2051
Green & indigenous News
129 readers
95 users here now
A community for Green & indigenous news!
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
2052
Last Updated on January 23, 2026 On December 11, 2025, Dennis Eduardo Lucas Amador forcefully invaded the farm of the Castrellóns, an Indigenous Ngäbe family from the community of Valle de Agua in Bocas del Toro province, Panama. He destroyed their crops, felled their trees, erected fences, and filled the property with roaming livestock. Lucas, […]
From Intercontinental Cry via This RSS Feed.
2053
2054
2056
2059
1
Staying with the story: Isabel Esterman on long-term nature reporting in Southeast Asia
(news.mongabay.com)
2061
2062
Amelia Schafer
ICT
If convicted next week, NDN Collective Founder Nick Tilsen is facing a maximum sentence of 26 years following a 2022 cop watch, a situation in which community members monitor police interactions, in Rapid City, South Dakota.
The state of South Dakota alleges that on June 11, 2022, Tilsen, Oglala Lakota, allegedly accelerated or lurched his vehicle toward Rapid City police officer Nicholas Glass in an attempt to stop police activity. Tilsen said he was conducting a routine cop watch and pulled over to view the officer’s interaction with a homeless Indigenous man in downtown Rapid City.
Tilsen’s trial begins in Rapid City on Jan. 26 and is expected to continue through the week.
Glass did not press charges until June 30, 2023, over a year after the alleged offense occurred and on the same day that NDN Collective announced it was holding a July 4 protest against police violence in Rapid City. That same day, the city and then-mayor Steve Allender issued several public safety messages discouraging the protest and warning against potential violence. The protest was ultimately peaceful.
Tilsen told ICT he was allowed to leave the scene immediately after the incident.
“After hearing my side of the story, the commanding officer, the sergeant on duty, let me go,” he said. “I didn’t hear anything about this incident until a year later. … This is outrageous that they can bring these charges and take me all the way to trial.”
Tilsen is charged with felony aggravated assault on law enforcement and obstruction of law enforcement, a misdemeanor charge. A jury could also choose to find him guilty of felony simple rather than aggravated assault following a January 7 grand jury indictment.
“It shows me how weak their aggravated assault charge was to begin with,” Tilsen said. “You think the aggravated assault charge is a 25-year charge, maximum sentence of 25 years, and a simple assault charge is a maximum of two years. To me, it feels like they’re just trying to create a menu of options for a jury as opposed to when these charges… shouldn’t have been brought in the first place.”
The cop watch encounter
During the June evidentiary 2025 hearing, Glass testified that his back was turned to Tilsen’s pickup truck when he heard the vehicle begin to move toward him. Glass said the vehicle came to a stop around one to two feet away from him.
In South Dakota, an aggravated assault charge includes threatening or intending to cause harm with a deadly weapon, which a vehicle is considered.
Glass testified on June 12 2025 via Zoom that he was approached in late June 2023 and asked if he’d like to press charges against Tilsen. Glass is now a member of the U.S. Air Force and is stationed outside of South Dakota and did not appear in person.
Glass said he was approached by someone from the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office and asked about pressing charges, but he could not recall who had approached him.
Glass is Native American, but the presiding judge did not allow Glass to elaborate on his Native identity.
The Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
‘A pattern’
In fall 2023, members of the Rapid City Native community organized a sit-in demanding that Pennington County State’s Attorney Lara Roetzel resign. Community members cited her office’s track record of over-prosecuting Native people and lack of progress investigating cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People.
Tilsen previously faced charges in 2020 resulting from a protest at Mount Rushmore; those charges were later dismissed. While the current incident has nothing to do with the Mount Rushmore protest, Tilsen said it does demonstrate a troubling pattern.
“This has been a pattern,” Tilsen said of legal action taken against NDN. “NDN Collective is eight years old, and in six of those eight years, we’ve been under some form of litigation or, you know, political or legal attacks from the legal system.”
Tilsen said that the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office has repeatedly tried to paint him as a dangerous individual and a criminal, despite him having no criminal record.
“What they’re trying to do here is to build a false narrative around me and my work in a community,” he said. “You know, this incident wasn’t a huge protest or anything like that. It was a simple cop watch. It is simple community care.”
Tilsen said he is deeply concerned about getting a fair trial. As a public figure, he is widely recognized in Pennington County.
“I do think that the good people of this community, both Indian and non-Indian people, take jury selection seriously here,” he said. “My hope is that the jurors that get selected in this process can be, you know, non-biased and to be truthful and to see the truth for what it is.”
Tilsen said the years-long legal battle has put many aspects of his life into perspective. If convicted, facing a maximum of 26 years, he’d miss out on priceless time with his children, wife and future grandchildren.
“I’m facing a maximum sentence of 26 years. When that is hung over your head, it makes you really think about every single move that you’re going to make,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you don’t make moves and that you don’t do organizing and you’re not in community, but it means that you are being more cognizant about the risks in which you are taking in community.”
So far, more than 21,000 individuals have signed a petition demanding the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office drop the charges against Tilsen. NDN Collective delivered the petition in person on Thursday, Jan. 22.
Charges against him could be dropped at any point, he said.
“I don’t want to spend my time fighting all of these charges all the time, fighting attacks from them all the time,” he said. “I don’t want the attention that comes along with it. I don’t want to spend resources on doing, on fighting these things. I would much rather love to do the work that I do in the community all the time. Organizing, helping people, helping people with ceremonies, doing foot patrols, helping the community.”
Tilsen will be represented by Bruce Ellison, a Rapid City-based attorney known for his work representing protestors of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
The post Trial of NDN Collective founder for alleged assault on officer to begin appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.
2063
8
Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that.
(ictnews.org)
This story was originally published by Grist.
Anita Hofschneider
Grist
Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.
Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute.
Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.”
President Donald Trump has demanded that the United States acquire Greenland and said that control of the island is necessary for national and international security. He has threatened European allies with tariffs and even hinted at seizing Greenland by force. On Wednesday, Trumpbacktracked on both threats and said he’d reached a “framework of a future dealwith respect to Greenland” without giving any details; however Trump’s behavior over the island has already undermined America’s relationship with Europe by threatening longstanding alliances.
Less publicized is how Trump’s threats have refocused attention on the United States’ relationship and history with Indigenous peoples: Greenland is 90 percent Inuit and has maintained its traditions, language, knowledge, and land despite centuries of colonial rule, and is viewed as a model of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.
Lynge, who is Inuit, is part of that history. Heco-founded the Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party in Greenland that advocates for independence. He helped lead the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization that represents Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. And he’s a former member of the Greenlandic Parliament, as well as the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which helps advise the U.N. Economic and Social Council on issues related to Indigenous peoples.
Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a colonial relationship that’s existed since the 18th century, but thanks to the work of people like Lynge, the island has achieved a level of political independence that many Indigenous peoples aspire to. “The extensive self-governance of Greenland is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self-determination for many Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” said the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, in 2023.
Yet despite the still-strong presence of Inuit peoples in Greenland, Stefan Aune, a historian and the author of the book Indian Wars Everywhere, said he’s been struck by how much Trump’s threats have been framed as conflict between the U.S. and Denmark or the U.S. and European countries, ignoring the presence of Indigenous peoples. “This really kind of evokes the way the history of North America often gets narrated, which is a kind of imperial squabble between the British, the French, and the Spanish, and then later the United States, despite the fact that there’s all these different Native nations that play a really equally important role in the war, the politics, the economics, and the diplomacy on the continent,” Aune said. “So there’s definitely a parallel there.”
Aune is among many experts who see Trump’s policies and rhetoric as echoes of historical entitlement to Native land reframed as a defensive struggle against Indigenous nations or other threats. “The iconic image of this is the surrounded wagon train, which you can see in all kinds of art, paintings, and then later movies and television and video games,” Aune said. “Settler colonialism consistently gets reframed as a defensive struggle rather than an invasion.”
Peter Mancall, a historian and author of the book Contested Continent, said he was struck by how quickly Trump pivoted from the security reasons to capture Venezuela’s president to his plans to sell 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. “The rapid pivot from the pretext of the invasion to the extraction of resources [in Venezuela] was quicker than anything I had seen in the early American period,” he said. “We’ve seen this before, and it has often had catastrophic consequences for Indigenous peoples as well as deleterious impacts on various environments.”
Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, the dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, sees parallels to the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he wrote about in his book Dismembering Lāhui. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was motivated to annex Hawai’i in order to cement economic control over the islands’ sugar plantations and to establish military control over Pearl Harbor.
“The fact that the president of the United States no longer feels that it’s necessary to justify imperialism in any other way except that ‘We need it’ is deeply revealing and clarifying,” Osorio said. “When you remove all of the pretext and you realize that all this has ever been about has been the acquisition of opportunities and other peoples and other peoples’ countries … it’s never been any different.”
Greenland is three times the size of Texas and home to about 56,000 people. The island has 39 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers to be critical for military technology and the U.S. economy, many of which are used for clean energy technology like electric vehicle batteries. Investors are hoping that melting ice caps due to climate change will make it easier for companies to mine minerals like gallium, which can be used to create computer chips.
But Paul Bierman, a geoscientist who has studied ice sheets in Greenland, is skeptical. He said melting permafrost has led to cratering on U.S. Air Force runways and thinks mining infrastructure would face similar challenges. “If you’ve ever stood next to a melting glacier, you’re not putting a mine there. The ice is literally melting below your feet. It’s crumbling, it’s collapsing,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to walk in and in a year, start up mines and have minerals coming out and be rich, it’s a complete and utter fantasy. It doesn’t match the reality of being on the ground.”
That hasn’t stopped wealthy investors from yearning to profit from Greenland, from billionaire Ronald Lauder to Peter Thiel. Bierman said the greater risk to humanity is allowing climate change — which Trump has called a hoax — to continue to melt ice caps and inundate low-lying cities like Jakarta, eventually dislocating an anticipated half a billion people. “Compared to the value of strategic minerals in Greenland, it’s orders of magnitude more in damages from letting the ice melt,” said Bierman, who wrote a book on Greenland called When The Ice Is Gone.
Denmark has recognized Greenland as self-governing with a right to its own mineral resources, and Greenlanders have been extremely clear about their desire to maintain their sovereignty, as well as their affiliation with Denmark. “It is our country,” Lynge said. “No one can take it.”
Since World War II, Greenland has been a close military ally of the U.S., hosting not just Pituffik Space Base — which displaced an Inuit village — but also more than 20 American military bases that were eventually abandoned. Treaties dating back to 1941 give the U.S. enormous sway over what its military can do on the island and prevents other militaries from operating there, even though Trump has repeatedly claimed that Russia and China are doing so.
“[According to an] agreement from 1951, the United States is free to do what they want, and from 2014, they can do that by talking to us and the Danes,” said Lynge from Greenland. “The U.S. is the only military presence here in Greenland, so what’s the problem?”
After two centuries of colonial rule, in the 1960s, Denmark began taking steps to limit Inuit population growth by inserting intrauterine devices in about 4,500 women, including girls as young as 12 years old. The Danish government apologized last year and agreed to compensate the women who sued, arguing the government violated their human rights. The population limitation process was extremely effective, dropping birth rates substantially among Indigenous families and causing permanent infertility among some women. Denmark also has a decades-long history of removing Inuit children from their homes against their parents’ will, with research as recent as 2022 showing that Inuit children are seven times more likely to be removed from their parents’ homes than Danish children. In 2023, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples issued a report on the status of Greenland that said Denmark needs to implement many reforms to fully respect Indigenous rights, including embracing a reconciliation process to address historical trauma.
Despite these traumas, and perhaps motivated by them, Greenland’s independence movement has gained ground in recent decades, securing several major wins. In 1979, more than 70 percent of Greenland’s mostly Inuit residents voted in favor of more independence from Denmark. The referendum made the island a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of Denmark, rather than just a colony, and gave Greenlanders control over domestic policies such as their education, environment, health, and fisheries. The law also established the Greenlandic Parliament.
In 2008, more than three-fourths of Greenlanders again voted in favor of self-governance, expanding their control over the police and courts and giving Greenland more of a say over foreign policy. The law also made Kalaallisut, an Inuit language of Greenland, the official language of the country, and restored Greenland’s control over its mineral and oil revenue, with provisions for remitting some funding to Denmark. It also established a pathway to full independence, without a specific timeline, as the move would require support from both Greenland and Denmark.
Political leaders in Greenland have continued to explore the possibility of full independence, drafting a potential constitution as recently as 2023, and last year, polls showed that most people in Greenland wanted independence from Denmark, although voters differed on how and when it should happen. The vast majority, 85 percent, oppose any type of union with the U.S.
“They serve as a model for how to practice self-governance,” said Gunn-Britt Retter, the head of the Arctic and environmental unit of the Saami Council, which represents Indigenous Saami people in Europe. The council has come out in support of Greenland against Trump’s threats, and has been a longtime ally of theirs in the fight for climate action and Indigenous rights internationally. She added that the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark makes no sense. “You can’t buy something that is stolen.”
To Lynge, Trump’s threats are not only misinformed, but also threaten the political autonomy that he has spent his lifetime building. And he doesn’t think Greenlanders are the only people at risk.
“We are in the middle of a situation in the world where small nations like us would be crushed if we don’t do anything,” Lynge said. “If the world allows what is happening right now, it will continue and destroy the world order as we know it.”
The post Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that. appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.
2064
2066
It almost felt like old times for the friends and family gathered at Robert Weatherspoon’s house. The living room couches and chairs were filled, a football game was on the TV, and the aroma of bacon and butter beans drifted in from the kitchen.
What was missing was Weatherspoon’s voice. While his friends usually bring the food or cook during get-togethers, Weatherspoon is counted on to supply the laughs. The 67-year-old with an expressive, cherubic face has a reputation for devastating one-liners, off-color game commentary, and stories — skewed somewhat for comedic effect — about people everybody knows in Gloster, a mill town in southern Mississippi too small to have strangers.
But shuffling from his bed to the living room had left him breathless. Weatherspoon took a puff from his inhaler, but his throat was locked and his chest was tight. He tried a joke on an old high school buddy across the room, and it fell flat, stalled between labored breaths.
His next utterance was darker, whispered to the person with the closest ear. “I thought I was dying last night,” Weatherspoon said. “For 20 minutes, I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t move.” An odd thought crossed his mind as he lay there, struggling for air. “I said, ‘Let me write something before I go. I want to tell about my life. I want to put it all down.’”
Robert Weatherspoon sits in his living room in Gloster, Mississippi. Weatherspoon used to garden and jog but says air pollution from a nearby wood pellet mill has harmed his health and curtailed his outdoor activities. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
The story of Weatherspoon’s late middle age might have chronicled an energetic man who still liked to jog, grow okra and peppers in his garden, chase after women, and make his friends laugh. But in 2014, a massive mill that turns trees into peanut-size pellets opened in Gloster, and “everything changed for everybody,” he said.
Operated by the British energy giant Drax, the mill and two newer ones in Louisiana — near Urania in the center of the state and Bastrop near the Arkansas line — churn out billions of pellets each year to meet surging overseas demand for electricity produced by burning wood, what the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Alongside the mills, in communities of mostly poor, Black residents, the air is tainted with cancer-causing gases and tiny particles that can burrow deep into people’s lungs and trigger a long list of health troubles.
It’s not clear whether Drax’s activity has caused any particular individual’s health problems, but the mills release chemicals at levels federal regulators and scientists say can be toxic to humans.
In living rooms around Gloster, on front porches, and between the crumbling facades and boarded windows along the town’s main street, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t believe their life was better before the mill, called Amite Bioenergy.
“When I go out, I can’t hardly catch my breath,” said Helen Reed, a Gloster native. “Everything is worse since Drax came here.”
Robert Weatherspoon and other residents of Gloster, Mississippi, say pollution for a large British-owned wood pellet mill has caused a host of health problems in the small town. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Tucked into a remote corner of southwest Mississippi, Gloster is exposed to more particulate matter and releases of toxic air than most parts of the country, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Rates of cancer, asthma, and heart disease are substantially higher than the national average. Gloster has other industrial facilities, but the EPA lists the Drax mill as the region’s only major emitter of toxic air pollutants.
