Confronting Ecological Crisis in Appalachia and the South: University and Community Partnerships

6. Building Partnerships to Challenge Chip Mills

109 6 Building Partnerships to Challenge Chip Mills Citizen Activists Find Academic Allies Lynne Faltraco and Conner Bailey Community activists must quickly come to grips with the nature of power. Distilled to its essence, power is the ability to make things happen (or keep things from happening) despite opposition from others. In modern industrialized societies, power is found largely within large institutional settings, such as government or corporate bureaucracies or even universities. Such organizations control financial and human resources , often work together, and can make things happen even when people in a community oppose their plans. People have power only when they become organized and focus on common goals. The challenges are daunting when people wake up to find that a threat to their community has emerged, not on the distant horizon but on their front steps, and that local, state, and even federal governments appear more interested in the prospects of economic growth than environmental quality or public health and safety. Fear easily can turn to despair as people realize that their governments are aligned with corporate interests and that political elites gain economic wealth and influence through such alignments. And yet we live in a democracy, and many books (including this one) are full of stories of citizens who rose up in righteous indignation to defend their homes and communities. In this chapter we describe how residents of one community responded to a threat to hardwood forests that protected watersheds, provided shelter and forage for abundant wildlife, and provided employment and recreation opportunities for local residents and visitors. 110 Faltraco and Bailey Rutherford County, the setting for this chapter, is a predominantly rural community in the eastern foothills of the Appalachian mountain chain in North Carolina. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the pulp and paper industry established nearly 150 chip mills throughout Appalachia and the South. Chip mills cost relatively little to build ($8–10 million) and employ relatively few people (five to eight per mill, not counting loggers and truck drivers). Chip mills take whole logs and grind them into chips, load them onto railroad boxcars, and ship them considerable distances to pulp and paper mills. Chip mills encourage clear-cutting and in particular target the hardwood resources of the region, creating problems of erosion and loss in soil fertility as well as disrupting wildlife habitat and adversely affecting water quality. As a result of the spread of chip mills, local sawmills and furniture makers that depend on local resources for their livelihoods find themselves in competition with some of the nation’s largest corporations. The impacts of chip mills were potentially devastating to resources and communities throughout the region . The Concerned Citizens of Rutherford County (CCRC) emerged in response to the threat chip mills posed to local forest resources and the local environment, organizing resistance first in Rutherford County and then throughout Appalachia and the South. CCRC was successful in finding a common set of goals that everyone could support and then developing a set of programs that promoted positive values through environmental education and monitoring activities . Along the way, community activists met and found support from individual faculty at three different universities but also encountered other faculty who were less sympathetic. This interaction with academics provided the first author of this chapter, Lynne, with a broader understanding of commonalities between her community’s struggles and those occurring elsewhere. The second author of this chapter, Conner, is an academic interested in how communities organize in response to environmental crises, and working with Lynne provided a learning opportunity to be shared with students. The Resource and the Threat The forest products industry has long played a dominant role in rural economies across the South and Appalachian regions. Several factors made this region attractive to the industry, including abundant rainfall, long growing seasons, and the facts that most forestland in the region is Building Partnerships to Challenge Chip Mills 111 privately owned and that environmental and natural resource management standards are relatively weak. In the Pacific Northwest, by contrast , shorter growing seasons, the prevalence of public ownership of forest resources, and relatively strict standards for logging operations represent a challenge to industry. This challenge became increasingly severe in the early 1990s, when the federal government restricted timber harvests from public lands. In Appalachia and the South the pulp and paper industry is the dominant actor in the forest products industry, accounting for roughly half...