I first knew Dogwood Alliance from the Stanback Internship Program at the Nicholas School of Duke University. I chose Dogwood partly because I’m an environmental student who is interested in renewable energy, and partly because Dogwood Alliance is not a big NGO that could give me real hands-on experience! It turned out that this was a decision I’ll never regret.
Without a doubt, my summer with Dogwood has been the most impressing and meaningful time in my life. Let’s roll back to the very beginning of my interview, when Haiz Oppenheimer, Dogwood’s Campaign Organizer at the time, told me the success story of the Staples campaign, forcing Staples to make environmental sustainability commitments. I knew then that Dogwood Alliance was a non-profit organization that would share me with its powerful spirit, but it turned out what Dogwood gave me was far greater than that.
Although I imagined thousands of possibilities for what my internship might be like, the real one proved to be still different and beyond my expectations.
In just the last two years or so, the wood pellet export industry in the US has exploded to meet spiking demand in Europe, where utility companies are phasing out coal and phasing in wood as a primary fuel source for electricity.
A federal court deemed that the EPA acted outside their purview when they granted that deferral and that the Clean Air Act should and does apply to all industrial facilities, including biomass plants.