Wood pellets have been touted by European countries as a greener, climate-friendly alternative to coal and gas. Made from sawdust and comparatively cheap trees grown in the American South, pellets now power a large share of the United Kingdom’s electrical grid. Drax has turned the U.K.’s largest coal power station, a mile-wide complex in rural Yorkshire, into what is essentially an immense wood stove fueled with Mississippi and Louisiana pine.
Raking in billions of dollars in both profits and government subsidies, Drax foresees substantial growth in the coming years — especially in the U.S., where it’s planning new mills and an ambitious push into the booming carbon capture and storage business.
In Gloster, the industry promised prosperity for the town’s 850 residents when Drax’s mill opened 11 years ago. Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop had once been booming mill towns, producing pulp, paper, and lumber for a global market. When those mills closed in the 2000s, the local economies collapsed. Drax was seen as a godsend — a rejuvenator of the jobs, money, and pride that come with a mill that roars with life. But many people say they’ve received little more than noise, dust, and toxic air: The three nearly identical Drax mills in Mississippi and Louisiana have been forced to pay millions of dollars for hundreds of pollution violations over the past five years.
The Amite Bioenergy wood pellet production facility in Gloster. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In Urania, a central Louisiana town about two hours northwest of Gloster, the penalties are having little effect, said Glen Henderson, a longtime Urania resident who lives a mile from Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy mill. “I was born and raised in the area, and I love it here,” he said. “But if I get a chance, I’m definitely going to move.”
Hassled by the mill’s lights and noise at night and sawdust coating his car in the morning, the peace and quiet Henderson hoped to enjoy in retirement disappeared when Drax opened the mill in late 2017.
“We’ve always been a mill town,” he said. “I worked in the old mill after high school. But the mills we had around here weren’t like this. This is something else.”
Michelli Martin, a Drax spokesperson, said the company is making strides to reduce pollution. “The safety of our people and the communities in which we operate is our priority, and we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously,” Martin said. “As a company dedicated to sustainable energy production, high standards of safety and environmental compliance are always our top priority.”
Drax’s mill has only hastened Gloster’s decline, said Carmella Wren-Causey at her home on the town’s edge, where subsidized apartments abut a dense monocrop of loblolly pines. “We’re being poisoned slowly, right before our eyes,” she said. Tears ran down her cheeks and slid under the plastic tubes funneling oxygen to her nose. Diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Wren-Causey’s breathing has become so difficult that she can barely keep up with her grandson, a toddler who was scooting his bike near her oxygen tank.
“God gave me breath when he gave me life,” said Wren-Causey, who blames the mill for her declining health. “Nobody should tamper with that. But Drax took it away.”
Carmella Wren-Causey has had trouble breathing after Drax moved into her town of Gloster, Mississippi. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
When Patrick Anderson, an environmental attorney, first tried to convince Mississippi’s environmental regulators that Drax was violating the state’s pollution laws, he boiled things down to a simple equation: 1 = 1.
Because testing showed one large pellet mill in Florida had been emitting about 1,000 tons of volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs, every year, it stood to reason that the virtually identical mill in Gloster was emitting roughly the same amount, he told the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2017.
But Drax was claiming its Gloster mill was keeping its emissions lower than 250 tons per year, the threshold that distinguishes “minor” from “major” sources of VOCs, a classification of pollutants that are harmful to breathe, especially for children, elderly people, and those who suffer from asthma and other lung conditions.
The minor-source designation allowed Drax to avoid more stringent regulations and higher costs associated with installing and maintaining pollution-control technologies. “One of the most troubling trends in the wood pellet industry is that facilities that should face the most rigorous air permitting standards are actually the least controlled and the dirtiest,” Anderson wrote in a 2018 report for the Environmental Integrity Project.
A year after the report, Anderson was proved right. In 2019, Drax disclosed to Mississippi regulators that the Gloster facility had been emitting an average of 796 tons of VOCs per year — more than three times the limit allowed under its permit, according to documents obtained through public records requests.
The revelation resulted in a $2.5 million fine from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2020 and elicited surprise and anger from Gloster’s residents, many of whom said they were unaware the mill posed risks to their health.
“When I first started having trouble breathing, I thought God was punishing me — but it wasn’t God doing that,” said Weatherspoon, who believes the mill’s emissions and his declining health are linked.
Krystal Martin, a community leader in Gloster, Mississippi, shows a photo of the Amite Bioenergy wood pellet mill. She says air pollution from the mill is hurting her predominantly Black, low-income town. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In a letter to Mississippi’s regulators a few years later, Drax attributed its underestimated emissions for the Gloster mill to a lack of experience with pellet production. “The pellet production industry is a relatively young industry,” the letter said. “Several wood pellet facilities, not only Amite BioEnergy LLC, initially underestimated emissions in connection with the permitting of these facilities.”
In neighboring Louisiana, state regulators also found that Drax had been breaking air quality rules. Drax’s mill near Bastrop, for instance, was supposed to cap its VOC emissions at 250 tons but had actually been releasing about 1,100 tons per year, according to a company filing with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. In 2022, the state agency reached a legal settlement in which Drax paid $3.2 million but admitted no wrongdoing.
That settlement was the largest in more than a decade for Louisiana’s environmental regulators. But to Anderson, who now works for the Southern Environmental Law Center, it was also the extent of any serious efforts to rein in Drax’s pollution in Louisiana.
When Mississippi determined in early 2023 that the Gloster mill had also far exceeded the allowable limits of what regulators call “hazardous air pollutants,” Anderson asked Louisiana’s regulators if the mills in Urania and Bastrop were doing the same.
It was a question they couldn’t answer. A Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson said the agency doesn’t require Drax to conduct routine testing for hazardous air pollutants, which include nearly 190 chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects, and other serious problems, or a similar group of chemicals the agency refers to as “toxic air pollutants.” The state’s regulators also don’t conduct their own testing at Drax’s mills.
Read Next
The Trump EPA ended the ‘green new scam.’ A year later, communities are still paying the price.
In Mississippi, the hazardous pollutants Drax released into the air above Gloster included methanol, acrolein, and tons of formaldehyde, a chemical that’s far worse than being merely carcinogenic. “It’s also mutagenic and neurodegenerative, which is as awful as that sounds,” said Aisha Dickerson, an environmental health researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Formaldehyde has the potential to both mutate human cells and trigger brain disorders, affecting memory, learning ability, and behavior.
Anderson said it’s mind-boggling that Louisiana won’t test for chemicals it knows can cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. In his yearslong campaign to get the state to change its ways, he attempted the 1 = 1 tactic, demonstrating that the Gloster mill is comparable to the Bastrop mill in Louisiana and likely has similar pollution levels.
Drax itself has called the Gloster and Bastrop mills “nearly identical.” In letters to Mississippi’s regulators, the company attempted to avoid additional emissions testing by arguing that the Bastrop mill in Louisiana was so similar to the one in Mississippi that testing from one should apply to the other. “The (Bastrop) facility was built at the same time and is very similar to Amite, such that it has the exact same process design, equipment, production, rates, and the fiber is procured from a similar wood basket,” the company wrote.
Drax’s Louisiana and Mississippi mills turn ground-up trees and logging debris into tiny pellets that are shipped overseas and burned in a power station in rural England. Eric Shelton / Mississippi Today
In 2024, Drax admitted to what Anderson had been saying for years. Buried several pages into the company’s permit updates, Drax noted that both of its Louisiana mills had exceeded their “minor source” limits for hazardous air pollutants. Drax didn’t say specifically how much it had been violating the 25-ton limit for these contaminants, but the company noted a “proposed emission rate” of nearly 40 tons, according to permitting documents.
Despite Drax’s admission, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has yet to issue fines, and a spokesman declined to say what steps, if any, the agency has taken to get Drax to comply with its emissions rules. The spokesman also did not answer several questions about its enforcement actions and air quality monitoring practices.
