Burning the forests that are supposed to be our best defense against climate change to protect us against climate change has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard. Yet over the last few years, Europe has wholeheartedly embraced this false solution to climate change, and we’ve seen a dramatic increase in logging in the Southern US to fuel European demand. Along the way, the US South has become the largest wood pellet export region in the world.
Not only does clearcutting US forests, turning them into pellets, and shipping them to Europe to be burned for electricity have a grievous cost for our climate, but it also destroys the habitat of the South’s rich and biodiverse plant and animal ecosystems.
Last month we released our first investigative video in support of the Our Forests Aren’t Fuel campaign: Wetlands Up in Smoke. The short film featuring a wide variety of voices documents the growing impact of the wood pellet industry on our Forests, community and climate.
Dogwood Alliance is proud to join the World Rainforest Movement and countless groups around the globe by taking part in the International Day of Action against Plantations. Natural forests in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, China, Indonesia, and the Southern US are under threat from the big agribusiness, the global pulp and paper industry, and increasingly wood burning utilities that look at forests as a commodity to increase corporate profit rather than for the vital role they play as home to indigenous people, wildlife habitat, protecting the world against climate change, and so much more.
In response to industry plans to develop eucalyptus plantations across the US South[1], environmental groups[2] are raising serious concerns about the impacts of eucalyptus plantations on forests, rural communities, wildlife and the climate.
