Meet the Greencorps Team Working for Forest Protection in the Southeast

Dogwood Alliance is excited to announce the addition of 3 Greencorps organizers to our team! This month, John Qua, Rita Frost, and Katya English joined the Dogwood team to help stop the expansion of the biomass industry and to save our Southern forests. They will be working in key biomass export cities: Wilmington, Savannah, and Baton Rouge. They join our team at a crucial time as the biomass industry gears up to expand, threatening some of our most biodiverse wetland and bottomland hardwood coastal forests.

American Citizens to EU Commision: Stop Cutting Our Forests

Over 50,000 US citizens are appealing to European Commissioners Arias Cañete and Vella for a change in the EU legislation that has caused a boom in the demand for wood pellets produced from Southern US forests. Their demand is today being delivered to the European Commission by BirdLife Europe and the European Environmental Bureau.

Forests Should Be Front and Center in Lima #COP20

The longer forests are allowed to grow, the greater the climate benefit. This basic biological fact has given rise to a number of international programs and policies designed to encourage the protection of forests as carbon sinks. In fact, the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, of which many European nations are signatories, has developed a variety of tools and policy frameworks to encourage greater forest conservation.

EPA Misses the Forest for the Trees

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to protect the forests, communities and climate with its new proposed framework for regulating biogenic carbon emissions from stationary sources. They have not followed the recommendations of their own Scientific Advisory Board as well as the mounting government and academic research that burning trees for electricity is going to increase Carbon emissions and accelerate climate change.

Environmental Paper Network, Paper Products and Biomass

Early this month, Dogwood Alliance was proud to attend the Environmental Paper Network’s 2014 Fall Steering Committee meeting in Boulder, Colorado. Environmental Paper Network (EPN) began in 2002 as an unlikely alliance of organizations with very diverse approaches to a common problem — addressing the scale of the challenges and opportunities for social justice and conservation presented by the expanding forest, pulp and paper industry. It should come as no surprise that with 15 years of history working to transform the pulp and paper industry in the US South, Dogwood Alliance was one of the founding partners of the EPN.