Allegations about Drax have also come from within. In 2020, Louisiana regulators received an anonymous complaint from someone with intimate knowledge of Drax’s two mills in the state. It contained a host of allegations about chemical releases, manipulated data, ignored safety testing, and poor wastewater management. The most serious accusation was that “each facility has literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting” of harmful chemicals annually, including episodes that “would easily” exceed limits on acrolein, a chemical that can irritate eyes and lungs and, according to scientists, is “probably carcinogenic.”
“Any mention of these items will cause senior management to threaten termination,” the complaint said. It also alleged that the two mills “manipulate” data “to avoid defined permit deviations.”
When the state’s inspectors followed up, they found no evidence of emissions violations in data and equipment records provided by Drax. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s inspection report did not address the alleged threats of firings or manipulated data. Inspectors partially substantiated the allegations about improper waste disposal: During an inspection of the Urania mill, they found that Drax was burning waste sludge without a permit.
Read Next
How a Koch-owned chemical plant in Texas gamed the Clean Air Act
Naveena Sadasivam & Clayton Aldern
Drax denied the allegations, noting that the waste-disposal issue was “not a normal condition” and that the company continually works with regulators to address environmental concerns.
The ultrafine dust expelled by Drax’s mills is another major health concern, Dickerson said. The particles released during a mill’s operations are so tiny that they can slip past the lung’s defenses and penetrate the bloodstream.
“Eventually, these particles can be transported to the brain and other organs,” Dickerson said, listing cognitive impairment and stroke among the problems that can develop. “You may not see symptoms immediately, but constant exposure could mean issues down the line.”
Drax has made several upgrades and changes to reduce emissions, particularly VOCs. In 2021, the company installed a thermal oxidizer at the Gloster mill that breaks down these compounds.
“We care deeply about the safety of our people and the residents of the communities in which we operate, and we take our environmental responsibilities and compliance extremely seriously,” said Matt White, vice president of Drax’s North American operations. “Compliance is at the foundation of everything we do, and we have invested a lot of hours and resources with the goal of continuously improving our operations.”
Despite the upgrades, Drax continues to incur fines for pollution violations. In late 2024, Drax agreed to pay $225,000 for exceeding the Gloster mill’s limits for hazardous air pollutants, particularly methanol. The state also cited Drax for failing to conduct required emissions tests and maintain pollution controls and proper records.
The company’s financial penalties, which add up to about $6 million, are dwarfed by its profits, which have topped $1 billion in recent years. “Drax is so profitable and so subsidized that it powers through all of this,” Anderson said. “The fines don’t hurt their bottom line.”
In April 2025, amid complaints from residents, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, or MDEQ, denied Drax permission to increase its emissions. Six months later, it reversed that decision, allowing the Gloster mill to become a “major source” of hazardous air pollutants. The October 15 permit ruling essentially gives Drax permission to release pollutants at the levels that got it in trouble when it was classified as a minor emitter.
A group of Gloster residents immediately filed a federal lawsuit against Drax, alleging that the company unlawfully exposed people to “massive amounts of toxic pollutants.”
Drax has “consistently failed to meet their legal obligations not to dump pollutants … and have continued to denude U.S. forests, all for the benefit of a British company,” the lawsuit alleges.
In a motion to dismiss the case, Drax’s lawyers argued that the lawsuit fails to show “particularized injury that is traceable to (the Gloster mill’s) conduct.”
A representative from the MDEQ declined to comment on the permit decision and lawsuit but said that “MDEQ takes seriously its obligations to protect human health and the environment.”
A Drax spokesperson said the company was “pleased that (MDEQ) has listened to the clear recommendations of its own technical staff and the voices of Gloster community leaders, local businesses, and a large number of our neighbors in Gloster,” adding that the “permit will allow our plant to continue to operate, enabling us to continue providing much needed well-paying jobs in this rural corner of Mississippi, and support hundreds more across the state’s forestry and lumber industries.”
The spokesperson said that “MDEQ’s conditions, inspection regime, and our commitment to continue to invest in compliance and improving operational standards will ensure that Drax at Amite operates as safely and efficiently as possible.”
A crane whisks logs into the Drax wood pellet mill in Gloster, Mississippi. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Pellet manufacturers seem to have a particular set of criteria that guides them to places like Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop, said Erika Walker, an epidemiologist at Brown University who has been researching the effects of noise and pollution in communities that host pellet mills.
“It’s like there’s an algorithm that tells you where vulnerable communities are, and where people are not going to ask questions,” she said. “If you need to piss on the side of the road, where do you go? A dark area where nobody’s looking.”
Pellet mills in the South are 50 percent more likely to be located in communities with a high proportion of poor and nonwhite residents, according to a 2018 study by researchers from Tufts University and the Dogwood Alliance, a forest conservation group based in North Carolina. Of the 32 mills assessed in nine Southern states, including Mississippi and Louisiana, 18 were in counties or parishes with poverty rates above the state median. Louisiana and Mississippi are tied for the highest levels of poverty in the United States at 14 percent, according to federal data. The national rate is just under 9 percent.
Across the Deep South, state and local leaders are so desperate for economic activity that they don’t ask critical questions about what the facilities may mean for the environment or people’s health, said Dickerson of Johns Hopkins. “These communities all seem to have low-income, historically marginalized residents who might not have the time or resources to fight a permit allowing a pellet mill to come in,” she said.
Krystal Martin operates the organization Greater Greener Gloster from a small office in downtown Gloster, Mississippi. The group opposes the Drax wood pellet mill, arguing that it pollutes the town while providing few economic benefits. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In Gloster and Bastrop, Black residents make up nearly 80 percent of the population, and more than 30 percet live under the poverty line, making less than $15,650 a year. Urania’s 700 residents are mostly white but look worse off economically. According to census data, the town had a poverty rate of 40 percent and a median household income of $12,400 — about a fifth of the national average.
Martin, the Drax spokesperson, denied that Drax is drawn to areas with few white people and high poverty. “The inference that Drax uses an ‘algorithm’ to take advantage of communities is untrue,” she said. “Drax uses a number of criteria to identify and select pellet mill locations, including proximity to low-grade roundwood and sawmill residuals, transport links, and access to local supply chain.”
Walker said that Drax could alleviate many concerns about pollution if the company built its mills far from where people live. The best place to put a mill is “in the middle of the woods,” she said. The Drax mill near Bastrop may approach this ideal. Located 10 miles north of the town, the mill is surrounded by forested tracts interspersed with logging roads.
“Honest to pea, I didn’t even know it was there,” said Linda Coker, who lives nearly 2 miles from the mill and is one of its nearest neighbors.
In Urania, Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy sits just outside the town’s limits, but a school, medical center, two churches, and several homes sit within a mile of it.
The facility’s location in Gloster is particularly troubling, Walker said. It abuts a mobile home park and other houses and is about a mile from a children’s day care center. “Literally, my first question when I visited Gloster was, ‘Who zoned this?’” she said. “It’s right out in the open. No acoustical barriers, no buffer of trees. It was shocking to see it operating right in the middle of the community.”
Children walk home after being dropped off from their school bus in Gloster, Mississippi.
Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
When the town of Urania was carved out of pine forests more than a century ago, its founder, a timber baron with a visionary streak, promised two often-incompatible things: industry and tranquility.
In the late 1890s, Henry Hardtner knew “the living was really rough” around his expanding lumber mill, so he platted Urania far enough away from his business that his workers could enjoy “a welcome relief” from the noise, dust, and smoke, a local newspaper recounted in 1968. The town, nestled among towering, sweet-scented longleaf pines, was named after the Greek goddess of the stars because, in Hardtner’s view, the site was downright “heavenly.”
Henderson, the Urania resident who lives a mile from the Drax mill, wishes Hardtner could see Urania now. He’d have Hardtner sit with him on his porch at 2 a.m. to listen to the near-constant clanging and banging from the LaSalle BioEnergy mill and see its lights glowing over the tops of an ever-thinning band of trees nearly a mile away. At daybreak, Henderson would show off the powdery substance coating his truck.
“This noise and dust — what are the long-term effects of all that?” he asked. “Nobody seems to know, or they don’t want to know.”
