again, destructive polluting industries sweep into rural communities and make sweetheart deals with a few “leading citizens” who help them push tax breaks, subsidies, and rezoning through local governments. Once they get their way, local residents are left to deal with the aftermath – the smell, the chemicals, the blazing lights, the […]
