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The Rachel Carson Council is a nationwide membership organization that engages and empowers our supporters to take effective action in communities and campuses at the local, state, and national level. With the leadership of our President and CEO, Dr. Robert K. Musil, the RCC is a respected voice for policy change in the nation’s capital.
In addition to our work on Capitol Hill, the RCC currently focuses its organizing at the grassroots level in North Carolina, Maryland, and Pennsyvania.
Recent Action Alerts
Take Action Now to Save Threatened Birds
05-02-25
he Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been one of America’s most potent tools for preventing extinction for almost 50 years but a new rule is being proposed that could wipe out key elements of its protections, particularly in regards to habitat.
The current Endangered Species Act prevents not only direct killing of listed species, but also “harm,” which is thought to mean actions that would negatively affect individuals of a species. This include habitat modification or inferring with behaviors like feeding, breeding, or sheltering.
STOP Drax’s Permit in Gloster, MS!
04-05-25
On Tuesday, April 8th in Gloster, Mississippi, a fateful environmental justice decision will be made. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality Permit Board will vote on a permit that would allow Drax, the wood pellet mega-producer and known polluter, to expand their operations in the small town. We need your help in showing up for Gloster residents who are fighting their polluters.
Break Big Biomass Webinar
04-06-25
You’re invited!
Join us this World Health Day for the transformative online rally, Break Big Biomass: A National Call to Action!
This is an opportunity to uncover the truth about industrial biomass energy and take meaningful action to protect our forests, health, and communities. Biomass, the burning of forests in power plants, is often falsely promoted as a clean energy solution. Learn the facts about its devastating effects and how you can make a difference.
Your invitation to the RCC 2025 National Wood Pellet Forum
03-12-25
You’re invited to the 2025 National Wood Pellet Forum in Washington, DC on March 28!
The Rachel Carson Council (RCC) is hosting a unique, day-long symposium to gather community leaders, scientific experts, environmental justice advocates, and policymakers to discuss all things wood pellets. Our FREE conference will feature speeches, presentations, and panel discussions on the ecological, climatic, environmental justice, public health, and economic pitfalls of the growing wood pellet biomass industry.
The Forum will take place on March 28th from 9am to 5pm EDT. It will be held at the Yotel DC, 415 New Jersey Avenue, Washington, DC 20001 in the Grand Hub Center room on Capitol Hill not far from Union Station and congressional office buildings. You can find more information about the logistics and agenda for the Forum at our registration link.
Join fellow North Carolinians Wednesday, March 12 at noon for a rally to build momentum!
This is going to be a high energy gathering, with music from Fat Cat Elon and the Musk Rats and some very fun giant puppets!
We can build a movement by mobilizing together.
Community Efforts
Cape Fear Cruise Exposes Environmental Injustice 10-15-24
The big biofueled Greenway Transit bus rolled to a stop at the Wilmington, North Carolina Riverwalk, a popular tourist spot not far from where the historic battleship USS North Carolina is permanently berthed. Out poured an eager, but slightly groggy busload of Duke University undergraduate and graduate students (and a faculty mentor) who had boarded the ecobus at 6 a.m. in Durham nearly three hours away.
They soon boarded the Cape Fear Riverboat, Henrietta, whose viewing deck filled with students and faculty from campuses across North Carolina including Catawba, UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, UNC-Greensboro, and UNC-Wilmington. Other NC campuses would also have been represented but had to close and were inaccessible because of the devastation from climate change fueled Hurricane Helene.
RCC Cape Fear River Trip Exposes Enviva 10-03-23
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.
The Sampson County Public Hearing on Wood Pellets and the Industry that Divided It
On July 15, 2019 environmentalists and community members from across the state of North Carolina and visitors from Virginia and the United Kingdom showed up and gave public testimony against the proposed expansion of Enviva Sampson, an industrial wood pellet producer. Their words spoke truth to power, and the message was clear – North Carolinians want an end to the wood pellet industry in their state.
As detailed in our 2019 report, Clear Cut, Enviva has entrenched itself in North Carolina. It is a part of a system which harms the environment, perpetuates injustices against frontline groups, and divides communities under the guise of economic development.
Eastern North Carolina and its beautiful coast has and always will be home to me. I work now for the Rachel Carson Council (RCC) in Washington, DC, but this past week, I was able to return home to continue critical work being done by the RCC and others to protect the unique environments and communities that also call the area home. Growing up in North Carolina, respect and awe for the natural world around me were instilled from an early age. I remember warm summer nights with the constant hum of cicadas when I would stay up to the wee hours of the morning to watch for sea turtle hatchlings boiling out of the sand and scramble to the safety of the ocean. I remember taking back country roads and driving for miles with nothing but lush forests on either side of the road
Environmental advocates discuss wood pellet industry’s impact on humans and the environment
Environmental advocacy groups gathered Friday to discuss the impact of the wood pellet industry on climate and public health during a boat ride on the Cape Fear River in Wilmington. People from groups including the Rachel Carson Council, Carolina Wetlands Association, NAACP, Alliance for Cape Fear Trees, Wood Pellet Forum, Cape Fear Sierra Club, and Clean Air Carolina attended. Dr. Kyle Horton, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, was also in attendance. The boat travelled past wood pellet dome silos maintained by Enviva. The boat travelled past wood pellet dome silos maintained by Enviva, a company that bills itself as the world’s largest producer of wood pellets.
Don’t Burn Trees to Fight Climate Change—Let Them Grow
Of all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade’s worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter). And last month, when Ethiopian officials announced that twenty-three million of their citizens had planted three hundred and fifty million trees in a single day, the swooning intensified. Someone tweeted, “This should be like the ice bucket challenge thing.” So it may surprise you to learn that, at the moment, the main way in which the world employs trees to fight climate change is by cutting them down and burning them. Across much of Europe, countries and utilities are meeting their carbon-reduction targets by importing wood pellets from the southeastern United States and burning them in place of coal: giant ships keep up a steady flow of wood across the Atlantic.
Northampton County, NC: More Enviva Expansion?
On August 20, The Rachel Carson Council (RCC) called yet again for environmentalists, activists and community members to provide testimony for the third proposed expansion of an Enviva plant in North Carolina in less than a year. The Northampton County Enviva plant is seeking to grow its operations to produce 780,000 tons of wood pellets per year. That equals approximately 18,000 acres of forestland destruction in North Carolina and Virginia. At a time when the climate crisis is getting worse, and with clear science showing the destructive nature of the wood pellet industry, such expansions are absolutely unacceptable.
The Enviva Southampton Plant & Enviva’s Fourth Expansion in a Year
In an unsurprising turn of events, Enviva has applied for its fourth expansion permit in under a year for its Southampton Plant located in Franklin, Virginia. This expansion would increase production by 246,000 tons per year equaling another 5,600 acres of forests cut down annually. This is unacceptable. We are on the precipice of climate disaster, and the only tried and true way to draw down carbon from the atmosphere is through the protection and expansion of biodiverse forests. Every week, more reports and investigations are demonstrating that forests are key to any climate solution and that the wood pellet industry is failing to properly source its materials, failing to protect communities’ health, and worsening our climate through its operations.