There has been little scientific research into the environmental and health impacts of the relatively new wood pellet industry, but that’s starting to change. In 2024, Walker received a $5.8 million federal grant to conduct the first study of emissions from wood pellet mills on human health in the U.S. Awarded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the grant is funding a research team that’s in the early phases of a five-year study focusing on the noise, particulate matter, VOCs, and other emissions from Drax’s Gloster mill.
The first study by Walker’s team, which includes researchers from the University of Mississippi and Drexel University, found that the noise levels in the small towns with pellet mills approach those of big cities. “The noise pollution in Gloster rivals my neighborhood, which is by an interstate in a big, industrial city,” said Walker, who lives just outside Providence, Rhode Island.
Noise from the Gloster mill’s operations and a steady stream of truck traffic to and from the facility sometimes topped 70 decibels and rarely fell below 41 decibels. The rural Mississippi town of Mendenhall, which is similar in size to Gloster but lacks a pellet mill, was typically 10 decibels quieter. “That’s an enormous difference,” Walker said. “It’s like turning a faucet into Niagara Falls.”
IIn Urania, Henderson said the mill seems loudest at night and in the early morning, producing a discordant clattering when he’s trying to sleep. It’s especially bad on windy nights.
“Get a north wind, and it’s rockin’ and rollin’,” he said. “It sounds like logs tumbling in a dryer.”
Read Next
In California, a biomass company’s expansion raises fears of more fires
The impacts of noise pollution on human health are often overlooked or ignored, but a growing body of research has linked chronic exposure to high blood pressure, heart attacks, anxiety, and depression.
“Noise disrupts your sleep, disrupts your mood, and sets off a stress response that’s like your ‘fight or flight’ response, which makes your body ready to fight a threat or run from it,” Walker said. “The constant stimulation of that response can cause all kinds of health problems.”
Drax says it follows all federal guidelines on noise abatement and conducts annual surveys of its mills’ sound levels, which it characterizes as no worse than other industrial facilities.
“We also go above and beyond to insulate our buildings to mitigate any noise that would come from the hammermill and help prevent it from being audible beyond the fence line,” Martin said. “The noise from facility operation is consistent with the surrounding industrial plants and does not contribute to significant impacts above existing background noise.”
Walker’s research is ongoing, but a few preliminary findings have emerged. One is that air pollution is magnitudes higher in Gloster, especially with VOCs, she said. Data from dozens of air pollution monitors installed around the town show clouds of pollutants concentrated around the mill and in neighboring residential areas. It also showed unexpected spikes during the night. That matches the experiences of some in Gloster who said they notice foul odors and find it more difficult to breathe after dark. “At night, it’s always worse,” Weatherspoon said. “It smells disgusting.”
This could indicate pollution “dumping” during certain hours when people are less aware of the pollution, Walker said.
Drax denied that the mill releases more pollution at night. “Any suggestion that we manipulate our operations to avoid complaints or detection is completely false,” Martin said.
Another surprising trend was found in Gloster’s children. The closer a child lived to the mill, the heavier their body weight, the researchers found. “That was shocking,” said Walker, who has visited Gloster and communicates regularly with residents. “It fits with some of the things we heard at community meetings. People are steeped in the idea that you don’t want your kids playing outside because the air’s polluted. If they’re staying inside, how are they getting physical activity?”
The widening base of research is leading some residents to think that the pervasive health problems in Gloster may be tied to the air they breathe, said Wren-Causey, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Drax. “It’s not just people’s lifestyles or the work they do,” she said. “It’s about what Drax is putting into the air. Now people are making a ruckus. People are starting to open their eyes.”
Robert Weatherspoon washes dishes at his home in Gloster, Mississippi. Weatherspoon says air pollution from a nearby wood pellet mill has harmed his health, and he now mostly stays indoors. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Sitting in his living room while his friends watched football, Weatherspoon said witnessing the dual decline of his body and his town has sparked an anger that his doctor warned could further harm his health.
“The doctor tells me, ‘Don’t get pissed off or you’re gonna die,’” he said. A friend nodded in agreement, telling Weatherspoon he really should take it easy. Weatherpoon shook his head. “When I think about what’s happened to me and what’s happening here, I get pissed off in a heartbeat,” he said.
Late in the football game, an out-of-town guest got up to leave. Weatherspoon tossed him a little gallows humor on the way out.
“Don’t come back here if you want to keep living,” he said. “It’s no joke.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Europe gets ‘green energy.’ These Southern towns get dirty air. on Jan 23, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
2067
2068
2069
2070
2071
0
In Brazil, planting forests for carbon credits could help ecosystem restoration
(news.mongabay.com)
2072
2073
It almost felt like old times for the friends and family gathered at Robert Weatherspoon’s house. The living room couches and chairs were filled, a football game was on the TV, and the aroma of bacon and butter beans drifted in from the kitchen.
What was missing was Weatherspoon’s voice. While his friends usually bring the food or cook during get-togethers, Weatherspoon is counted on to supply the laughs. The 67-year-old with an expressive, cherubic face has a reputation for devastating one-liners, off-color game commentary, and stories — skewed somewhat for comedic effect — about people everybody knows in Gloster, a mill town in southern Mississippi too small to have strangers.
But shuffling from his bed to the living room had left him breathless. Weatherspoon took a puff from his inhaler, but his throat was locked and his chest was tight. He tried a joke on an old high school buddy across the room, and it fell flat, stalled between labored breaths.
His next utterance was darker, whispered to the person with the closest ear. “I thought I was dying last night,” Weatherspoon said. “For 20 minutes, I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t move.” An odd thought crossed his mind as he lay there, struggling for air. “I said, ‘Let me write something before I go. I want to tell about my life. I want to put it all down.’”
Robert Weatherspoon sits in his living room in Gloster, Mississippi. Weatherspoon used to garden and jog but he says air pollution from a nearby wood pellet mill has harmed his health and curtailed his outdoor activities. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
The story of Weatherspoon’s late middle age might have chronicled an energetic man who still liked to jog, grow okra and peppers in his garden, chase after women, and make his friends laugh. But in 2014, a massive mill that turns trees into peanut-size pellets opened in Gloster, and “everything changed for everybody,” he said.
Operated by the British energy giant Drax, the mill and two newer ones in Louisiana — near Urania in the center of the state and Bastrop near the Arkansas line — churn out billions of pellets each year to meet surging overseas demand for electricity produced by burning wood, what the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Alongside the mills, in communities of mostly poor, Black residents, the air is tainted with cancer-causing gases and tiny particles that can burrow deep into people’s lungs and trigger a long list of health troubles.
It’s not clear whether Drax’s activity has caused any particular individual’s health problems, but the mills release chemicals at levels federal regulators and scientists say can be toxic to humans.
In living rooms around Gloster, on front porches, and between the crumbling facades and boarded windows along the town’s main street, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t believe their life was better before the mill, called Amite Bioenergy.
“When I go out, I can’t hardly catch my breath,” said Helen Reed, a Gloster native. “Everything is worse since Drax came here.”
Robert Weatherspoon and other residents of Gloster, Mississippi, say pollution for a large British-owned wood pellet mill has caused a host of health problems in the small town. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Tucked into a remote corner of southwest Mississippi, Gloster is exposed to more particulate matter and releases of toxic air than most parts of the country, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Rates of cancer, asthma, and heart disease are substantially higher than the national average. Gloster has other industrial facilities, but the EPA lists the Drax mill as the region’s only major emitter of toxic air pollutants.
Wood pellets have been touted by European countries as a greener, climate-friendly alternative to coal and gas. Made from sawdust and comparatively cheap trees grown in the American South, pellets now power a large share of the United Kingdom’s electrical grid. Drax has turned the U.K.’s largest coal power station, a mile-wide complex in rural Yorkshire, into what is essentially an immense wood stove fueled with Mississippi and Louisiana pine.
Raking in billions of dollars in both profits and government subsidies, Drax foresees substantial growth in the coming years — especially in the U.S., where it’s planning new mills and an ambitious push into the booming carbon capture and storage business.
