RCC Cape Fear River Trip Exposes Enviva

The Cape Fear Riverboat, the Henrietta, hits its whistle and pulls out from the historic waterfront into a strong current in the open river. It is cold, cloudy and breezy this Saturday morning in Wilmington, North Carolina. The Cape Fear River has seen enslaved Africans working rice fields here before the Civil War until the rice trade collapsed with the end of the war. Now the riversides mix wetlands, stands of trees, some industrial sprawl from the Port of Wilmington, and hide one of the worst, yet least known, causes of climate change pollution.

Today, the Henrietta, normally filled with tourists, is packed to capacity with over 70 passengers who have joined the Rachel Carson Council’s boat tour to learn about the environmental damage done by the Enviva Corporation and its clear-cutting of forests and industrial scale production of wood pellets that are then shipped overseas from Wilmington to Europe. There they are burned for electricity in former coal-fired plants. Enviva says their source of electricity is clean, renewable, and good for the planet.

Not so, says RCC President and CEO, Bob Musil, who has come from Washington, DC to help lead this tour. The trip has been organized, the seats filled, by Pauline “Priss” Endo of the local Sierra Club, who introduces Musil. He calls Enviva’s claims “greenwashing.” That is also the name of a new RCC report called Greenwashing: A Report on the Corporate Selling of Polluting Wood Pellet Production whose release today is timed to the boat trip. The passengers scoop up copies of the report to use in schools, colleges, with state and national representatives, the media, and at environmental meetings across the state. Filling the upper deck are people from the communities affected by wood pellet production, a North Carolina Health Department official, a host from WHQR Public Radio, members of local environmental groups like the Sierra Club, a documentary film crew, and members of the Southern Forest Conservation Coalition (SFCC) made up of groups like the Rachel Carson Council, the Dogwood Alliance, and others from Virginia, South Carolina and the rest of the Southeast where wood pellet production and clear cutting are centered.

Musil says the boat tour is to help make the invisible, visible, to counter Enviva’s false narrative, and to give citizens the tools to take action. And, he adds, it is personal. Enviva headquarters are in a glittering glass building in downtown Bethesda where Musil lives and the RCC has its headquarters in addition to its Washington, DC office on DuPont Circle. “I wanted to see for myself things like Enviva’s huge twin domes that at any time hold over 300,000 metric tons of wood pellets made from clear cut North Carolina hardwood forests to be shipped overseas to for electricity.

Musil is joined by Andy Wood, a fourth-generation naturalist and ecologist with the Coastal Plains Conservation Group. Wood describes how the pollution from wood pellet production harms both people and the ecosystems the passengers are observing from the top deck. Wood holds up young saplings (hickory and swamp chestnut maple) which he explains are prized for clear cutting by Enviva because the mature trees, when burned, create far hotter temperatures than other species. Wood also describes how the industrial processes in making wood pellets will pollute the entire surrounding ecosystem including the Cape Fear River.

Photos: Leeann McClure

As he speaks, bird photographers aboard spot eagles and osprey and eagerly snap them. Wood is happy to see them, but adds, “Unless we stop this Enviva sham, this fraud, climate change and pollution will do them in, too.”

Joining Wood at the mic is the tour’s youngest speaker, Sheel Patel, an outstanding student at the local high school who, once shown the reality of wood pellet production and pollution, now opposes Enviva, produces teaching materials on climate and wood pellets, and recruits fellow high school students to join him. Patel speaks forcefully to the older crowd and invites them to the deck below where he has set up his own exhibition complete with video, music, and information.

Given greenwashing and the poor business practices of Enviva that were outlined in the RCC report Bad Business: The Economic Case Against Woody Biomass as Renewable Energy, retired banker Jack Spruill, who has his own forest holdings that he shows proudly to visitors so they can see the beauties of North Carolina hardwood forest, offers a brief economics lesson on the wood pellet business. Spruill then offers a simple, effective call to action. He urges the passengers to buy a couple of shares in Enviva, as he has done, so they can attend shareholder meetings and demand real answers about the perils of wood pellet production.

Then it is Anita Cunningham of Lumberton, North Carolina, who lives next to an Enviva wood pellet production plant, who most touches and moves the tour members. Cunningham recounts calmly, but compellingly, what it is like to be unable to even sit on your porch without dust, particles, and pollution — how bad it feels knowing that the communities affected are predominately poor and African American, “people who look like me.”

As the Henrietta heads back to dockside, warm sunlight breaks through the clouds. RCC’s Musil’s urges those aboard to sign a petition to Enviva from the Dogwood Alliance, and to join the RCC, Dogwood, Anita Cunningham, and others in Washington on October 18-19 for International Biomass Day of Action with rallies, lobbying, and a chance to put into practice what they have learned. All this is captured in interviews and by a drone run by WSC Cinema who will produce and distribute a short video to let even more people see and hear what Enviva can no longer keep hidden.