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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
Tell Congress: Woody Biomass is Not a Wildfire Solution! 07-31-26
Under the guise of “wildfire prevention,” a dangerous new piece of legislation has just been introduced in Congress that threatens our forests, air, and climate.
H.R. 9827 / S. 5087, misleadingly named the Wildfire Reduction Market Expansion Act, would redefine “woody biomass” under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) to funnel taxpayer subsidies directly into logging our public and private forests.
If passed, this bill will create a massive financial incentive to log whole trees and haul away the vital forest floor under the false promise of “fire management” and green fuel.
Take Action: No Passes for Polluters 05-26-26
The administration handed 180 big polluters a free pass to poison the air.
An email was all it took.
For the first time in U.S. history, the Trump administration has invoked an obscure Clean Air Act provision to exempt over 180 industrial facilities from toxic pollution rules, with no scientific review, no public process, and no congressional oversight.
The executive branch simply set up an EPA email inbox inviting industrial companies to request exemptions from Clean Air Act rules, which they’ve granted en masse.
Take Action TODAY for Endangered Species Day 05-15-26
Today, May 15th, is Endangered Species Day, and one of the most critically endangered animals on Earth needs you to speak up right now.
The Rice’s whale lives only in the Gulf of Mexico. There are 51 left.
Last month, the Trump administration convened the Endangered Species Committee—what we’re calling the “Extinction Committee”—for the first time in more than 30 years. Its first order of business: grant the oil and gas industry a sweeping exemption from the Endangered Species Act in the Gulf. At the same time, the administration is accelerating offshore lease sales and approving over 500 miles of new pipelines that would be built directly through the habitats of the Rice’s whale, sperm whales, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, the rarest sea turtle in the world.
Tell Congress: No Pesticide “Poison Pill” in the Farm Bill! 02-19-26
The House’s 2026 Farm Bill draft has just been released, and it’s a disaster. The long-awaited bill offers meager support to organic producers and specialty crop growers. In reality, the bill gives handouts to large chemical companies.
Hidden at the end of the Farm Bill, there is an entire “Regulatory Reform” section (Subtitle C) dedicated to weakening pesticide labeling requirements, preempting state regulation of pesticides, and granting companies immunity from lawsuits when American workers get sick from their products.
The House Agriculture Committee is deliberating on this draft starting on Monday, February 23rd, at 1pm EST. Will you help us urge Congress to oppose this industry-friendly “poison pill” Subtitle C of the Farm Bill? In just a few clicks, you can make your voice heard!
Join us: Make Polluters Pay Week of Action is here. 01-26-26
For decades, fossil fuel companies have knowingly fueled the climate crisis, all while raking in billions in profits and blocking meaningful action. Now, our communities are paying the price through deadly heatwaves, floods, fires, and rising seas.
This can’t continue.
That’s why from January 26-30, people around the country are coming together for the Make Polluters Pay Week of Action: to demand justice, accountability, and climate reparations from the corporations most responsible for this crisis.
Will you join RCC and our partners in taking action?
Three Days Left: NO New Offshore Drilling Leases! 01-20-26
In just three days, on January 23rd, the public comment period closes on the Department of the Interior’s Draft 5-Year Offshore Drilling Plan.
In short, the plan embraces new drilling opportunities and expands lease sales into protected areas in California, Alaska, Florida, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
Every oil spill begins with a lease sale. The Outer Continental Shelf is too precious to sell out to oil and gas drillers. Our fisheries, marine life, and coastal communities are all at risk under this wildly unpopular plan.
Tell the Interior Department to release a program with NO expanded lease sales.
This is our chance to voice our concerns directly to the officials shaping the program. Thank you for taking a stand and keeping Rachel Carson’s love of coastlines alive!
Today is the last day to stand up for clean water! 01-05-25
The Trump EPA is racing to finalize a proposed rule that would dramatically weaken the Clean Water Act by stripping federal protections from wetlands and small streams. These waterways, no matter how small in size, are critical to protecting our drinking water, reducing flooding, and sustaining U.S. ecosystems.
If this rule moves forward, corporate polluters will gain a green light to fill, drain, and contaminate waterways that millions of people rely on every day. Their consequences will flow downstream: dirtier drinking water, increased flooding, damaged fisheries, and higher costs for communities already grappling with climate impacts.
Even under hostile administrations, public comments matter: they create a legal record, demonstrate public opposition, and can slow or even stop harmful rules. The Rachel Carson Council has proudly submitted our organizational comment opposing this dangerous rollback. Now we need your voice alongside ours.
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.