In Gloster, the industry promised prosperity for the town’s 850 residents when Drax’s mill opened 11 years ago. Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop had once been booming mill towns, producing pulp, paper, and lumber for a global market. When those mills closed in the 2000s, the local economies collapsed. Drax was seen as a godsend — a rejuvenator of the jobs, money, and pride that come with a mill that roars with life. But many people say they’ve received little more than noise, dust, and toxic air: The three nearly identical Drax mills in Mississippi and Louisiana have been forced to pay millions of dollars for hundreds of pollution violations over the past five years.
The Amite BioEnergy wood pellet production facility in Gloster. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In Urania, a central Louisiana town about two hours northwest of Gloster, the penalties are having little effect, said Glen Henderson, a longtime Urania resident who lives a mile from Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy mill. “I was born and raised in the area, and I love it here,” he said. “But if I get a chance, I’m definitely going to move.”
Hassled by the mill’s lights and noise at night and sawdust coating his car in the morning, the peace and quiet Henderson hoped to enjoy in retirement disappeared when Drax opened the mill in late 2017.
“We’ve always been a mill town,” he said. “I worked in the old mill after high school. But the mills we had around here weren’t like this. This is something else.”
Michelli Martin, a Drax spokesperson, said the company is making strides to reduce pollution. “The safety of our people and the communities in which we operate is our priority, and we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously,” Martin said. “As a company dedicated to sustainable energy production, high standards of safety and environmental compliance are always our top priority.”
Drax’s mill has only hastened Gloster’s decline, said Carmella Wren-Causey at her home on the town’s edge, where subsidized apartments abut a dense monocrop of loblolly pines. “We’re being poisoned slowly, right before our eyes,” she said. Tears ran down her cheeks and slid under the plastic tubes funneling oxygen to her nose. Diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Wren-Causey’s breathing has become so difficult that she can barely keep up with her grandson, a toddler who was scooting his bike near her oxygen tank.
“God gave me breath when he gave me life,” said Wren-Causey, who blames the mill for her declining health. “Nobody should tamper with that. But Drax took it away.”
Carmella Wren-Causey has had trouble breathing after Drax moved into her town of Gloster. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
When Patrick Anderson, an environmental attorney, first tried to convince Mississippi’s environmental regulators that Drax was violating the state’s pollution laws, he boiled things down to a simple equation: 1 = 1.
Because testing showed one large pellet mill in Florida had been emitting about 1,000 tons of volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs, every year, it stood to reason that the virtually identical mill in Gloster was emitting roughly the same amount, he told the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2017.
But Drax was claiming its Gloster mill was keeping its emissions lower than 250 tons per year, the threshold that distinguishes “minor” from “major” sources of VOCs, a classification of pollutants that are harmful to breathe, especially for children, elderly people, and those who suffer from asthma and other lung conditions.
The minor-source designation allowed Drax to avoid more stringent regulations and higher costs associated with installing and maintaining pollution-control technologies. “One of the most troubling trends in the wood pellet industry is that facilities that should face the most rigorous air permitting standards are actually the least controlled and the dirtiest,” Anderson wrote in a 2018 report for the Environmental Integrity Project.
A year after the report, Anderson was proved right. In 2019, Drax disclosed to Mississippi regulators that the Gloster facility had been emitting an average of 796 tons of VOCs per year — more than three times the limit allowed under its permit, according to documents obtained through public records requests.
The revelation resulted in a $2.5 million fine from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in 2020 and elicited surprise and anger from Gloster’s residents, many of whom said they were unaware the mill posed risks to their health.
“When I first started having trouble breathing, I thought God was punishing me — but it wasn’t God doing that,” said Weatherspoon, who believes the mill’s emissions and his declining health are linked.
Krystal Martin, a community leader in Gloster, Mississippi, shows a photo of the Amite BioEnergy wood pellet mill. She says air pollution from the mill is hurting her predominantly Black, low-income town. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In a letter to Mississippi’s regulators a few years later, Drax attributed its underestimated emissions for the Gloster mill to a lack of experience with pellet production. “The pellet production industry is a relatively young industry,” the letter said. “Several wood pellet facilities, not only Amite BioEnergy LLC, initially underestimated emissions in connection with the permitting of these facilities.”
In neighboring Louisiana, state regulators also found that Drax had been breaking air quality rules. Drax’s mill near Bastrop, for instance, was supposed to cap its VOC emissions at 250 tons but had actually been releasing about 1,100 tons per year, according to a company filing with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. In 2022, the state agency reached a legal settlement in which Drax paid $3.2 million but admitted no wrongdoing.
That settlement was the largest in more than a decade for Louisiana’s environmental regulators. But to Anderson, who now works for the Southern Environmental Law Center, it was also the extent of any serious efforts to rein in Drax’s pollution in Louisiana.
When Mississippi determined in early 2023 that the Gloster mill had also far exceeded the allowable limits of what regulators call “hazardous air pollutants,” Anderson asked Louisiana’s regulators if the mills in Urania and Bastrop were doing the same.
It was a question they couldn’t answer. A Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson said the agency doesn’t require Drax to conduct routine testing for hazardous air pollutants, which include nearly 190 chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects, and other serious problems, or a similar group of chemicals the agency refers to as “toxic air pollutants.” The state’s regulators also don’t conduct their own testing at Drax’s mills.
Read Next
The Trump EPA ended the ‘green new scam.’ A year later, communities are still paying the price.
In Mississippi, the hazardous pollutants Drax released into the air above Gloster included methanol, acrolein, and tons of formaldehyde, a chemical that’s far worse than being merely carcinogenic. “It’s also mutagenic and neurodegenerative, which is as awful as that sounds,” said Aisha Dickerson, an environmental health researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Formaldehyde has the potential to both mutate human cells and trigger brain disorders, affecting memory, learning ability, and behavior.
Anderson said it’s mind-boggling that Louisiana won’t test for chemicals it knows can cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. In his yearslong campaign to get the state to change its ways, he attempted the 1 = 1 tactic, demonstrating that the Gloster mill is comparable to the Bastrop mill in Louisiana and likely has similar pollution levels.
Drax itself has called the Gloster and Bastrop mills “nearly identical.” In letters to Mississippi’s regulators, the company attempted to avoid additional emissions testing by arguing that the Bastrop mill in Louisiana was so similar to the one in Mississippi that testing from one should apply to the other. “The (Bastrop) facility was built at the same time and is very similar to Amite, such that it has the exact same process design, equipment, production, rates, and the fiber is procured from a similar wood basket,” the company wrote.
Drax’s Louisiana and Mississippi mills turn ground-up trees and logging debris into tiny pellets that are shipped overseas and burned in a power station in rural England. Eric Shelton / Mississippi Today
In 2024, Drax admitted to what Anderson had been saying for years. Buried several pages into the company’s permit updates, Drax noted that both of its Louisiana mills had exceeded their “minor source” limits for hazardous air pollutants. Drax didn’t say specifically how much it had been violating the 25-ton limit for these contaminants, but the company noted a “proposed emission rate” of nearly 40 tons, according to permitting documents.
Despite Drax’s admission, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has yet to issue fines, and a spokesman declined to say what steps, if any, the agency has taken to get Drax to comply with its emissions rules. The spokesman also did not answer several questions about its enforcement actions and air quality monitoring practices.
Allegations about Drax have also come from within. In 2020, Louisiana regulators received an anonymous complaint from someone with intimate knowledge of Drax’s two mills in the state. It contained a host of allegations about chemical releases, manipulated data, ignored safety testing, and poor wastewater management. The most serious accusation was that “each facility has literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting” of harmful chemicals annually, including episodes that “would easily” exceed limits on acrolein, a chemical that can irritate eyes and lungs and, according to scientists, is “probably carcinogenic.”
“Any mention of these items will cause senior management to threaten termination,” the complaint said. It also alleged that the two mills “manipulate” data “to avoid defined permit deviations.”
When the state’s inspectors followed up, they found no evidence of emissions violations in data and equipment records provided by Drax. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s inspection report did not address the alleged threats of firings or manipulated data. Inspectors partially substantiated the allegations about improper waste disposal: During an inspection of the Urania mill, they found that Drax was burning waste sludge without a permit.
