Richie Harding has a lot going on. He’s a pastor at a local church, a small business owner, the executive director of a nonprofit called Gaston Youth, and a community activist.
It’s a hot day in February and he is showing me around his hometown of Garysburg, North Carolina. He takes me to meet his friend Silverleen Alston, who lives in a tidy, well-maintained double wide trailer with green shutters. Her home is situated along a two-lane highway that was widened to accommodate giant logging trucks that roar past day and night. “We’ve been fighting this for years,” Alston tells me.
She’s talking about the noise and pollution from the industrial wood pellet plant that came to her neighborhood about a decade ago. Alston, who has lived here most of her sixty-four years, gestures at the cluster of houses that dot the road.
“My grandfather, he gave land to each one of his kids,” Alston says. “So this is family land here, over there, all around here, it’s family land. So we don’t feel like we need to jump up and leave just because Enviva is here.”
Enviva is the company that built the wood pellet plant in this rural community just a few miles south of the Virginia border. It’s located in Northampton County, which is majority Black and one of the poorest counties in the state.
Richie Harding returned to Garysburg in 2009 after leaving for college and a stint in the military. While he was away, his mother had been fighting against water pollution from a hog farm about a quarter mile from her home. Later, she worked to block a coal ash facility from being built nearby. Now fifty-two, Harding has taken up his mom’s fight against out-of-town corporations like Enviva that expect to meet little local resistance when setting up shop in communities like his.
Enviva is the world’s largest manufacturer of industrial wood pellets, one of the most popular forms of biomass energy. All ten of its facilities are in the Southeastern United States, most of them in economically distressed communities with large non-white populations. Sometimes called the wood basket of the world, the South has always been an abundant source of commercial wood products. But now, many of the region’s forests are being cut down to generate electricity in Europe. Nearly all of the pellets produced by Enviva are shipped to Europe, where they are burned in power plants.
Pellets are a popular form of biomass because existing coal-fired power plants can be converted to burn pellets relatively easily. But making wood pellets is messy and energy intensive. After a debarker machine strips the logs, the wood is ground up, dried, and, using heat and pressure, molded into finger-sized chunks ready to be loaded onto giant cargo ships and sent across the Atlantic.
The whole process of producing and shipping wood pellets is only carbon neutral for the countries that are burning the pellets.
Of course, each stage of harvesting, drying, manufacturing, and transportation releases greenhouse gasses. Worse, when the pellets are burned to generate electricity, they release more carbon dioxide than coal. It may seem surprising, then, that many countries are able to classify this biomass energy as carbon-neutral.
The disingenuous policy that pretends burning wood pellets doesn’t release carbon dioxide gives climate agreement signatories a convenient shortcut to meet their greenhouse gas emissions targets. As a result, to keep the industry profitable and growing, European governments pay millions in subsidies to utilities that use some form of biomass to power their generators. In fact, forest biomass is currently responsible for roughly half of the world’s so-called “renewable energy.”
James L. VanHise
Richie Harding in Garysburg, North Carolina.
The whole process of producing and shipping wood pellets is only carbon neutral for the countries that are burning the pellets, because the carbon debt is counted where the trees are cut down, not where they are burned. As Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and an expert in bioenergy, put it: “If you have a rule that tells energy consumers they don’t have to count the carbon from burning biomass…it gives them incentive to burn it, regardless of the effect somewhere else, because it's just not their problem.”
What about the carbon debt incurred in the United States? Well, we have a lot of trees, proponents argue. And if we replant the forests that are cut down, someday they will absorb the extra carbon emitted by the biomass power plants elsewhere in the world, and we will actually have a renewable energy system on the global level.
There are a few obvious problems with this scenario. First, there is good anecdotal evidence that not all the razed forests are replanted. Second, even when there are attempts at reforestation, experts estimate it will take thirty up to 100 years of growth before the replanted trees are able to recover their previous effectiveness as carbon sinks, in effect delaying carbon neutrality for generations.
In 2021, more than 500 scientists and economists signed a letter to President Biden and leaders of the major biomass consuming countries, pleading with them to end this irrational carbon accounting system. Princeton’s Searchinger, one of the initiators of the letter, calls it a scientific misinterpretation: “It's one of these strange things where some of the so-called experts get it wrong, while the average person immediately understands why it’s absurd.”
The carbon neutrality hoax adds an air of credibility to Enviva’s claim that it is working hard to reign in climate change. The slogan on their homepage encapsulates this message: “Displace Fossil Fuels. Grow More Trees. Fight Climate Change.”
Enviva claims they use only “low-value wood” such as limbs, tree tops, and mill residue, but local residents report seeing trucks laden with whole trees lined up at some facilities, and drone footage shows hundreds of thick logs stacked inside the plants. The company denies they cut down forests, which is technically true since they use contractors to do the work.
A report commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center found that “the rate of forest clearing increased markedly after the initiation of pellet mill operations.” According to the Dogwood Alliance, in North Carolina alone, 60,000 acres of forest were being cut down each year to feed the mills. Alarmingly, Enviva plans to double pellet production by 2027.