Read Next
How a Koch-owned chemical plant in Texas gamed the Clean Air Act
Naveena Sadasivam & Clayton Aldern
Drax denied the allegations, noting that the waste-disposal issue was “not a normal condition” and that the company continually works with regulators to address environmental concerns.
The ultrafine dust expelled by Drax’s mills is another major health concern, Dickerson said. The particles released during a mill’s operations are so tiny that they can slip past the lung’s defenses and penetrate the bloodstream.
“Eventually, these particles can be transported to the brain and other organs,” Dickerson said, listing cognitive impairment and stroke among the problems that can develop. “You may not see symptoms immediately, but constant exposure could mean issues down the line.”
Drax has made several upgrades and changes to reduce emissions, particularly VOCs. In 2021, the company installed a thermal oxidizer at the Gloster mill that breaks down these compounds.
“We care deeply about the safety of our people and the residents of the communities in which we operate, and we take our environmental responsibilities and compliance extremely seriously,” said Matt White, vice president of Drax’s North American operations. “Compliance is at the foundation of everything we do, and we have invested a lot of hours and resources with the goal of continuously improving our operations.”
Despite the upgrades, Drax continues to incur fines for pollution violations. In late 2024, Drax agreed to pay $225,000 for exceeding the Gloster mill’s limits for hazardous air pollutants, particularly methanol. The state also cited Drax for failing to conduct required emissions tests and maintain pollution controls and proper records.
The company’s financial penalties, which add up to about $6 million, are dwarfed by its profits, which have topped $1 billion in recent years. “Drax is so profitable and so subsidized that it powers through all of this,” Anderson said. “The fines don’t hurt their bottom line.”
In April 2025, amid complaints from residents, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, or MDEQ, denied Drax permission to increase its emissions. Six months later, it reversed that decision, allowing the Gloster mill to become a “major source” of hazardous air pollutants. The October 15 permit ruling essentially gives Drax permission to release pollutants at the levels that got it in trouble when it was classified as a minor emitter.
A group of Gloster residents immediately filed a federal lawsuit against Drax, alleging that the company unlawfully exposed people to “massive amounts of toxic pollutants.”
Drax has “consistently failed to meet their legal obligations not to dump pollutants … and have continued to denude U.S. forests, all for the benefit of a British company,” the lawsuit alleges.
In a motion to dismiss the case, Drax’s lawyers argued that the lawsuit fails to show “particularized injury that is traceable to (the Gloster mill’s) conduct.”
A representative from the MDEQ declined to comment on the permit decision and lawsuit but said that “MDEQ takes seriously its obligations to protect human health and the environment.”
A Drax spokesperson said the company was “pleased that (MDEQ) has listened to the clear recommendations of its own technical staff and the voices of Gloster community leaders, local businesses, and a large number of our neighbors in Gloster,” adding that the “permit will allow our plant to continue to operate, enabling us to continue providing much needed well-paying jobs in this rural corner of Mississippi, and support hundreds more across the state’s forestry and lumber industries.”
The spokesperson said that “MDEQ’s conditions, inspection regime, and our commitment to continue to invest in compliance and improving operational standards will ensure that Drax at Amite operates as safely and efficiently as possible.”
A crane whisks logs into the Drax wood pellet mill in Gloster, Mississippi. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Pellet manufacturers seem to have a particular set of criteria that guides them to places like Gloster, Urania, and Bastrop, said Erika Walker, an epidemiologist at Brown University who has been researching the effects of noise and pollution in communities that host pellet mills.
“It’s like there’s an algorithm that tells you where vulnerable communities are, and where people are not going to ask questions,” she said. “If you need to piss on the side of the road, where do you go? A dark area where nobody’s looking.”
Pellet mills in the South are 50 percent more likely to be located in communities with a high proportion of poor and nonwhite residents, according to a 2018 study by researchers from Tufts University and the Dogwood Alliance, a forest conservation group based in North Carolina. Of the 32 mills assessed in nine Southern states, including Mississippi and Louisiana, 18 were in counties or parishes with poverty rates above the state median. Louisiana and Mississippi are tied for the highest levels of poverty in the United States at 14 percent, according to federal data. The national rate is just under 9 percent.
Across the Deep South, state and local leaders are so desperate for economic activity that they don’t ask critical questions about what the facilities may mean for the environment or people’s health, said Dickerson of Johns Hopkins. “These communities all seem to have low-income, historically marginalized residents who might not have the time or resources to fight a permit allowing a pellet mill to come in,” she said.
Krystal Martin operates the Greater Greener Gloster organization from a small office in downtown Gloster, Mississippi. The group opposes the Drax wood pellet mill, arguing that it pollutes the town while providing few economic benefits. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
In Gloster and Bastrop, Black residents make up nearly 80 percent of the population, and more than 30 percet live under the poverty line, making less than $15,650 a year. Urania’s 700 residents are mostly white but look worse off economically. According to census data, the town had a poverty rate of 40 percent and a median household income of $12,400 — about a fifth of the national average.
Martin, the Drax spokesperson, denied that Drax is drawn to areas with few white people and high poverty. “The inference that Drax uses an ‘algorithm’ to take advantage of communities is untrue,” she said. “Drax uses a number of criteria to identify and select pellet mill locations, including proximity to low-grade roundwood and sawmill residuals, transport links, and access to local supply chain.”
Walker said that Drax could alleviate many concerns about pollution if the company built its mills far from where people live. The best place to put a mill is “in the middle of the woods,” she said. The Drax mill near Bastrop may approach this ideal. Located 10 miles north of the town, the mill is surrounded by forested tracts interspersed with logging roads.
“Honest to pea, I didn’t even know it was there,” said Linda Coker, who lives nearly 2 miles from the mill and is one of its nearest neighbors.
In Urania, Drax’s LaSalle BioEnergy sits just outside the town’s limits, but a school, medical center, two churches, and several homes sit within a mile of it.
The facility’s location in Gloster is particularly troubling, Walker said. It abuts a mobile home park and other houses and is about a mile from a children’s day care center. “Literally, my first question when I visited Gloster was, ‘Who zoned this?’” she said. “It’s right out in the open. No acoustical barriers, no buffer of trees. It was shocking to see it operating right in the middle of the community.”
Children walk home after being dropped off from their school bus in Gloster, Mississippi.
Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
When the town of Urania was carved out of pine forests more than a century ago, its founder, a timber baron with a visionary streak, promised two often-incompatible things: industry and tranquility.
In the late 1890s, Henry Hardtner knew “the living was really rough” around his expanding lumber mill, so he platted Urania far enough away from his business that his workers could enjoy “a welcome relief” from the noise, dust, and smoke, a local newspaper recounted in 1968. The town, nestled among towering, sweet-scented longleaf pines, was named after the Greek goddess of the stars because, in Hardtner’s view, the site was downright “heavenly.”
Henderson, the Urania resident who lives a mile from the Drax mill, wishes Hardtner could see Urania now. He’d have Hardtner sit with him on his porch at 2 a.m. to listen to the near-constant clanging and banging from the LaSalle BioEnergy mill and see its lights glowing over the tops of an ever-thinning band of trees nearly a mile away. At daybreak, Henderson would show off the powdery substance coating his truck.
“This noise and dust — what are the long-term effects of all that?” he asked. “Nobody seems to know, or they don’t want to know.”
There has been little scientific research into the environmental and health impacts of the relatively new wood pellet industry, but that’s starting to change. In 2024, Walker received a $5.8 million federal grant to conduct the first study of emissions from wood pellet mills on human health in the U.S. Awarded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the grant is funding a research team that’s in the early phases of a five-year study focusing on the noise, particulate matter, VOCs, and other emissions from Drax’s Gloster mill.
The first study by Walker’s team, which includes researchers from the University of Mississippi and Drexel University, found that the noise levels in the small towns with pellet mills approach those of big cities. “The noise pollution in Gloster rivals my neighborhood, which is by an interstate in a big, industrial city,” said Walker, who lives just outside Providence, Rhode Island.
Noise from the Gloster mill’s operations and a steady stream of truck traffic to and from the facility sometimes topped 70 decibels and rarely fell below 41 decibels. The rural Mississippi town of Mendenhall, which is similar in size to Gloster but lacks a pellet mill, was typically 10 decibels quieter. “That’s an enormous difference,” Walker said. “It’s like turning a faucet into Niagara Falls.”
IIn Urania, Henderson said the mill seems loudest at night and in the early morning, producing a discordant clattering when he’s trying to sleep. It’s especially bad on windy nights.
“Get a north wind, and it’s rockin’ and rollin’,” he said. “It sounds like logs tumbling in a dryer.”
Read Next
In California, a biomass company’s expansion raises fears of more fires
The impacts of noise pollution on human health are often overlooked or ignored, but a growing body of research has linked chronic exposure to high blood pressure, heart attacks, anxiety, and depression.
“Noise disrupts your sleep, disrupts your mood, and sets off a stress response that’s like your ‘fight or flight’ response, which makes your body ready to fight a threat or run from it,” Walker said. “The constant stimulation of that response can cause all kinds of health problems.”
Drax says it follows all federal guidelines on noise abatement and conducts annual surveys of its mills’ sound levels, which it characterizes as no worse than other industrial facilities.
“We also go above and beyond to insulate our buildings to mitigate any noise that would come from the hammermill and help prevent it from being audible beyond the fence line,” Martin said. “The noise from facility operation is consistent with the surrounding industrial plants and does not contribute to significant impacts above existing background noise.”
Walker’s research is ongoing, but a few preliminary findings have emerged. One is that air pollution is magnitudes higher in Gloster, especially with VOCs, she said. Data from dozens of air pollution monitors installed around the town show clouds of pollutants concentrated around the mill and in neighboring residential areas. It also showed unexpected spikes during the night. That matches the experiences of some in Gloster who said they notice foul odors and find it more difficult to breathe after dark. “At night, it’s always worse,” Weatherspoon said. “It smells disgusting.”
This could indicate pollution “dumping” during certain hours when people are less aware of the pollution, Walker said.
Drax denied that the mill releases more pollution at night. “Any suggestion that we manipulate our operations to avoid complaints or detection is completely false,” Martin said.
Another surprising trend was found in Gloster’s children. The closer a child lived to the mill, the heavier their body weight, the researchers found. “That was shocking,” said Walker, who has visited Gloster and communicates regularly with residents. “It fits with some of the things we heard at community meetings. People are steeped in the idea that you don’t want your kids playing outside because the air’s polluted. If they’re staying inside, how are they getting physical activity?”
The widening base of research is leading some residents to think that the pervasive health problems in Gloster may be tied to the air they breathe, said Wren-Causey, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Drax. “It’s not just people’s lifestyles or the work they do,” she said. “It’s about what Drax is putting into the air. Now people are making a ruckus. People are starting to open their eyes.”
Robert Weatherspoon washes dishes at his home in Gloster, Mississippi. Weatherspoon says air pollution from a nearby wood pellet mill has harmed his health, and he now mostly stays indoors. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian
Sitting in his living room while his friends watched football, Weatherspoon said witnessing the dual decline of his body and his town has sparked an anger that his doctor warned could further harm his health.
“The doctor tells me, ‘Don’t get pissed off or you’re gonna die,’” he said. A friend nodded in agreement, telling Weatherspoon he really should take it easy. Weatherpoon shook his head. “When I think about what’s happened to me and what’s happening here, I get pissed off in a heartbeat,” he said.
Late in the football game, an out-of-town guest got up to leave. Weatherspoon tossed him a little gallows humor on the way out.
“Don’t come back here if you want to keep living,” he said. “It’s no joke.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Europe gets ‘green energy’. These Southern towns get dirty air. on Jan 23, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
2074
World leaders surely breathed a sigh of relief late this week when President Donald Trump said the United States wouldn’t have to “take” Greenland after all, having been granted permission to establish more military bases instead.
Greenland, being mostly covered in ice, might not seem like an obvious target for Trump, other than its relative proximity to the U.S. on a map. He’s said controlling the Danish territory, which is 90 percent Inuit and a model of Indigenous self-governance, is essential for national security. But even though the president has insisted that climate change is a “hoax,” security experts said, warming temperatures have actually made the island nation more desirable from a geopolitical standpoint.
Melting ice sheets open up land and sea that were previously inaccessible, presenting new — albeit dangerous — opportunities. (Never mind that as Greenland’s meltwater flows into the ocean, it could raise sea levels by up to 10.6 inches by the end of this century.)
“The fact that it’s more accessible has in some ways made it more attractive,” said Sherri Goodman, senior associate at Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative and the author of the 2024 book Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.
Take the new shipping routes that have emerged as Arctic sea ice retreats. Already, Russian and Chinese ice breakers have begun traversing what’s called the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s coastline. It connects ports in Asia to those in Europe, and is much shorter than sailing through the Suez Canal. This polar route could cut shipping times by nearly 40 percent and costs by more than 20 percent. In October, Russia and China signed an agreement to develop the route, sometimes referred to as the “Polar Silk Road.”
If fossil fuel emissions continue as expected, most of the Arctic Ocean could be free of summer sea ice by 2050, reshaping global trade. “I think it’s actually moving faster than we even predicted,” Goodman said. Warming temperatures could create another route, called the Northwest Passage, that skirts Greenland’s coastal waters — which may be of interest to the U.S. That region could become navigable to the average tanker within a few decades. However, as the island’s ice deteriorates, more icebergs could litter these waterways, creating hazards for ships.
That could further complicate the already tricky economics of Greenland’s rich mineral resources. Geological surveys suggest that the island is loaded with a slew of rare earth elements like the praseodymium used in batteries, the terbium that goes into screens, and even the neodymium that makes your phone vibrate. Perhaps most importantly for the Trump administration, these minerals are essential for defense purposes, including weapons and navigation systems.
“They sit at the heart of pretty much every electric vehicle, cruise missile, advanced magnet,” Adam Lajeunesse, a public policy expert at Canada’s St. Francis Xavier University, told Grist last year. “All of these different minerals are absolutely required to build almost everything that we do in our high-tech environment.”
But Greenland hasn’t been mined extensively for good reason: It’s difficult — and expensive — to work there. Even though companies can already dig along the ice-free southern coastlines, the massive amount of ice that covers the island makes it logistically difficult to keep operations going — there’s no railroad, for example, to transport materials. Brutal weather, too, can shutter an airport for days, making it impossible to fly in essential supplies. And the way that rare earth elements are distributed within the ground makes retrieving them especially laborious — for every ton of minerals an operation digs up, it produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste.
Read Next
Greenland’s ice is in serious trouble in part because of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification. As ice in the far north disappears, it exposes more ocean and land, which is darker and absorbs more of the sun’s energy. This creates a feedback loop in which warming begets more warming. Accordingly, the Arctic is heating four times faster than the rest of the planet.
Yes, as climate change destroys ever greater expanses of Greenland’s ice, more land will become accessible to mine. But it also will compound the logistical challenges: Frozen ground, known as permafrost, can thaw and destabilize roads and other infrastructure. Hillsides held together by ice can collapse as melting continues in the decades ahead. (When the weight of ice disappears from the island, the land will also dramatically rebound — think of it like removing a bowling ball from a memory foam mattress.) And if you’re mining on land next to a melting glacier, it’s not producing a gentle trickle of water, but a torrent of liquid and boulders.
“This is an unstable environment,” said Paul Bierman, a geoscientist at the University of Vermont and author of the book When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future. “If you’re a business, and you’re thinking about sinking tens of millions of dollars into a new port to remove the ore, or to build roads across this permafrost terrain to transport ore with large trucks, that becomes a risk and an expense.”
Mining operations could even accelerate the decline of the sheet, due to polluting dust darkening the ice. “I would argue that mining is getting more difficult, not easier, as climate changes,” Bierman said. “I think the current administration’s focus on economic resources in Greenland is horribly misplaced.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A melting Greenland is easier to exploit — but also more perilous on Jan 23, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
2075