While the climate damage is concerning, it’s the harm that pellet manufacturing is doing to his community that upsets Harding the most. The dust coming from the plant has had a major impact on the few dozen families that live in the vicinity of the Enviva plant in Garysburg. Harding and Alston take me around to look at some vehicles sitting in neighbors’ driveways. They are all coated with a thick layer of dust.
“So if you have this on the vehicles, what’s their HVAC unit look like?” asks Harding. “What do their lungs look like? People are sneezing out sawdust.” Harding knew a guy that lived next to the plant who used to cook outside on a barrel-type grill. “He had to just open it a little bit, because the dust would be falling on top of it,” says Harding. “You didn't want to have that all down on your food.”
The process of manufacturing wood pellets releases other pollutants that are even more hazardous to the health of residents than the gritty dust that settles on homes and vehicles. The plants emit extra-fine particles called PM2.5 that can damage lungs, worsen asthma, and cause heart attacks. The manufacturing process also produces byproducts, such as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, including acetaldehyde and formaldehyde, which can be toxic or carcinogenic even in small amounts.
Another health hazard is the never-ending noise from a pellet mill that operates 24/7. Even in neighborhoods several miles from the plant, residents can hear the steady pounding of heavy machinery stripping and grinding logs.
“This is what people hear all day and night,” Harding says. He points out a home not far from Enviva where a woman has had to change her sleeping arrangements to get away from the noise. “There was another bedroom on the other end of her house that she could sleep in,” Harding tells me. But not everyone in the neighborhood has that option.
Driving along Garysburg’s country roads, we pass fields of crops and small patches of natural forest. Harding points out areas that have been completely cut since Enviva began operation. Dry grass sways in the breeze where forests once stood. There is no evidence that there has been any replanting.
Cutting down forests has real consequences for the local community. As natural habitats disappear, Harding says residents are seeing animals like deer and coyotes invading residential areas more frequently. And since open fields don’t absorb water as readily as natural forests, they are seeing more roads flood when big rain storms sweep through the area. People were logging this area to feed the local paper mills before Enviva got here, Harding tells me, but not at the rate he is seeing now.
Everyone that I spoke to who lives near an Enviva plant feels like they have been let down by the governmental bodies that are supposed to be protecting them. The state of North Carolina has provided millions in subsidies to Enviva, and the commissioners in Northampton County, where Garysburg is located, were so generous with their incentives that they needed to raise property taxes.
North Carolina state regulatory agencies have never denied Enviva a permit to build a pellet mill. And once the plants are operating, Enviva has requested and received permits to expand operations at every one of its four North Carolina facilities. Community activists have spoken at hearings, met with regulatory officials, and lobbied state legislators. Still, the permits are issued. Alston feels like they’ve been abandoned. “We are just fighting by ourselves,” she tells me.
What community resistance there was when the plants were initially proposed has largely died down now that they are in full operation. The Dogwood Alliance has been one of the main non-profit groups fighting the plants. Dogwood and a few activists from communities surrounding the North Carolina facilities have also formed a coalition called Impacted Communities Against Wood Pellets.
“As far as the people voting and doing things, people get tired,” Harding says. But there may also be deeper reasons why people won’t stand up against Enviva. “We live in an area where people are very afraid to speak publicly about anything, not just this issue, but any issue,” Harding told me in a phone interview.
People forget that much of the harm to the planet is being silently perpetrated in rural communities.
When I ask what people are afraid of, Harding goes back fifty years to a fraught history of racism and trauma. He described how the nearby town of Roanoke Rapids was a sundown community, which meant people of color were not allowed to be seen after the sun went down.
“So we end up with a lot of people that just still have that scared mentality,” he says, “and they just will not speak up.”
Debra David, another coalition member who lives near an Enviva plant in the southern part of the state, has a similar explanation for why people feel a need to keep their heads down.
“When you have been punched like that, you’re afraid to do anything,” she says. “You get in your car, you go, or you get in your house and you stay…It was instilled in us when we were little—don’t say nothing,” she tells me. “Somebody ask you something, keep going.”
Dogwood Alliance
A forest clearing in North Carolina.
And yet, there have been times in the past when the indignities are too much, anger rises to the surface, and fierce resistance breaks out. Just a few miles west of Garysburg is Warren County, widely considered the birthplace of the environmental justice movement.
Forty years ago, it was the most predominantly Black county in North Carolina, and the state government decided it would be a good place to dump sixty tons of PCB-contaminated soil. Protesting residents laid down in front of the trucks that were bringing poisoned dirt into their community. More than 500 people were arrested and protests lasted for seven weeks.
The hardships and struggles of small towns like Garysburg affect everyone. Because the media tends to focus on mass protests and federal policy fights, people forget that much of the harm to the planet is being silently perpetrated in rural communities, far from the population centers where most of us live. To mitigate the worst effects of climate change and forge a just transition to a carbon-free future, it is in these places where many of the fights will need to be fought.